Nobel prize trends 1947–2006

Editorial

Scientometric identification of elite ‘revolutionary science’ research institutions by analysis of trends in Nobel prizes 1947–2006

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 931-934

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Summary

Most research is ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term: checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms. By contrast, ‘revolutionary science’ changes the fundamental structures of science by making new theories, discoveries or technologies. Science Nobel prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) have the potential to be used as a new metric for measuring revolutionary science. Nobel laureates’ nations and research institutions were measured between 1947 and 2006 in 20 year segments. The minimum threshold for inclusion was 3 Nobel prizes. Credit was allocated to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time of award. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 institutions which won three-plus Nobel prizes in 20 years, the UK has 4, France has 2 and Sweden and USSR 1 each. Four US institutions won 3 or more prizes in all 20 year segments: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Columbia and Chicago (7). But the Western United States has recently become the world dominant region for revolutionary science, generating a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Washington at Seattle; and the University of California institutions of Santa Barbara, Irvine, UCSF, and UCLA; also the Fred Hutchinson CRC in Seattle. Since 1986 the USA has 16 institutions which have won 3 plus prizes, but elsewhere in the world only the College de France has achieved this. In the UK Cambridge University, Cambridge MRC unit, Oxford and Imperial College have declined from 17 prizes in 1967–86 to only 3 since then. Harvard has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint sixth position. Although Nobel science prizes are sporadically won by numerous nations and institutions, it seems that long term national strength in revolutionary science is mainly a result of sustaining and newly-generating multi-Nobel-winning research centres. At present these elite institutions are found almost exclusively in the USA. The USA is apparently the only nation with a research system that nurtures revolutionary science on a large scale.


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Most of scientific production can be categorized as ‘normal science’ using Thomas Kuhn’s term to describe research which constitutes the checking, trial-and-error improvement and incremental extrapolation of already existing paradigms [1]. Normal science can be measured and analyzed using standard scientometric research outputs such as number and share of publications and citations [2]. But a different method is need to detect and measure the much rarer, but potentially more-important, examples of paradigm-transforming Kuhnian ‘revolutionary science’ [3].

Revolutionary science changes the fundamental structures of a whole science (as achieved by Einstein, Newton or Darwin) or, more often, a significant sub-speciality of a major science [1]. For example science can be transformed or re-directed by new theories, discoveries or major technologies. Revolutionary science is therefore the cutting-edge which allows each science to continue to grow in rapid bursts, and to become qualitatively more accurate and useful in its predictions [3] and [4].

The problem of discriminating between revolutionary and normal science has become more difficult since the advent of Big Science [5]. Big Science comprises quasi-industrial forms of research organization. It arose initially in physics and chemistry but now characterizes biomedical research, which is currently the dominant world science. Big Science is almost inevitably a type of normal science (since it needs to be predictable) and tends to be ‘applied’ in its aims, and similar to industrial Research and Development in its methods [4] and [6]. Normal science now overwhelms revolutionary science in terms of quantity, so that revolutionary science has become almost invisible when research production is measured using standard scientometrics.

Science Nobel prizes have the potential to be used in detecting and measuring revolutionary science [3] and [7]. This may allow identification of those nations and institutions where revolutionary science has happened in the past, and help understand the conditions which could encourage revolutionary science in the future.

Nobel prizes as a measure of revolutionary science

The award of a Nobel prize in one of the four recognized sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Economics) seems to be the best current evidence of a significant achievement in revolutionary science. Although the small annual number of Nobel prize-winners (laureates) means that many significant achievements go unrecognized [7], nonetheless the perceived validity of these awards is high within the scientific community, and only a small proportion of awards are regarded as controversial or unjustified.

The number of science Nobel laureates in a nation and a research institution were measured between 1947 and 2006 in three 20 year segments of 1947–66, 1967–86 and 1987–2006 [8]. A maximum of three people can receive each prize, so there are a minimum of four and a maximum of 12 laureates per year (since 1969, when the economics prize was first awarded. Up to 1968 there were a minimum of three and a maximum of nine laureates).

A very large number of nations and institutions have won a single Nobel prize, but my interest was in those places which had won multiple prizes as evidence that they provided an environment conducive to revolutionary science. I set the threshold at three Nobel prizes during a 20 year period as the minimum number of laureates which counts as a significant national or institutional contribution to revolutionary science. (However, in 1965 the prize for Physiology/Medicine went to Jacob, Monod and Lwoff of the Pasteur Institute, Paris, France; who all researched the same general topic.)

Official statistics are only available on Nobel laureates’ institutional affiliation at the time they receive the prize [8]. Clearly, this is not as valid a measure of revolutionary science as knowing laureates’ affiliations at the time prize-winning work was actually accomplished; however such information is not readily available. I therefore allocated credit to each laureate’s institution and nation of residence at the time they received their award.

By contrast with the general decline elsewhere in the world, the US system is increasingly successful in generating revolutionary science which leads to the award of a Nobel prize (Table 1). It can be seen that few countries have any research institutions which have earned three or more Nobel prizes over any of the defined 20 year time spans. Over 60 years, the USA has 19 such institutions (Table 2), the UK has four, France has two, and Sweden and USSR one each (Table 3).

Table 1.

Number of Nobel laureates by Nation – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Nation 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA 50 88 126
UK 20 25 9
Germany 8 7 9
USSR/Russia 7 2 2
France 4 3 5
Switzerland 3 7 7
Sweden 3 7 1
Japan 2 1 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.

Table 2.

Number of United States Nobel laureates by institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
USA
Harvard University 9 13 5
University of California Berkeley 7 3 4
Stanford University 4 5 9
CalTech 4 4 5
Columbia University 4 1 7
Rockefeller Institute & University 3 6 3
Chicago University 2 4 7
Princeton University 1 2 6
MIT 1 5 11
Cornell University 1 4 2
UCLA 1 0 3
Yale University 0 4 1
NIH – National Institute Health 0 4 0
University of Colorado, Boulder 0 0 4
University of Washington, Seattle 0 0 3
Fred Hutchinson CRC, Seattle 0 0 3
University of California, Santa Barbara 0 0 3
UCSF (U Cal San Fransico) 0 0 3
University of California, Irvine 0 0 3
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.

Table 3.

Number of Non-US Nobel laureates by Institution – 20 year segments from 1947 to 2006
Institution 1947–66 1967–86 1987–2006
University Cambridge, UK 3 7 2
MRC Cambridge, UK 3 3 1
University Oxford, UK 3 3 0
Imperial Coll. London, UK 0 4 0
Pasteur Inst, Paris, France 3 0 0
College de France, Paris 0 0 3
PN Lebedez Institute, Moscow, USSR 5 0 0
Karolinska Inst., Sweden 0 4 0
CERN (multi-national) 0 3 1
A minimum of three prizes in one time segment is required for inclusion.

