Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Why are modern scientists so dull? And why that question is nonsense.

Bruce Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham, wrote an essay on:

Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance
and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity

I stumbled across this on Information Processing, you can download the PDF here: http://kernull.com/bioradio.pdf

After reading the paper, I felt the need to check the Elsevier logo on the PDF is not a fake. It isn't. The thing got published in the journal Medical Hypotheses, Volume 72, Issue 3, Pages 237-243. Prof. Carlton btw is Editor in Chief of this journal.

Summary

The argument the author puts forward can be roughly summarized as follows.

Modern scientists are "intellectually dull" and "lack scientific ambition." The reason for this, so Charlton, is a failure of the selective process in the academic system. He argues that the education of scientists is taking increasingly longer. As a result, being a scientist nowadays requires "an almost superhuman level of [...] perseverance - the ability to doggedly continue a course of action in pursuit of a goal, over a long period and despite difficulties, setbacks and the lack of immediate rewards (and indeed the lack of any guaranteed ultimate rewards)."

Full article here:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull-and.html