Institute For The Future

Bite-sized science

The Ottawa Citizen recently ran a piece (which I discovered via Science Library Pad) on the dangers of incrementalism in scientific research-- arguing, essentially, that scientists are under too much pressure to publish lots of articles to think deeply. (Turns out Canadians worry as much as anyone about the state of their scientific communities.)

 

The piece is a bit anecdotal, and arguably it could have been written any time in the last twenty years. Still, the anecdotes themselves are well-drawn. For example, environmental scientist Scott Findlay "the culture of science today has resulted in more research," but not necessarily better science:

"The amount of science being generated per unit of time ... continues to increase. Along with that, an increasingly large proportion of that is epistemologically trivial.... The scientific community has got itself into this mindset that ... more science, irrespective of how trivial it is, is somehow better."

He blames "performance indicators" -- ways of judging Professor Smith, like a baseball player's batting average -- that are are tilted toward having lots of published articles, but not necessarily valuable ones.

Science culture is biased against "big, long, tough questions. And I think the likes of Darwin and Einstein and even some of the physicists of the golden age of physics of the '30s and '40s probably would not survive in today's scientific society," he argues.

The incentives are to do bite-sized pieces, projects the scientist knows how to do within a deadline, he says.

"People ... do science that contributes to our understanding of systems, don't get me wrong. But the likelihood of being able to take on a problem, the solution of which will result in a quantum leap forward ... is asymptotically (nearly) zero."

The interesting thing here is the implicit argument that the scientific community itself has internalized what had been norms pushed by bureaucrats and foundation officers. For a long time, scientists have complained about the growing demands of paperwork, the need to constantly hustle for funds, and generally play the game of getting money to do science, rather than doing science. But what's new here is the claim that this is starting to feel normal.

 

Perhaps that's why in workshops we ran earlier this year, the demand to constantly publish was cited by a number of graduate students as one thing that could discourage them from pursuing careers in science.

 

Things actually get more interesting when endocrinologist Roger Pierson explains what kind of research he would do "if I didn't have to worry. And we worry constantly about what happens in two years when the grant runs out. I've got six people (lab staff and students) in here who need to finish their degrees or feed their families." The big project he'd take up?

I would be working on developing next-generation contraceptives that would allow women the ability to choose when and how they have children, and would do things like ease the transition from childhood to adulthood through puberty, and ease the transition through menopause.... Those are very contentious issues for women. To break them up into little pieces of infertility and fertility (research projects) and contraceptives ... it would be so much more intelligent to design an overarching umbrella.

My one serious quibble with the piece is that it makes the argument that Charles Darwin was able to come up with his theory of evolution by natural selection because he didn't have have to worry about all this stuff:

Before he considered evolution, Charles Darwin spent 10 years dissecting barnacles and thinking. At his village estate, there were rooms devoted to barnacles, plus a sandy path on which to walk and think. Barnacles led to the big idea -- eventually.

Scientists today don't have time for big picture thinking: They say they are under too much pressure to produce, produce, produce.

The result, some say, is a flood of little discoveries that often aren't very useful, while the big picture goes ignored -- especially in medicine and biology.

This is wrong in two key respects.

 

First, as innumerable historians of science have documented, Darwin came up with the basic idea of natural selection after returning from his travels around South America (he was attached to the HMS Beagle, but actually spent only about 18 months of the six years he was traveling on the ship-- most of the time he was exploring on his own). By 1839, he had pretty much worked out all the key ideas; he then spent nearly two decades assembling the evidence, from other explorers, animal breeders, even-- believe it or not-- barnacles. As Adrian Desmond explains [sub req],

From 1846 to 1854, Darwin added to his credibility as an expert on species by pursuing a detailed study of all known barnacles. Intrigued by their sexual differentiation, he discovered that some females had tiny degenerate males clinging to them. This sparked his interest in the evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original hermaphrodite creature.

So barnacles didn't lead to the big idea; the big idea provided the framework that rationalized six years on barnacles.

 

Second, Darwin's Origin of Species was a condensed version of a projected three-volume work that he put together after Alfred Russel Wallace came up with a similar theory of natural selection. It's history's most spectacularly successful example of rushing into print.

 

Finally, it isn't as if Darwin lived without any pressures at all: he refrained from publishing his theory in 1839 because he worried that it would make him sound radical and anti-clerical, and several of the projects he undertook in the 1840s and 1850s were crafted to build up his bona fides as a world-class naturalist, not just a country squire who knew a thing or two about fossils.

 

The challenge for scientists then becomes to understand how someone like Darwin managed to construct a strategy that let him think big, while still building his career and credibility; and for policymakers, to understand how to develop systems that allow such strategies to work and pay off.