Interesting confluence of views from today’s feeds:
Let’s face it, science is boring – science-in-society – 21 December 2009 – New Scientist
“Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.”
Medical Hypotheses: Why are modern scientists so dull?
“How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity”
Brownstudy's Blog 
Good links. I’m slowly rereading Kuhn’s classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions; his ideas about “normal” and revolutionary science are certainly relevant here. Science generates a lot of beans, and those who like to count them will find opportunities more than ample.
I think it’s interesting how the second article pushes IQ as an indicator of creativity, given that the creativity psych literature I’m familiar with has found limited association. And I question Charlton’s contention that the domination of science by head-down plodders is a new thing; most science has always been normal science, which requires this sort of terrier mindset.
Most importantly, if science education is washing out un-persistent geniuses, good! Science is not sudoku. Sure, the revolutionaries of the field were smart–but they also spent years in near-fanatical devotion to the mundane, grungy, painstaking work of the lab (or telescope, or whatever) and notebook.
LikeLike
Also: I saw Charlton, the author of the “why are scientists so boring” article, mentioned elsewhere recently.Discover Blog did a whole series on his rather unusual corpus (most of his articles have been published in Medical Hypothesis, of which he is the editor). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/category/ncbi-rofl/charlton-week/ Some wacky stuff.
LikeLike