Table 2 shows that there are only four institutions which have won three or more Nobel prizes in all three 20 year periods, all from the USA – Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech. The most successful institution in the past 20 years was MIT, with 11 prizes followed by Stanford (9), Chicago and Columbia (7). But the Western United States has become the world dominant region for revolutionary science – with Stanford, Berkeley and CalTech now being amplified by a new generation of elite public universities: University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Washington at Seattle, University of California at Santa Barbara, UCSF (University of California at San Fransisco), University of California at Irvine, UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) – also the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at Seattle.

In the past 20 years, the USA has 16 institutions which have won three or more prizes, but elsewhere in the world (Table 3) only the College de France has achieved three Nobel prizes. Since 1986 the previously Nobel-successful UK research institutions (University of Cambridge, the MRC Molecular Biology Unit at Cambridge, University of Oxford and Imperial College, London) have declined from seventeen prizes 67–86 to only three.

The USA demonstrates dynamic changes in ranking over the 60 year period (Table 2). New institutions have risen to prominence in the Western states. From one prize each in 1947–66, MIT and Princeton have both overtaken Harvard to become first and fifth among Nobel prize-winners. Columbia declined in the middle period, but recovered strongly to reach equal-third in the rankings. The NIH and Yale have significantly declined during the most recent 20 years. Such variation in rankings is probably indicative of a high level of competition between revolutionary research institutions.

Harvard is particularly interesting. In terms of conventional scientometric research measures, Harvard is currently by-far the top ranking university in the world. For example, Harvard has more than double the number of citations of Stanford (which is second) and about 65 percent more publications than UCLA (which is second) during 2000–2004 [9]. And Harvard has more elected Members of the US National Academy of Sciences than any other university (167 – Harvard; 129 – Berkeley; 128 – Stanford; 100 – MIT; 72 – Princeton; 71 – Cal Tech [10]). By a large margin, Harvard also tops the respected Shanghai Jiao Tong University world rankings [11].

Yet there are signs of a decline in revolutionary science at Harvard. From 47–86 Harvard was the top Nobel-prize-winning institution, but for the past 20 years it has been overtaken in prize numbers by MIT (11), Stanford (9), Columbia (7), Chicago (7) and Princeton (6) – all of which are considerably smaller. The implication may be that Harvard is evolving towards being a ‘normal science’ university – albeit unusually large and successful.

Conclusion

If this statistic of Nobel prizes is a valid measure of revolutionary science, then the main conclusion is that the USA has emerged to become the only nation that supports revolutionary science on a large scale. It seems that long-term strength in revolutionary science is mainly a product of a nation possessing numerous elite research institutions where revolutionary science thrives. A nation lacking such institutions will win relatively few Nobel prizes, and prizes will be spread around many institutions (e.g. in Germany, the various Max Planck research institutions sometimes win a single Nobel prize, but no specific institute has ever won two prizes in 20 years).

Over the past 60 years, the UK has declined from being the only non-US focus of revolutionary science, to joining Switzerland and Germany (with nine prizes) as the kind of place where normal science has been thriving but revolutionary science is thinly-distributed and sporadic in occurrence. Presumably, recent US improvement has therefore been driven mainly by within-nation competition.

In contrast to the picture of long term decline in Nobel-prize-winning revolutionary science; UK and European scientific production (also that of Chinese science) is probably catching up with the USA in terms of scientometric measures such as numbers of publications and citations [12] and [13]. This difference between national performance in normal and revolutionary science seems to suggest that the research systems of revolutionary science and normal science are evolving towards separation [3]. Clearly, growth of the two types of science does not always go-together.

In future, it would probably be beneficial if this increasing separation between revolutionary and normal science were made explicit, with institutional self-definition and specialization, and differentiated funding streams and evaluation criteria for the small number of elite revolutionary science institutions [4]. Part of this process would be the development of a distinctive set of scientometric measures for revolutionary science. Counting Nobel laureates could be a first step in this direction.




Acknowledgement

Thanks are due to Peter Andras, Andrew Oswald and Malcolm Young for comments and advice.



References

[1] T.S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago Univesrity Press, Chicago (1970).

[2] E. Garfield, Essays of an information scientist, ISI Press, Philadelphia (1977).

[3] Charlton BG, Andras P. Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven year rolling sample. Minerva [in press].

[4] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, The future of ‘pure’ medical science: the need for a new specialist professional research system, Med Hypotheses 65 (2005), pp. 419–425. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (98 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[5] Solla D.J. Price de, Little science, big science and beyond, Columbia Univesrity Press, New York (1986).

[6] J. Ziman, Real science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) (2000).

[7] Charlton BG. Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – and why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions. Medical Hypotheses [in press].

[8] Nobel Foundation. Nobel prizes. ; 2006 [accessed 07.12.06].

[9] Charlton B, Andras P. Oxford University’s research performance (four articles published in Oxford Magazine during 2006).
[10] National Academy of Sciences. Members. ; 2006 [accessed 30.11.06].

[11] Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Institute of Higher Education. Academic Ranking of World Universities 2006.; 2006 [accessed 14.12.06].

[12] R.D. Shelton and G.M. Holdridge, The EU–US race for leadership of science and technology: qualitative and quantitative indicators, Scientometrics 60 (2004), pp. 353–363. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[13] Z. Ping and L. Leydesdorff, The emergence of China as a leading nation in science, Res Policy 35 (2006), pp. 83–104.

Alienation and animism

*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*

Editorial

Alienation, recovered animism and altered states of consciousness

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 727-731

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Summary

Alienation is the feeling that life is ‘meaningless’, that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things. Methods used to cure alienation and recover animistic modes of thinking involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality: for example, solitude, leisure, unstructured time and direct contact with nature. Many people also achieve similar results by deliberately inducing altered states of consciousness. Animistic thinking may emerge in meditation or contemplation, lucid dreaming, from self-hypnosis, when drowsy, in ‘trance states’ induced by repetitious rhythm or light, or when delirious due to illness, brain injury, psychoses, or intoxication with ‘entheogenic’ drugs – which is probably one reason for the perennial popularity of inducing intoxicated states. However, intoxication will typically damage memory processes making it harder to learn from any spiritual experiences; and even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required. Despite these constraints and limitations, recovering animism through seeking altered states of consciousness could already be considered a major world spiritual practice.


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One of the distinctive features of Western contemporary life is that, while pleasures are widely available (albeit at a price), there is an almost universal sense of ‘alienation’. Alienation is the feeling that life is meaningless, that we do not belong in the world.

But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world. This perspective is a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers [1] and [2]. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a unified world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships [3] and [4].

We were all animistic children once, and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans, and it requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive socialization to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world [5]. It is learned objectivity that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things.

But objectivity is superficial: animism remains the basic underlying mode of human thinking, and animism can be recovered. When we are removed from the rational systems of civilisation, when learned patterns of socialised behaviour are stripped-away, and in altered states of consciousness, then animistic thinking can re-emerge and a sense of belonging in the world may return.

