Darwinian Science?

Since progress in science tends to be competitive and occurs in a population of scientists (see blog below), it is inviting to think of it as a Darwinian process. That is, science proceeds by way of a large variety of approaches tried by a population of scientists, and selection occurs on those approaches in terms of their successes in experimentation. It is an attractive way to think about scientific progress because it depends upon the generation of variety by broad investment by the government and upon repeatable experimentation to prove approaches that work. It would be wrong, however, to label this as a Darwinian view of science.

Since science is a phenomenon of ideas and not of genes, it is a Lamarckian process rather than a Darwinian one. In other words, progress is achieved by the passing on of adaptations through learning within one's lifetime rather than through any increased fitness of successful scientists, although successful scientists do tend to attract and train more new scientists than unsuccessful ones. The ideas and techniques that lead to successes in scientific experiments are published and passed on in a much shorter interval than that required to produce new scientists. Scientific progress is like any cultural evolution, in that way.

That said, how should this recognition of scientific progress as a Lamarkian evolution affect science funding programs? Clearly, one should encourage a diversity of approaches in order to improve the chances of "covering" the search space of options to a solution to any scientific problem. One should also encourage rapid and widely-distributed publication of all results. These lessons are not new.

Frequently lost on program managers, however, is the fact that, in order for the evolutionary process to proceed, one must also develop a competitive process among the scientists working to solve the same problem. Selection of a scientific "solution" to a problem is relatively meaningless without a corresponding set of attempts that failed to bring about a successful result. This means that program managers must not only expect failures, but they must be willing to fund sufficient variety of approaches, that is, take sufficient risk, that failures are generated and published! In examining failures, scientists learn valuable lessons about the causes of success and where the causality can be attributed in a success. Without them, it is not possible to know what aspects of the successful approach actually led to the desired result.

The propensity of program mangers to seek and publicize "winners" is only part of the job of effective program management because the wider the net is cast, the more accurately one can not only recognize success, but why an approach has succeeded.