Are modern scientists duller?

Summary: Last year, the journal Medical Hypotheses contained an editorial titled “Why are modern scientists so dull?” It claimed that 'revolutionary' scientists, who are both smart and creative, are going extinct because universities select more and more for hard-working, agreeable people instead of intelligent or creative ones. But is this really true?

The journal Medical Hypotheses is a journal that allows thinkers to express their unconventional ideas in a non-peer-reviewed way. It therefore contains a number of articles which must not be taken very seriously (such as an article disputing the link between HIV and AIDS), but sometimes the recalcitrant thoughts expressed by writers and editors can be interesting to ponder. And the particular paper I'd like to ponder in this blog post is the 2009 issue 72, page 237-243: 'Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity'

At first sight, this may just seem a science-flavoured equivalent of the old complaint that in the past scientists were as not soft and pampered as the spoiled 50- to 60-year old brats who currently populate our universities. No, in the olden days, to be a scientist you had to walk barefoot to university through the snow and the blizzard, uphill both ways! However, I think it is my duty as a scientist (and my pleasure as a talent science investigator) to give any opinion, no matter how unpromising at first sight, a decent hearing and analysis.

The paper itself is about 6 pages long, but the gist of it is that scientists are more and more selected for agreeableness ('nice people') and conscientousness ('hard workers'), at the cost of intelligence and creativity. After all, if you pick the ten most agreeable people in your class, it is probable that they are not the ten most intelligent people or the ten most creative people as well.

The first issue one can have with the paper is the implication that modern scientists are dull, at least duller than the scientists of an undefined past. The problem here is lack of quantitative data: even if we could somehow define 'cleverness' by IQ (which is doubtful in itself, as certainly not all high-IQ people are star scientists, think for example of Marilyn Vos Savant who has a claimed IQ of over 200 but no real achievements to her name) we don't have reliable IQ-estimates of the average scientist in the 17th, 18th or 19th century to compare with the current university population. So it is always dangerous to get stuck comparing the average university professor nowadays (say a professor Jones, who is a decent authority in his area and quite a competent teacher and administrator but almost certainly not Nobel worthy) with Isaac Newton or Dmitri Mendeleev. Such a comparison would even make an intelligent man like prof. Jones seem rather dull in comparison. To perform a really fair comparison, one should either compare the average scientist of the past with the average scientist now, or the elite scientist of the past with the elite scientists now. As long as such a comparison is not made, the assertion that modern scientists are duller than the scientists of the past stands on rather shaky ground.

However, the author sidesteps the issue whether modern scientists are actually duller by arguing that they at least should be duller than in the past. And it may be interesting to take a closer look at his line of reasoning.

The author´s main argument for claiming scientist dullness is that the time needed to become an independent practitioner of science is increasing all the time. Whereas in the past one often could start independent research in one's early or mid-twenties already (some scientists already got full professorships around age 21), nowadays most people below 30 are strung along by elaborate PhD-studies and a series of postdocs, in which they simply do what other people tell them, instead of being able to follow their own passion. And even when they attain assistant professorships and beyond, the necessity to get funding limits their research to those areas that are palatable to government agencies and charitable organisations that they need to finance their investigations. In short: nowadays scientists are much less free than in the past, which may deter independent, creative spirits who would be the most likely generators of new ideas and innovations.

First of all, I would agree that scientists nowadays may in general not be in the most luxurious of positions, especially as it seems that funding is shifting more and more from universities giving resources to their scientists in a 'no questions asked' manner towards external agencies which can require large amounts of paperwork, reducing the time which a scientist can spend on actual research. However, relative to companies a university scientist still has quite a lot of freedom; and it may be that this relatively larger freedom may still influence creative people to prefer working at universities rather than companies.

It is unlikely however, that the creative freedom of scientists is really suffering a major impact from longer training times and a greater dependence on external funding. First of all, supervisors greatly differ in the amount of freedom they allow their junior researchers – while there undoubtedly exist a fair number of professorial control freaks, a truly smart and creative person will try to find a supervisor who allows a fair amount of freedom as long as at least some of the work is publishable; after all, those supervisors exist as well.

Regarding external funding: external funding so far does not seem to have the effect of making scientists do truly different work from what they'd prefer, it merely seems to induce university-based researchers to 'spin' their own favourite subject in such a way that it seems useful and fundable. So while increasing necessity of obtaining external funding may at first sight seem to limit the researcher's freedom, in reality most of the research only seems adapted towards societal usefulness, and in reality is almost exactly the same work as the work the investigator would do spontaneously, or at the very least chosen in such a way that it is still rather interesting to the investigator him- or herself.

In summary, then, I don't think that current scientists are much duller than the average scientist in the past. There are some things that may hamper their doing science to a greater degree than used to be the case in the past (such as the increased amounts of time needed to get funding), still, for creative people science still offers much more freedom than most companies.

That does not mean that science cannot be made more engaging, and politicians and scientists alike should probably seriously reconsider some aspects of current science, especially the funding aspect. Still, I think the scientists will have some good suggestions for that - whatever the Medical Hypotheses editor claims, they are probably still smart enough.