Animism

Animism is not a religious or philosophical doctrine, neither is it an ‘error’ made by people too young or too primitive to know better; animism is nothing less than the fundamental mode by which human consciousness regards the world [1] and [2]. Consciousness just is animistic [3] and [4]. And this perspective is a consequence of human evolutionary history.

Humans evolved sophisticated brain mechanisms for dealing with the complex social situations that formed a dominant selection pressure throughout primate evolutionary history [6] and [7]; and in animistic thinking these social mechanisms are flexibly applied to interpret complex aspects of the world in general. Information on animals, plants and landscape are fed-into a system that codes them into social entities with social motivations, and models their behaviour in social terms.

Human consciousness is therefore essentially a social intelligence, designed by natural selection for dealing with people, but accidentally highly applicable to understanding, predicting and controlling a wide range of phenomena. Unless suppressed during upbringing, this way of looking at the world is spontaneously generalised beyond the social sphere, so the significant world is seen as composed of ‘agents’, having dispositions, motivations and intentions. Humans see the world through social spectacles [3].

The significant features of the natural world are seen as sentient and evaluated using social intelligence modes of thinking. Therefore, for an animistic thinkers significant events do not ‘just happen’ – like inert billiard balls bouncing-off one another – instead events occur because some entity wants them to occur. Every significant event is intentional and has personal implications.

Animism is an extremely effective way of dealing with the natural world under the conditions of hunter–gatherer societies. For instance, each species of animal has its own nature, each member of a species its own character, knowledge of which enables behaviour to be predicted with considerable precision in real world situations [1] and [2]. Even with the advantages of scientific biology, ‘anthropomorphism’ still remains the best system for understanding, predicting and manipulating animal behaviour – especially among large social mammals: successful animal trainers usually develop and use elaborate anthropomorphic characterizations of dogs, cats and horses [8].

Furthermore, because other people were so important in evolutionary history [6] and [7] social information is especially vivid: it grabs and sustains our attention and mobilises our emotions. In an oral culture that depends on human memory, the best way of transmitting important information is by the medium of animistic stories and songs.

At home in the world

Animistic thinkers feel at home in the world [2]. Children and hunter–gatherers are not necessarily happy, of course – but they are not alienated: they have a relationship with the world. Animists are watched over, influenced, protected and punished, by the sentient powers that constitute the world.

Among tribal hunter–gatherers, although there are hostile powers, the relationship of each individual to the world is that of child and parent. The world is a ‘giving environment’ – fundamentally benign because it keeps us alive [9]. This is a beneficent ‘cosmic economy’ which cannot be controlled, planned or significantly shaped. Animists say ‘yes’ to the world, unconditionally [2] and [10].

By contrast, since the invention of farming and on through the industrial revolution into modernity, life has become akin to a state of siege, the individual (usually with a small gang of family and allies) against a mass of hostile strangers [2]. To survive and thrive planning is essential, yet most plans will fail. The natural world is raw material for the production of food and other necessities and luxuries. Production entails prolonged, dull, repetitive tasks to force nature into new and different shapes. The world is not a nurturing parent, but must be coerced into producing the necessities of life.

Mass alienation is therefore no accident, but an inevitable consequence of the kind of society we inhabit. Animism would be grossly maladaptive for decision-making in a complex society of politics, economics, law, science, technology and military organization – a society that depends on objective information and rational planning [5]. Returning to a thoroughgoing, society-wide animism would therefore be impossible without a return to hunter–gatherer lifeways; which is both impossible and undesirable since modern life is, in most material respects, vastly preferable to the Malthusian trap (of poverty, disease and starvation) which constituted most of recorded history [11].

Indeed, the most probable human future entails more complexity, more planning, more control – and, as a by-product, more alienation [12]. But although a shared and public animism is ruled-out as maladaptive, the situation for individuals is different. There may be niches for more-or-less wholly animistic individuals even in modern society, and there certainly are niches for a recovery of animistic thinking within many ordinary people’s private lives – especially during leisure time.

The problem is that, for a modern adult, recovery of animistic thinking entails undoing the effects of an exceptionally thorough and prolonged process of socialisation that has buried animism under a vast superstructure of abstraction and systematic thinking [13] and [14]. Modern adults cannot easily or quickly recover their animistic way of thinking at will, even temporarily.

Methods used to help in the recovery of animistic modes of thinking have been known since the Romantic era. They essentially involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality. For example, solitude (away from people), leisure (away from the economy) and unstructured time (as contrasted with technologically-measured time) – indeed holidays away from home are often a highly effective way of getting ‘in touch’ with life. Direct contact with nature is another classic strategy.

Under such conditions of contemplative detachment from societal constraints there tends to be a spontaneous recovery of animistic thinking. Those who can achieve this state often strive to do so, perhaps by setting aside a ‘sacred space’ of a special time or place for frequent meditation or personal rituals [15]. They may find that these cues and repetitions make flipping-into an animistic state straightforward and habitual.

But psychological detachment from social constraints is not possible for everyone due to their personality or situation, nor is it always effective. Some people find that it takes many clear days of vacation - or even longer – before they can ‘switch off’ their organised minds, forget their personal and practical worries and begin to live in the here-and-now. Such people cannot self-generate altered states, and may need some kind of ‘artificial’ or technological assistance to produce the desired effect.

Recovering animism through altered states of consciousness

It has also been noticed that altered states of consciousness, due to accidental or deliberate impairment in brain functioning, will sometimes cause the re-emergence of animistic modes of thinking [16].

For instance, animistic thinking emerges during meditation or contemplation, when drowsy (e.g. during hypnagogic states between sleeping and waking), during intoxication – whether accidental or deliberate, when delirious due to illness or brain injury’. We can also recall animistic thinking when remembering dreams, especially those rare ‘lucid’ dreams. For most people, most of the time, recovered animism must be a leisure-time pursuit. Even self-hypnosis or dreamy-reverie are states incompatible with optimal mental performance.

It is generally believed that hunter–gatherers included individuals called shamans who utilized altered states of consciousness to intensify their animistic thinking to the point where they transcended the barriers of time, space and species to undertake spirit journeys and transformations with aims such as healing individuals, seeking guidance on tribal decisions, or restoring good fortune [2] and [17]. Traditional shamans attained altered states by spontaneous psychological ability reinforced by training and practice; through various ordeals, dances, performances and rituals; or by their skill in ‘lucid dreaming’ (i.e. remaining aware while dreaming, and retaining some control over dream content and direction). Modern New Age spiritual practices include ‘Neo-shamanism’ in which (usually) rhythmic drumming, chanting or music is used to induce a trance state in which similar animistic experiences may be achieved [18].

Animism is also a feature of severe psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. ‘Paranoid’ delusions are characterised by ‘delusions of self-reference’ – which is a sense of being the focus of a world of hostile sentient powers [19]. Paranoid individuals may believe they are under constant observation, perceive the radio talking to them personally, or interpret media stories as containing coded allusions to their situation.

