There's a nice editorial in Nature this week: In praise of research in fundamental biology. It even includes a nice shout-out to Palaeozoic fish.
It is good to see this message taking centre stage in a widely visible place. I'd only add that this isn't just about funder policies. Many funders give their panels and referees wide scope to determine what is important and worthwhile and many run "discovery science" programs within their remit, as NERC does here in the UK. This is key, as it helps maintain intellectual independence, ensuring that panels and referees can make decisions based on the soundness of the science without interferences like political or institutional fashions. It is not just the institutions therefore that need to see these messages, but working academics who are the gate-keepers of funding decisions. A lot of fundamental science is not hypothesis-driven and thus appears to have ill-defined outcomes. I strongly suspect this fact is what undermines a lot of fundamental science proposals. This happens at the review stage where peer reviewers and expert panels make the decisions, not the institutions. This isn't to say that fundamental science does not concern hypotheses. However, a lot of fundamental research does not follow an experimentalist model, and therefore is not best explained in experimentalist terms. Historical sciences, like palaeontology highlighted briefly in the editorial, are not uniformly modelled in an experimentalist framework. Historical sciences are more investigative, and tend to involve searching through details and constructing hypothesis and narrative in light of new observations. This can give the impression that the work is dealing in ill-defined objectives and may be too risky to warrant support. Nevertheless, the expectation that historical sciences work in a pre-defined hypothetico-deductive pattern infects even palaeontologists, especially when they get in the panel room or review proposals. I believe this is more a product of subconscious "physics envy" more than any sense that the investigative, discovery-driven approach is any less worthwhile. Scientists evaluating proposals---whatever their background---need to become more aware of the diversity of research approaches before relying too quickly on standard heuristics for assessing research quality.
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Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
December 2022
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