Is science destroying itself?
Despite increasingly technological success
science may be undergoing a slow shooting
of itself in the foot…
This article is likely to be of interest to scientists but less so others. Nonetheless, the issue is important to everyone, such is our reliance of science to underpin the technology that drives our global economy and society.
We have just successfully come out of a global pandemic with (as of the start of 2022) a median estimate of just 18 million dead but many, many times that saved due to vaccines' success. Every year smartphones keep getting smarter (shhh., don't mention the machines are taking over the world). China has rover on the Moon and the US have teamed up with ESA to put one on the bed of an ancient Martian lake, and both rovers are collecting samples that, it is hoped, will be eventually returned to Earth. Science's progress is unrelenting… Or is it?
This may come as news to some SF² Concatenation regulars who are not scientists but science is being slowly but significantly hampered!
Background and science landscape
Now, one of my former incarnations for may years was as Head of Science Policy and Books for the Institute of Biology (the Institute of Biology, or IoB, being the professional body for UK biologists/bioscientists that was rebranded nearly a couple of decades ago as the Royal Society of Biology – don't ask). At the IoB, I was aware that we (biologists) had a number of problems. I was aware of this from nearly the start of my tenure there, when I was the Institute's Publications Manager, in talking with journal paper contributors, potential textbook authors and the like. Having said that, it was only in my later Science Policy years which involved regularly working with counterparts in chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry), physics (Institute of Physics), Save British Science (now the Campaign for Science and Engineering) that I understood that a substantive part of the problem was also manifest in other core science disciplines. I mention all this not to re-visit part of my career but to emphasise that what comes next is no figment of the imagination, nor is it trivial.
What has prompted my bringing up this matter now was my recently reading ecologist David J. Gibson's popular science book Planting Clues as he alludes to an aspect of this problem, though I don't think even he realises quite how far it goes.
David Gibson is a British ecologist and a professor based in the US at the University of Carbondale. He is also a senior editor of the Journal of Ecology. This is a journal produced by the British Ecological Society (BES). In turn, the BES being a learned scientific society as opposed to scientific professional body; the former facilitate their specialist science while the latter may do that in a broader way, they have a responsibility, charged by Royal Charter, to represent their science practitioners and determine professional standards. I explain all this so you get a sense of the science landscape (at least as far as UK bioscience is concerned) as we will return to this later.
The problem
In Planting Clues David Gibson refers to plant blindness, that is many biologists' inability to identify plant species. This may come as a surprise to you but it is a real problem. Biologists work with species be they: in forests to crop them, woodland to preserve them, on farms, collecting biochemicals of pharmaceutical importance, etc., etc. Yet many biologists do not know many of the species outside of those with which they commonly work. You can take an agricultural biologist for a walk through a wood and they would likely be unable to name many of the even more common species there let alone the rarer ones. And this applies to other specialist biologists visiting ecosystems they don't actually work with on a day-to-day basis.
Now, you may understandably ask, does this matter? To take a reductio ad absurdum argument, after all, you would not expect, say, a zoologist to have a working knowledge of plants. And you would be right, at one level it does not matter. I myself have worked in science communication (publishing and policy representation) with a personal academic interest in energy and environment concerns since my student days. This has morphed over the years into studying the Earth system's evolution over deep time. So it is not really important for me to know the difference between a flat worm and a round worm, or even how these relate to earthworms. Actually, that is a bad example as I do, but take me on a walk and ask me the names of species we encounter and I would have great difficulty. OK, when it comes to animals I'd probably be quite good identifying an animal species' phylum, class and order but woefully poor identifying its family and genus. As for plants, well as David Gibson would say, I am plant blind!
Shameful, huh? Well, yes. Though perhaps my doing zoology A-level (pre-university qualification) and not biology or botany might explain part of that, and that reverberated down my college studies and by the time of being a post-graduate I had largely become too specialised. I may suffer from plant blindness but other bioscientists (such as botanists) are animal blind. In fact, David Gibson's problem really is part of species blindness.
But here's the thing, even if I had not lent towards animals than plants at school, even with my knowledge of animal species, it is fairly broad-brush knowledge. As said, phylum, class and order largely fine but forget family and genus. And this is hardly a proud boast for any bioscientist but many, if not most, are like me with huge gaps in being able to identify huge swathes of the web of life. This despite biodiversity loss being a major issue of our time
So far so good (or so bad) the problem is bigger than this: it affects other scientists such as chemists and geologists too. But before I come to this bigger, related concern, let's dig a little deeper into this species blindness thing.
The diversification and silo-ing of science
Part of the problem is the success of science: science in the 20th century has boomed. Indeed, it is said that there are more qualified scientists alive today, than the total sum of previous scientists no longer with us. Now, while this may be an urban myth (I have not fact-checked it identifying an academically peer-reviewed source) but the gist is certainly one that could well be largely true: there are many scientists working today, more so than did in the 20th century. The trouble is that in getting here, to a world abound with technology based on ever-advancing science, science has become increasingly compartmentalised into silos, within which experts communicate freely, but between which much less so. Indeed, go to any academic library and pick up say a biological journal and also a physics one, then give them both to a physicist and a biologist, and while each could understand the one relating to their own discipline, they would find the other virtually incomprehensible: physicists and biologists speak (quite literally) different languages.
Importantly, this silo-ing of science into semi-isolated compartments actually occurs within the core disciplines. So in biology, a molecular biologist (for example) does not need the tool-kit of a whole-organism biologist: the latter most likely should be able to identify species, the former hardly ever so. And even within whole-organism biology, a parasitologist (say) does not need to be able to identify a vast range of species other than parasites (obviously) and their vectors. Similarly, why should a biomedical scientist need to be able to identify woodland species? They don't.
Of course, it would be good if at the school level (at the potential scientist level), biologists had a solid grounding in species identification. Alas, here, over the years matters have deteriorated for two reasons.
The biological boom
First, back in the early 20th century biology was a lot simpler and focussed on species identification, which dominated biology in earlier Victorian times. But as the 20th century progressed, biology developed markedly in other areas. In the biomedical sciences especially, there was an explosion driven by advances in molecular biology. This means that biology school pupils today have much more to learn, other than species identification, the time for which has been dramatically squeezed.
Fieldtrips
The second reason is time and cost. If you are to get to grips with species identification you actually need to see the species which you wish to identify. This will, in no small part, mean going into the field and looking at life first hand.
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