The nature of animistic thinking during altered states of consciousness depends on the emotional state [20]. A pleasant and healthy body state will usually lead to positive animistic experiences, and vice versa [3]. During the delirium of severe physical illness animistic experiences are almost always very unpleasant and involve the experience of a hostile (instead of nurturing) world, because the person is sick and suffering pain. For example, alcohol withdrawal (‘delirium tremens’) may involve terrifying persecutory delusions and perception of a threatening environment.

Mania, by contrast, may involve a blissful state of godlike one-ness with an animated world; because the energized and un-fatigued emotional tone of mania lends a euphoric colouring to delusions of self-reference [3]. Something similar applies with hallucinogenic drugs – whether someone has a good or bad ‘trip’ depends substantially on their emotional state, which may be influenced by the drug itself.

This emphasizes that there are two elements to recovered animism: alteration of consciousness, and maintenance of a positive emotional state.

The ‘entheogenic’ rationale for intoxication

Although intoxication may be rewarding in itself, probably one major explanation why so many people seem to seek so frequently to alter their consciousness with agents such as alcohol, marijuana, volatile organic solvents, opiates and hallucinogenic drugs [21] is that they are seeking to recover animistic modes of thinking, to cure alienation and feel at home in the world. When used in this spiritual-seeking way, psycho-pharmacological agents are sometimes called ‘entheogens’ (meaning ‘that which causes God to be within’) [22].

There are, of course, problems with using chemical intoxicants as an entheogen. There may be a risk of lasting damage to the brain or other aspects of health, there may be hangover or rebound phenomena, and the potential for addiction or other forms of chemical dependence. Intoxication does not have a specific effect in recovering animistic cognition, it also impairs other aspects of general brain function such as concentration, judgement, and reaction times. This means that intoxication is not an option for people who need to drive, operate machinery, look after children, or perform any kind of skilled or responsible function [22].

Furthermore, inducing animistic thinking by intoxication may be somewhat self-defeating, since intoxication will often significantly impair memory processes. Mystical or spiritual experiences may be induced by intoxication, but not be clearly remembered, so they can neither be learned-from nor integrated with the rest of life.

Despite such constraints and limitations, recovering animism through altered states of consciousness can be considered a major contemporary spiritual activity, especially in Neo-paganism [23] and New Age [24] movements, but probably also in some charismatic branches of Christianity – such as Pentecostalism (which is probably he fastest growing protestant denomination [25]). And it seems more than coincidence that the favourite English language fiction of the twentieth century in most surveys [26] was substantially a work of animism: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its non-human sentient beings, and its animate horses, eagles, trees, mountains and landscapes.

In an ever more rational, abstract and objective public world it may seem ironic, although it should not be altogether surprising, if many people privately practised some personalized version of Neo-shamanism in order to induce a sense of belonging [18]. Recovered animism could become the personal religion of the future.



References

[1] N. Bird-David, ‘Animism’ revisited, Curr Anthropol 40 (1999), pp. 567–591.

[2] H. Brody, The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers and the shaping of the world, Faber and Faber, London (2001).

[3] B. Charlton, Psychiatry and the human condition, Radcliffe Medical Press, Oxford (UK) (2000).

[4] B.G. Charlton, Theory of mind delusions and bizarre delusions in an evolutionary perspective: psychiatry and the social brain. In: Brune Martin, Ribbert Hedda and Schiefenhovel Wulf, Editors, The social brain – evolution and pathology, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2003).

[5] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, CQ (Critical Quarterly) 47 (2005), pp. 30–39. Full Text via CrossRef

[6] R.W. Byrne and A. Whiten, Machiavellian intelligence: social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes and humans, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1988).

[7] G. Miller, The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, Heinemann, London (2000).

[8] V. Hearne, Adam’s task: calling animals by name, Knopf, New York (1986).

[9] N. Bird-David, The giving environment: another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters, Curr Anthropol 31 (1990), pp. 183–196.

[10] J. Campbell and B. Moyers, The power of myth, Anchor, New York (1991).

[11] Clark G. A farewell to alms:a brief economic history of the world. Princeton (USA): Princeton University Press (in press).

[12] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The Modernization Imperative, Imprint Academic, Thorverton (2003).

[13] Keith E. Stanovitch, The robot’s rebellion: finding meaning in the age of Darwin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2004).

[14] B.G. Charlton, Science as a general education: conceptual science should constitute the compulsory core of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 451–453. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (63 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[15] J. Campbell, A Joseph Campbell companion: reflections on the art of living, HarperTrade, New York (1991).

[16] C.T. Tart, Altered states of consciousness, Wiley, New York (1969).

[17] R. Hutton, Shamans: Siberian spirituality and the western imagination, Hambledon and London, London (2001).

[18] D.C. Noel, The soul of shamanism: western fantasies, imaginal realities, Continuum, New York (1997).

[19] W. Mayer-Gross, E. Slater and M. Roth, Clinical psychiatry (3rd ed.), Cassell, London (1969).

[20] A.R. Damasio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason and the human brain, Macmillan, London (1994).

[21] B.G. Charlton, Diazepam with your dinner, Sir? The lifestyle drug-substitution strategy: a radical alcohol policy, QJM 98 (2005), pp. 457–459. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[22] Erowid. Entheogens: spiritual and traditional use of psychoactives. www.erowid.org/entheogens. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).

[23] R. Hutton, Triumph of the moon, Oxford University Press, Oxford (UK) (2001).

[24] P. Helas, The new age movement, Blackwell, Oxford, UK (1996).

[25] Wikipedia. Pentecostalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacostalism. (accessed 7 Nov 2006).

[26] T.A. Shippey, JRR Tolkien: author of the century, HarperCollins, London (2000).

There should be more science Nobel laureates

*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*

Editorial

Why there should be more science Nobel prizes and laureates – And why proportionate credit should be awarded to institutions

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical hypotheses. 2007; 68: 471-473

***



Summary

The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology and economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. The prizes exist primarily to honour individuals but also have a very important function in science generally. In particular, the institutions and nations which have educated, nurtured or supported many Nobel laureates can be identified as elite in world science. However, the limited range of subjects and a maximum of 12 laureates per year mean that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized; and relatively few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different levels of quality. I advocate that the Nobel committee should expand the number of Nobel laureates and Prize categories as a service to world science. (1) There is a large surplus of high quality prize candidates deserving of recognition. (2) There has been a vast expansion of research with a proliferation of major sub-disciplines in the existing categories. (3) Especially, the massive growth of the bio-medical sciences has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in this area. (4) Whole new fields of major science have emerged. I therefore suggest that the maximum of three laureates per year should always be awarded in the categories of physics, chemistry and economics, even when these prizes are for diverse and un-related achievements; that the number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine per year; and that two new Prize categories should be introduced to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science. Together, these measures could increase the science laureates from a maximum of 12 to a minimum of 24, and increase the range of scientific coverage. In future, the Nobel committee should also officially allocate proportionate credit to institutions for each laureate, and a historical task force could also award institutional credit for past prizes.


