Strive to avoid oversimplification

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler," Albert Einstein once quipped.

It's sage advice: Getting to the kernel of a concept is to understand its essence. To find a thing's inherent nature through scientific, mathematical or philosophical discourse - or an array of countless other investigations - is part of the human journey.

But to see only the kernel's outline serves no one, except maybe our personal egos.

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As infants, we don't see so well. Newborns have 20/600 visual acuity, improving to only about 20/100 by six months.

The result: Babies can see lines on a piece of paper, or grasp contrasts. When it comes to noticing textures, however, they're not so good.

Research in face recognition indicates infants largely rely on outlines and basic features when identifying a person. Perhaps one of the appeals of cartoons later in life is that the simplified forms are easier to follow.

At about 24 months, most infants gain 20/20 eyesight. But by then, we're psychologically comfortable with looking for outlines. Does sensing the details require a new level of maturity?

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There's no doubt simplification serves us well.

Back during elementary school, my younger brother and I used to do our homework at the kitchen table. Shortly after supper had been cleared, textbooks, worksheets, colored pencils, calculators and crumbs from the latest cake or brownie mix Mom had baked covered the table. If the weather was nice, getting all of that schoolwork done turned into a race against sunset.

"What's 3 times 9?" he asked me one of those May evenings. He always had trouble with his nines.

I decided to show off my superior, seventh-grade learning. "Twenty-five plus the square root of 4."

"No, really, what is it?"

"That's what it is - figure out the square root of 4 and add 25. It's an axiom."

"I don't care!" he said, practically snarling as he stomped a foot. "I simply want the answer!"

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Language research indicates we rely on the edges of words to read. Even though a word may be misspelled, if the first and last letters are correct, we usually don't notice. At the very least, we can read the line without taking a second look.

Try it:

Alomst evrey wrod in tihs sentnece is miseplled.

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This dependence on outlines apparently runs deep into our primate past.

Scientists have found they can get chimpanzees to relate letters to objects: press a "g" on the screen and get a "grape." Press "b" and get a "banana." Press "q" and get nothing.

Try to teach a chimp to spell, though. The brightest can do a few three-letter words. Ask them to press "g" then "r" then "a" then "p" and finally "e," and they get it all wrong. Wanting a grape, they screech and bounce off the walls.

However, have them press a button that says "grape" as a single word on it, and they do it with ease. Over and over, in fact.

Which is why phonics advocates are so maddening. We just don't learn how to read by dissecting a word into various parts. Prefixes and suffixes are the exception - but in those cases we're talking about the be-ginning or the end of a word, or its outline.

One thing phonics is good for is learning how to pronounce some words. But plenty of people can read at an advanced level without knowing how to pronounce a word. Simply put, being able to pronounce and spell a word doesn't mean you know its definition.

Thinking so, however, is akin to seeing only the kernel's crown, and believing it's all there is.

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Simplification, when correctly applied, streamlines our lines. But all too often we get by with the outline, with the oversimplified version. It's often sufficient. After all, we don't need to know the names of all the streets we cross on our drive home, just when to turn.

All too often, however, such routes no longer serve us. A detour is needed. New paradigms must be constructed.

Henry A. Wallace was one man who devised a new paradigm. Recognizing that the way crops were grown with 1800s methods meant there would not be enough food to feed the world, he examined how corn might be genetically improved to offer larger yields and be resistant to insects. Learning a love of plants from George Washington Carver - an African-American scientist at the time of Jim Crow laws - Wallace developed hybrid corn, rewriting agriculture and the Iowa economy for the 20th century.

Herbert Hoover was another such man. In 1914, he accepted leadership of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. Using business models that dumped profit for humanitarianism (Hoover even refused a salary for himself), he kept alive hundreds of thousands of children in that war-occupied country.

Curiously, Hoover fell from grace because of his inability to break old paradigms when a crisis called for doing so. Franklin Delano Roosevelt instead offered the New Deal and defeated Hoover in the 1932 election.

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Today in America, we face many challenges to the old paradigms. As free-will beings, we face them every day.

Will we strive to make everything as simple as possible but not make the error of oversimplification?

History will tell.

(originally published February 29, 2004)