The Natural Selection of Conservative Science

TL;DR

This paper explores how the formation and evolution of scientific communities influence the prevalence of high risk, high reward research, revealing that community dynamics often favor conservative science due to the replicability of successful projects.

Contribution

It introduces a model treating scientific communities as evolving populations, showing how community formation processes can both promote and hinder high risk science.

Findings

Community formation can promote high risk science in some cases.

High risk, high reward science is hard to pass on and sustain.

Conservative science tends to dominate due to replicability and lineage continuity.

Abstract

Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards conservatism -- the increasing production of what Kuhn (1970) would have called `normal science'. This paper will explore a possible explanation for this sort of trend: that the process by which scientific research groups form, grow, and dissolve might be inherently hostile to high risk science. In particular, I employ a paradigm developed by Smaldino and McElreath (2016) that treats a scientific community as a population undergoing selection. As will become clear, perhaps counter-intuitively this sort of process in some ways promotes high risk, high reward science. But, as I will point out, high risk high reward science is, in general, the sort of thing that is hard to repeat. While more conservative scientists will be able to train students capable of continuing their successful projects, and so create thriving lineages, successful risky science may not be the sort of thing one can easily pass on. In such cases, the structure of scientific communities selects against high risk, high rewards projects. More generally, this paper makes clear that there are at least two processes to consider in thinking about how incentives shape scientific communities -- the process by which individual scientists make choices about their careers and research, and the selective process governing the formation of new research groups.