***

The Nobel prizes have since 1901 existed primarily to honour individuals, but the prizes also have a very important function in science generally, in particular providing a retrospective research quality evaluation for institutions and nations.

The four science Nobel prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine/physiology, and – since 1969 – economics) have performed extremely well as a method of recognizing the highest level of achievement. (The literature and peace prizes, lacking objective and internationally-valid criteria for evaluation, have clearly failed to achieve the validity of the science prizes.) Although originally awarded to individuals, the science prizes are now awarded a maximum of once a year to a maximum of three laureates, which makes a maximum total of only 12 laureates annually. However this maximum number of laureates is not often reached due to the usual practice of awarding each year’s prize for achievements related to a single ‘theme’ of research – for which only one or two people may be responsible.

The science prizes serve not only to honour individuals retrospectively, but have also been used to evaluate the quality of universities and other research institutions by crediting the places that have been associated with the most ‘revolutionary’ science breakthroughs. For example, the Shanghai Jiao Tong academic rankings (http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2006) uses ‘alumni’ data of the university where Nobel Laureates studied, and also the institution where laureates were working at the time of award. This generates a mostly-US world elite of universities containing the likes of Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Colombia, MIT, Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley and Cambridge (UK).

But the maximum of only 12 science laureates per year means that many major scientific achievements remain un-recognized. Outside of the research super-elite, few universities can gather sufficient Nobel-credits to enable a precise estimate of their different level of quality. Such small numbers create considerable statistical noise, over-valuing a ‘lucky’ institution and undervaluing other places where Nobel-quality work was accomplished but un-rewarded.

I suggest that the massive expansion and specialization of world science since the foundation of the Nobel Prizes implies that the number of Nobel laureates should be at-least doubled. It would also be a very useful service to science if the prize committee would – in future and retrospectively – proportionately allocate an official share of institutional credit for each person’s prize.

Reasons why more Nobel laureates are justified

1. While it is understandable that the Nobel Committee and existing laureates would not want to ‘inflate’ the value of the award, given the number of unrewarded major scientists there seems to be no shortage of very high quality candidates for Nobels. So there should be no problem that increasing numbers would reduce the quality of laureates.

2. The past century since the first Nobel Prize in 1901 has seen a vast, many-fold expansion of scientific research. Furthermore, there has been a continual process of specialization of research, as well as the generation of new hybrid categories (such as bio-chemistry). So, the meaning of a Nobel has changed. It is now appropriate that within a general category, several specialist prizes be awarded each year.

3. The relative importance of sciences have changed, and for the several decades the bio-medical sciences have dominated in terms of size and achievements. This has created a shortage of Nobel recognition in the area of physiology and medicine. For example, many major therapeutic advances in drug discovery and innovative procedures have not been recognized by Nobel prizes.

4. New fields of science have emerged and grown to maturity. Economics was recognized by a new Nobel Prize founded in 1968, but mathematics and computing science also seem worthy of new prizes. (The mathematical Fields Medal of the Royal Society is not a Nobel equivalent, since it only goes to candidates aged less than 40.)

5. An increase in the numbers of Nobel prizes would have great advantages for recognizing the scientific research institutions which have educated, nurtured and supported them. When there are so few laureates each individual award carries a disproportionate weight in terms of institutional associations. Only a handful of world universities have gathered enough laureates over sufficient years to eliminate chance effects. More laureates would mean that the contribution of institutions would be more precisely measurable, a wider range of scientific achievement would be rewarded, and also more up to date measures would become useable.

6. Related to this, it would be a great service to science if prizes were awarded not just to an individual, but if the official credit for each laureate was also proportionately allocated between any institutions that were considered significantly to have supported the achievement – this process could also be done retrospectively (e.g. by an historical task force constituted for the purpose).

In conclusion, I would advocate a progressive expansion of the number of science Nobel prizes. The exact mechanism by which this would be achieved is not critical, but here are some suggestions:

1. The maximum of three laureates per year in the physics, chemistry and economics categories should be awarded as a matter of routine; even when this means that prizes are being given for diverse and un-related achievements.

2. The number of laureates in the ‘biology’ category of physiology or medicine should be increased to six or preferably nine.

3. Consideration should be given to two new prizes to recognize achievements in mathematics and computing science.

A combination of these measures would ensure that the number of laureates per year would increase from the current maximum of 12 to a minimum of 21–24. The situation could be monitored to ensure that this change did not lead to any sign of incipient decline in quality of laureates, and consideration could be given to further expansion or adjustment of disciplinary categories in future.

While it is understandable and laudable that the Nobel committee should be extremely cautious about devaluing the status of the award, in fact the real problem is exactly the opposite. By maintaining so few laureates when world science has expanded so much, there has been a deflationary extra-valuation of each award and an arbitrary element to the distribution of credit. As a service to world science, the Nobel Committee should seriously consider expanding the number of laureates to keep-up with the volume and quality of scientific activity.

From Nutty Professor to Buddy Love

Editorial

From Nutty Professor to Buddy Love – Personality types in modern science

Bruce G. Charlton



Medical Hypotheses. 2007; 68: 243-244.



Summary

People often suggest that scientists should have a specific personality type, usually conscientious and self-critical. But this is a mistake. Science as a social system needs to be conscientious and self-critical, but scientists as people do not necessarily have to conform to that stereotype. Since science works by a process of selection, it makes sense to have a wide range of personalities in science. It takes all types. However, the selection pressures within science have changed over recent decades. In the past, a successful scientist often resembled the white-coated, bespectacled and introverted Nutty Professor in Jerry Lewis’s movie of that name. But the modern science superstar is more like the Nutty Professor’s alter ego, nightclub singer ‘Buddy Love’: a sharp-suited, good-looking and charismatic charmer. While Nutty was dull but impartial, Buddy is compelling but self-seeking. Our attitude towards public scientific pronouncements should be adjusted accordingly.




The benefit of having all sorts of personality types in science is a theme of David L Hull’s Science as a process (Chicago University Press, 1988), which charts the history of evolutionary theory, and interprets it as a selection process. Hull describes a galaxy of scientific personalities performing a wide range of scientific functions, and concludes that diversity is useful in providing the conceptual variations necessary to speed progress in unpredictable situations.

Past scientists usually worked alone and depended on conscientiousness and self-criticism for the validity of their research. Therefore, scientists included a high proportion of shy, introverted, highly-focused and somewhat ‘autistic’ types – rather like the white-coated and stammering Nutty Professor played by Jerry Lewis in the 1963 movie of that title. But under modern conditions different selection pressures apply, and Nutty Professors may not thrive except in the lower ‘technical’ levels of scientific careers (and in the mathematical and physical sciences where innate aptitude is so rare that all manner of weird personalities must be tolerated). As medical and bio-scientific research has expanded, and Big Science ‘industrial’ modes of production have come to dominate, so the stereotypical successful scientist has changed.

