Driving for hire is already a dangerous job, as my colleague Michelle Chen points out. Taxi drivers suffer homicide on the job at a rate 20 to 30 times higher than the average worker (and since many drivers are immigrants, racism plays an ugly role in the violence many drivers face). A 2010 study by the Occupational Health Internship Program and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a labor organization that fights to improve conditions for taxi drivers, reported that 51.1 percent of surveyed drivers had been verbally threatened and 17.3 percent had been physically assaulted in the past year. This is one reason that there aren’t many women driving cabs or Uber cars in the first place.
Uber’s idea, that women riders and women drivers might feel safer together, isn’t even terribly original. SheRides, a woman-founded company that partners with existing car services to connect women drivers with women passengers, already exists, and in India there have been all-female cab companies for years.
As Konczal points out, there’s little reason that women (or anyone else) need Uber executives for economic empowerment, and there’s little empowerment in working for an exploitative boss. Perhaps what would-be women drivers should do instead is start their own company—since Uber already requires them to own their own capital in the form of their cars, all they need to do is pool a bit of their cash to pay a developer to build and maintain an app.
Or one might suggest that Uber’s new women drivers get to know another inspirational woman leader: the Taxi Workers Alliance director, Bhairavi Desai.
This demand for experimental verification was explicitly linked to the new philosophy proposed by Francis Bacon. Bacon had called for a fresh start to knowledge of the physical world; the natural philosopher must “vex” nature, as he vividly put it, learning her secrets by observation and rigorous experimentation. This was a requirement that resonated with the natural philosophers of the time, who had already begun to practice what Bacon was preaching.
Bacon’s inductive method was explicitly opposed to that of the Aristotelians. Bacon respected Aristotle himself, but disdained the views of many medieval followers of Aristotle, who slavishly believed whatever their master had said so many centuries before. Bacon knew that Aristotle himself would have changed his mind on some of his conclusions had he had access to modern knowledge and ways of investigating nature. In the year that Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born, Galileo had expressed Bacon’s point with a sly story he recounted in a book promoting the Copernican view against the old Aristotelian astronomy. He told of a man attending a dissection at the home of a famous anatomist. Aristotelians believed that all the nerves originated in the heart, while their opponents held they began in the brain. “The anatomist showed that the great trunk of nerves leaving the brain and passing through the nape, extended down the spine and then branched out through the whole body, and that only a single strand as fine as a thread arrived at the heart,” Galileo wrote. The anatomist then turned to an observer who was an Aristotelian and asked whether he was now convinced that the nerves originate in the brain and not the heart. “The philosopher, considering for awhile, answered: You have made me see this matter so plainly and palpably that if Aristotle’s text were not contrary to it, stating clearly that the nerves originate in the heart, I should be forced to admit it to be true.”
Kepler, too, criticized the slavish allegiance to ancient wisdom, referring to it as nothing but a “world on paper.” William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of blood by the pumping of the heart, claimed, “I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.” Leeuwenhoek would later similarly chide those who drew conclusions about salt particles in the body without ever having seen them.
Bacon rejected as well the claims of those who thought that all knowledge, even knowledge of the physical world, came primarily through human reason and not the senses. He considered these philosophies to be like the method of the spider, which spins a web entirely out of its own body, not using anything outside of itself. In Leeuwenhoek’s time the most prominent “spider” was René Descartes, who had lived in Amsterdam for twenty years until leaving for Sweden to tutor Queen Christina in 1649 (there he died, partly from the cold climate, soon afterward). Descartes espoused an epistemology, or method of knowledge acquisition, that expressed mistrust in the senses, and placed primary value on reasoning from ideas found in the mind rather than from observations of nature.
For example, in determining his three laws of motion, Descartes began from a “clear and distinct” idea found in his mind: the idea of God. His idea of God included, by definition, that God is omnipotent, immutable, and eternal (that is what we mean by “God,” Descartes believed). From this “first principle” Descartes derived his three laws of physics, what we would call his laws of motion, as well as a general law, the law of conservation of motion—that the total amount of motion in the world remains constant. Descartes’s proof of this law is logical, rather than empirical, following necessarily from God’s properties. When God created the universe, he endowed its material bodies with a finite quantity of motion. At each moment subsequently, God acts to preserve this same amount of motion.
It is obvious that when God first created the world, He not only moved its parts in various ways, but also simultaneously caused some of the parts to push others and to transfer their motion to these others. So in now maintaining the world by the same action and with the same laws with which He created it, He conserves motion; not always contained in the same parts of matter, but transferred from some parts to others depending on the ways in which they come in contact.
In his treatise on scientific method, Descartes employed the same logic to prove all sorts of laws of nature. By the end of the book he concluded—optimistically and erroneously—“no phenomena of nature have been omitted. . . . There is nothing visible or perceptible in this world that I have not explained.” That rise, they show in a new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, began right around 2004 — which is also when the fracking industry began drilling for natural gas in the state. And what the homes with the highest levels of radon have in common? They’re all located in counties with a lot of fracking going on.
These are the kind of findings where it’s important to emphasize the difference between correlation and causation. The authors looked at 860,000 radon measurements from a Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection database, but they weren’t able to trace the elevated levels directly back to fracking wells. But they do have a theory for what could be happening. Nearly 7,500 fracking wells were drilled in the state between 2005 and 2015, they point out, and the process, which involves injecting a mix of water of and chemicals into the ground to break apart shale rock, can unearth toxic materials that return to the surface along with the leftover fracking fluid. That can include radium and uranium, which decay to form radon.
Joan A. Casey, the study’s lead author, said in a statement that from there, there are a number of ways the radon could enter homes: it could be contaminating well water; it could be entering the air near gas wells; or it could be contained in the natural gas itself, and introduced through stoves and furnaces.
Or, it could turn out to be something else entirely, with no connection to the fracking industry. Again, the authors aren’t sure that fracking is responsible for the elevated radon levels. But their findings, they say, “do not provide reassurance” that the industry isn’t to blame.