Why Descriptive Science Still Matters

“Descriptive” in science is a pejorative, almost always preceded by “merely,” and typically applied to the array of classical -ologies and -omies: anatomy, archaeology, astronomy, embryology, morphology, paleontology, taxonomy, botany, cartography, stratigraphy, and the various disciplines of zoology, to name a few. But there is chronic misunderstanding as to what descriptive science actually is, and thus there is ignorance of its significance. This in turn imperils these disciplines and even the existence of fundamental knowledge in academia, as recent history teaches us. First, an organism, object, or substance is not described in a vacuum, but rather in comparison with other organisms, objects, and substances. The comparative method assesses variation among individual things, and organizes it into systems and classifications that are used for making predictions. A thing is relevant in the context of other things: Tiny Pluto is relevant because it behaves differently and is shaped differently than the thousands of other planetary bodies in the Kuiper Belt. Even the most prosaic description is actually a highly selective account of features that are found to be significant in comparison with related things. As a result, there is no such thing as a perfectly complete description or a perfectly complete classification or organization system; as descriptions become more refined and thorough, so do the systems of organization. The composition of our solar system, for example, would not have been so controversial in 2006 were it not for improved observations and descriptions of Charon (Pluto's moon), Ceres and other asteroids, and 2003 UB313 (a.k.a. Eris, the farthest object in the solar system). What makes the recent discussion of the solar system so surprising is that it was based on something that most people thought astronomers had already described a long time ago.