The stars of modern science tend to be much more extraverted than the Nutty Prof, because they need the rhetorical, managerial and socio-political skills - and ‘type A personality’ – appropriate to a team leader. They need to get grants, motivate large groups, enforce a high productive output, and act as a ‘front-man’ to present (and ‘spin’) collaborative research in specialist conferences, political arenas and for a broad media audience.

This leads to a greater dominance within science of characters who resemble the Nutty Professor’s alter-ego, night-club singer and womanizer ‘Buddy Love’ – into which the Prof temporarily transforms with the help of a potion he invented. (Note: in modern science Buddy Love is often a woman, mutatis mutandis.) The successful scientist nowadays benefits from being good-looking, charismatic, articulate – indeed, he may be an overbearing and manipulative psychopath, yet still highly effective at his job.

While the Nutty Professor was modest and understated, the Buddy Love-type is a master of hype – someone who pushes and exaggerates the significance of his work to the greatest degree he can get-away-with. In fact, Bud tends to go beyond this point, leading to fakery and fabrication.

In a nutshell, BL lacks exactly that capacity for self-criticism which was so common among scientists of the past. As Hull describes, when there was little peer review, there was a strong incentive for scientists to self-regulate in order to protect their own future reputations. Nowadays, research is so heavily peer-reviewed at so many levels that the major incentive of scientists is to satisfy the referees, not themselves.

Modern science encourages those who possess a fanatical and unshakeable belief in their own research, and a tireless industriousness in promoting it, which helps gain them a hearing in the crowded marketplace of ideas. And one-sided zeal need not damage the progress of science, so long as the criticism of others makes up for lack of self-criticism. (However, this vital negative feedback from rivals may be blocked when Buddy is both powerful and vindictive.)

The Jeckyll and Hyde transformation from Nutty Professor to Buddy Love should affect the way we interpret the public pronouncements of scientists. While NP would usually provide a dull but accurate articulation of current informed opinion, BL provides appealing and memorable sound-bites – subtly calculated to benefit his self-interest.

After all, it is precisely this aptitude with people and words that enabled the elite cadre of Buddy Loves to discard their white coats for sharp suits, and rise above the mass of Nuttys.

Mega-prizes in medicine

*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*

Editorial

Mega-prizes in medicine: Big cash awards may stimulate useful and rapid therapeutic innovation

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 68: 1-3

***

Summary

Following Horrobin’s suggestion of 1986, I argue that offering very large prizes (tens of millions of US dollars, or more) for solving specific therapeutic problems, would be an excellent strategy for promoting the rapid development of effective new treatments. The two mainstream ways of paying for medical research are funding the process with grants or funding the outcome via patent protection. When grants are used to fund the process of research the result tends to be ‘pure’ science, guided by intrinsic scientific objectives. Practical results, such as useful therapeutic advances, are a by-product. Patent-seeking research, by contrast, is more focused on technology than science. It seeks practical results; and aims to pay for itself (and make a profit) in the long term by generating a patentable product or procedure. Prize-seeking research is subject to different incentives and applicable to different situations than either process-funded or patent-seeking research. Prize seeking researchers have a strong incentive to solve the specified problem as rapidly as possible, but the problem may be solved using old ideas that are scientifically mundane or unpatentable technologies and methods. Prizes therefore seem to generate solutions which are incremental extensions, new applications or novel combinations of already-existing technologies. The main use of mega-prizes in medicine would be to accelerate therapeutic progress in stagnant fields of research and to address urgent problems. For example, medical charities focused on specific diseases should consider accumulating their resources until they can offer a mega-prize for solving a clinical problem of special concern to their patients. Prize money should be big enough to pay for the research and development, the evaluation of the new treatment in a clinical trial, and with a large profit left-over to compensate for the intrinsic risk of competing. Sufficiently large amounts of money, and the prestige and publicity derived from winning a mega-prize, could rapidly mobilize research efforts to discover a whole range of scientifically un-glamorous but clinically-useful therapeutic breakthroughs.


***

In 1986 David Horrobin put forward the idea that large cash prizes should more often be used as an incentive to develop answers to important medical questions [1]. This proposal, still neglected, has much merit for stimulating therapeutic progress. I believe that offering very large prizes (e.g. tens of millions of US dollars) for solving specific clinical problems would be an excellent strategy for developing effective new treatments for medical conditions where mainstream science and commercial research and development (R&D) has so far failed.

There are two mainstream ways of funding science: funding the process with grants, and funding successful products by patent protection.

Research grants are used to fund the process of scientific research. Grant funded research tends to be ‘pure’ science, guided by intrinsic scientific objectives. Practical results, such as useful therapeutic advances, are a by-product rather than the primary goal. The incentive for doing good research is mainly the incentive structure of science: rewards of success include high status as a scientist and from this comes the perks of a triumphant career.

By contrast with pure science, applied research or R&D is supposed to solve problems. But, even when R&D ostensibly aims at useful practical results, if this outcome is neither enforced nor rewarded the ideal R&D strategy is to make enough progress to maintain funding, but never actually to solve the problem because that would put an end to income. In other words, grant funded R&D is implicitly supported to ‘do research’, and not to ‘solve problems’. Such R&D may end-up being merely ‘grant-seeking’ and generative of what amounts to low quality pure science. Arguably, much modern medical research falls into this category [2].

Patent-seeking research, by contrast, is a kind of risky investment – un-funded in the short term but intended to have a good chance of paying for itself and making a profit in the long term. The aim is to generate a patentable product (something novel, non-obvious and useful), then make money from the patent. Patent-seeking research is usually more like applied science or R&D than pure science, and includes most of pharmaceutical and much technological research.

Prizes are different both from process-funded and patent-seeking research. Prizes are essentially a way of funding research to solve specified problems in situations where the process of development is more a matter of R&D than pure science, but when the aimed-at product is unlikely to be patentable. Researchers have a strong incentive to solve the specified problem because receiving the prize is contingent upon achieving a solution. But prize-seeking researchers are free to solve the specified problem using ideas and approaches that may be scientifically mundane, technologies that are un-patentable, or technologies for which patents have expired.

Prizes tend to generate solutions which are incremental extensions, new applications or novel combinations of already existing technologies. The most famous example is the 1714 Royal Society of London 20 000 pounds Sterling prize for measurement of longitude to within five tenths of a degree [3]. This was eventually awarded to John Harrison in 1773, for designing a sufficiently accurate and robust clock. The delay in awarding the prize came from the fact that the Royal Society was looking for a ‘pure science’ answer to the longitude problem, while Harrison’s method was based on old science implemented by vastly-improved technology.

Indeed, this seems to be the usual way in which prizes are won. The general rule seems to be that prizes stimulate technology rather than science, accelerate R&D rather than generate paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. The prize winners for motorized flight, human powered flight, energy-efficient refrigerators and the ‘X prize’ for cheap space flight seem to confirm this pattern [4].

The main use of mega-prizes in medicine would be to accelerate therapeutic progress in stagnant fields of research, to address urgent problems, and to do so even when effective solutions are neither scientifically ‘sexy’ nor necessarily money-making. Useful therapies for a disease may be even duller than Harrison’s clock appeared to the Royal Society, and may not be patent-protect-able, yet nonetheless extremely valuable to suffers from the disease.

My suggestion is that those medical charities who concentrate on helping patients with specific diseases should not be plowing all their assets into research grants to support ‘pure science’ – which may or-may-not have a therapeutic payoff. Funding the process of research produces a measurable output which can, in the short term, be ‘spun’ into an illusion of therapeutic progress, yet progress in much of medical research remains sluggish or non-existent [2]. Such disease-focused charities should instead consider accumulating their resources until they can offer a mega-prize for solving a clinical problem of specific concern to their patients. The prize money should be big enough to pay for the research and development, the evaluation of the new treatment in a clinical trial, and with a large profit left over to compensate for the intrinsic risk of competing for a prize which may not be won. Mega-prizes would therefore need to range from tens of millions of dollars up to billions of dollars, according to the size of the problem.

For example, many specific types of cancer might be suitable for offering prizes. Shortly before he died of lymphoma, David Horrobin wrote an article in the Lancet calling for a more urgent and pragmatic approach to cancer therapy [5]. He speculated that there might already exist a variety of potentially beneficial (and non-toxic) nutritional and pharmaceutical interventions – supported by biochemical and animal experiments or case studies, but not yet refined or checked by clinical trials. Specific types of lifestyle advice and nursing care might also make a difference. Such interventions, if properly combined and sequenced, and tested in small and well-controlled trials, could rapidly and significantly help people with various malignancies. Yet such potentially beneficial treatments would probably not be patentable, and would also be regarded as scientifically mundane, so would be unlikely to be discovered with current mainstream research incentives. Mega-prizes might make the difference.

Perhaps sufficiently large amounts of money, and the prestige and publicity which would derive from winning a mega-prize, could mobilize research efforts to discover a whole range of scientifically un-glamorous but clinically-useful therapeutic breakthroughs. Such a strategy could provide realistic hope of speeding-up therapeutic advances for patients suffering from diseases for which, at present, little can be done.



References

[1] D.F. Horrobin, Glittering prizes for research support, Nature 324 (1986), p. 221. Full Text via CrossRef

[2] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Medical research funding may have over-expanded and be due for collapse, QJM 98 (2005), pp. 53–55. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[3] Davis LN. Should we consider alternative incentives for basic research? Patents vs prizes. Paper from DRUID Summer Conference 2002. Available from: http://www.druid.dk/conferences.

[4] Davis LN. How effective are prizes as incentive to innovation? Evidence from three 20th century contests. Paper from DRUID Summer Conference 2004. Available from: http://www.druid.dk/conferences.

[5] D.F. Horrobin, Are large clinical trials in rapidly lethal diseases usually unethical?, Lancet 361 (2003), pp. 695–697.

Lectures - a highly effective teaching method

Editorial

Lectures are such an effective teaching method because they exploit evolved human psychology to improve learning

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 67: 1261-1265.

Summary

Lectures are probably the best teaching method for many students in many circumstances; especially for communicating conceptual knowledge, and where there is a significant knowledge gap between lecturer and audience. However, the lack of a convincing rationale has been a factor in under-estimating the importance of lectures, and there are many who advocate their replacement with written communications or electronic media. I suggest that lectures are so effective because they exploit the spontaneous human aptitude for learning from spoken (rather than written) information. Literacy is a recent cultural artefact, and for most of their evolutionary history humans communicated by direct speech. By contrast with speech, all communication technologies – whether reading a book or a computer monitor – are artificial and unnatural. Furthermore, learning is easier during formal, quiet, real-time social events. The structure of a lecture artificially manipulates human psychology to increase vigilance, focus attention, and generate authority for the lecturer – all of which make communications more memorable for the student. Instead of trying to phase-out lectures, we should strive to make them better by understanding that lectures are essentially formal, spoken, social events.


***



Despite the lecture method being so unpopular among professional educational advisers, reformers and intellectuals generally – and almost annual declarations that information technology is just about to render lectures obsolete – many scientists continue to give lectures and students continue voluntarily to attend them. The fact that lectures have survived so much official opprobrium suggests that they are a much more effective teaching method than they are given credit for.

Indeed, existing practice suggests that properly structured lecture series may be the best teaching method for many subjects and many students, and lectures may be especially well-suited to the transmission of conceptual and systematic knowledge [1]. Lectures are therefore usually the standard medium for teaching science up to the point where the student begins to specialize and train as a practicing scientist, at which point a more individualized and skill-orientated training becomes necessary.

In itself, the greater ease of learning from lectures may indeed account for some of the disdain with which many intellectuals regard lectures, since intellectuals are experts at the cognitively-challenging business of learning by solitary reading. For example, intellectuals may deride clear, comprehensible and enjoyable lectures as ‘spoon-feeding’ students; with the implication that students should be forced to work hard to find their basic knowledge in the same way that intellectuals do for their advanced knowledge. This was perhaps appropriate when science teaching was mainly for training future professional scientists; but now that science is taught mainly as a ‘general education’, the acquisition of knowledge is more important than the process by which it is attained [2].

Lectures are also criticized as inculcating a ‘passive’ attitude to learning; and any passive tendency is encouraged by the mistaken practice of giving students handouts or written summaries of the lecture contents, so that students are implicitly expected just to sit and listen, and neither organize nor write-down the information supplied by the lecturer. But we need to be clearer that making learning easier is an admirable educational objective, assuming that what is being learned is worthwhile (as it is in the sciences). Making learning easier is especially important for the less-naturally gifted proportion of the population who make up an increasingly large number of higher education students in advanced societies due to the massive recent and continuing expansion of colleges and universities [3]. If knowledge is valuable, then we should embrace effective methods of inculcating knowledge: the easier the better.

I suggest that there are many advantages to lectures which seem obvious yet are seldom noted or acted-upon. The first is that it is easier for most people to learn conceptual information from spoken communications than from reading – and the essentially aural nature of information has important implications for lecture organization. The second is that the real-time, human-presence of a lecturer and the social context of a formal lecture makes it easier for most students to remain alert, focus attention and remember what is said than when students are required to work alone. A third factor which deserves recognition is that the proper unit of educationally valuable lectures is a course of lectures (i.e. repeated interactions between the same teacher and the same class), not an one-off talk.

I conclude that lectures are ‘spontaneously’ easier to learn-from than are written or electronic media, and the reason is probably that they exploit evolved human psychology. In this sense it is ‘human nature’ to learn by hearing information in social situations, because this was the medium and context in which ancestral hunter-gatherers did most of their learning.

The effectiveness of lectures

Lectures work, but nobody seems to know why. The lack of an accepted rationale for the method seems to make people feel guilty about using lectures. At best lectures are taken for granted (which makes it unlikely that they will be improved), at worst attempts are made to replace lectures with almost anything else.

We must first accept that it is completely impractical and unaffordable to replace lectures with individual or small-group teaching in modern mass higher education systems [3], and attempts to do so (in any more than a token or symbolic fashion) will probably merely lead to less teaching of students. More usually ‘distance learning’ methods are introduced, such as teaching by e-mail and internet; but this brings attendance-based universities into competition with cheaper, more convenient and (probably) better-quality distance learning institutions. In the mania to replace lectures, absurd gestures may be made such as abandoning real teaching altogether, and instead getting groups of students to ‘teach-each-other’. (Student-led education might arguably be valuable among the cleverest and best-educated students, but is a totally misguided strategy for mass higher education.)

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of lectures’ effectiveness comes from what people actually do, rather than what people say. I find it highly significant that lectures are especially used in teaching the most quantitative and systematic sciences, and for intensive professional training courses such as medicine, engineering and law. In other words, lectures are a focus of teaching in exactly the situations where transmission of knowledge is most vital, and in subjects where learning is most easily and validly measurable. Of course, lectures will only get you so far, and individual teaching by ‘apprenticeship’ supported by self-directed study remain necessary for learning specialized and high level skills.

It is striking that, despite increasing choice of alternatives, the great majority of students continue to enrol in attendance-based and residential universities where lectures are a primary mode of instruction. And, when at university, they usually show-up for lectures, even when the lectures are not compulsory. So, students still choose lecture-based teaching despite the ready availability of more convenient alternative qualifications from highly-reputable ‘distance learning’ institutions which have grown-up to exploit new communication technologies [4]; such as the UK Open University or the University of Phoenix in the USA. But although such distance-learning is often both high in quality and much cheaper, it has added to, rather than displaced, the demand for attendance-based, lecture-focused educational institutions. Apparently, many students experience difficulties in learning in solitude even from the finest written or audio–visual media.

Taking all these observations together, there seems to be ample prima facie evidence that lectures are probably the best practicable teaching method in many circumstances and for many students. However, it is not generally understood why lectures are useful, and because this rationale is not understood, the conduct of lectures has often been changed in ways that make them less effective – usually by undermining the focus upon spoken communication by inappropriate use of visual aids or excessive emphasis on written support material.

Lectures are essentially spoken – written handouts undermine lectures

The specific reason for their effectiveness is that lectures are essentially a form of spoken communication which is delivered to an audience by an actually present and visible person through a series of repeated social interactions. A lecture therefore constitutes a formally structured social event which fits evolved ‘human nature’ and artificially manipulates human psychology to improve learning.

It is easy for educated people in advanced societies to forget that literacy and solitude are both relatively-recent cultural artefacts. In the hunter-gatherer societies in which our (neuro-anatomically identical) ancestors dwelled for many tens of thousands of years, information was communicated mainly face-to-face and by direct speech, and individuals were almost never alone [5]. By contrast, all communication technologies – whether reading a book, audio–visual media, or a computer monitor – are artificial and contrived; and studying alone is a difficult skill with widely varying levels of attainment. This is probably the major reason why so many people find it easier to learn from a spoken lecture and in groups.

Attending a course of lectures requires a long-term commitment to be in the necessary place at the proper time. Because the main medium of communication in a lecture is the spoken word, what is spoken should be regarded as the essence. The only way to make lecture attendance unimportant is to diminish the effectiveness of the lecture. Only if lectures are sub-optimal can students miss them without incurring some disadvantage. If a student is not present and listening, he or she will not obtain the advantage of attending a lecture; and will have to make-do with solitary personal study. This is undeniably inconvenient, but it is intrinsic to the medium.

Therefore, when a lecture course is the focus of teaching, care should be taken not to sacrifice the essence of lectures by confusing students over the core learning activity which is expected of them. In lecture-based course, students should understand that one major expectation is that they should attend lectures or be prepared to take the consequences of disadvantaged learning. In order to make the most of their natural strengths, lectures need to maintain their proper focus on speaking as the primary form of communication.

But students may miss lectures through no fault of their own, as well as for less admirable reasons. So it is tempting to try and ameliorate the inevitable educational disadvantages to students who cannot (or prefer not to) attend lectures by providing identical or more-detailed material as handout – perhaps distributed by the internet. Once such handouts are established as an element of the teaching, it is tempting to distribute them, or make them available online, in advance of spoken lectures. But these temptations should be resisted, because handouts will – by their abstract objectivity – usurp the primacy of the spoken lecture.

It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which hand-outs can damage the effectiveness of lectures. A lecture is compelling substantially because it is here-and-now, a situation in which the student must concentrate, listen, understand – and these activities cannot be put-off until later. The intensity of a lecture depends on this necessity for the student to focus.

And in order to have a record of information for understanding and revision, the student must record the lecture in their own words, and they must do it now. But the existence of hand-outs or transcriptions usurps this fundamental responsibility of the student. A handout stands-between the student and the real-time lecture in the same way that a video-camera stands between a tourist and landscape in which they are standing. To see a lecture through the lens of a hand-out is as impoverished a perspective as seeing the Alps through the viewfinder of a camera.

As well as increasing immediate attentiveness, lecture notes also make the lecture into an active mode of learning because note-taking requires ‘deep-processing’ forms of learning, by imposing a requirement to understand, abbreviate and re-organize in-coming information. Deep-processed information is better remembered.

More generally, lecture teaching methods should not allow verbal information to become subordinated to ‘visual aids’. It is tempting to make lectures more entertaining by adding attention-grabbing graphics. But complex visual material is usually distracting rather than educational. TV, video, animations and the like are so attention-grabbing that they break the conceptual thread of spoken discourse. Switching back-and-forth between audio–visual technology and the spoken voice involves a repeated cognitive ‘gearchange’ that relatively disadvantages speech.

The primary visual aid should be the lecturer him- or her-self – the effective lecturer is an actor or orator. In particular, the audience should clearly see the lecturer’s face, and eye-contact with the lecturer is vital. A lecture which takes place in the dark while viewing slides, where a disembodied voice intones sentences, can hardly be described as a lecture at all since it lacks the basis of a social event. Attending a lecture in the dark is more like visiting the cinema than participating in a social event.

A lecture is a means to an end, which is learning. Methods to attract attention and entertain the audience should therefore be subordinated to the over-arching educational imperative.

Lectures as social events

As well as being spoken communications, lectures are properly delivered by an actually present individual. This creates a here-and-now social situation which unfolds in real time. Humans are social animals, who are naturally more alert and vigilant in actual social situations.

What makes the lecture a social event is the potential for two-way communication – mainly the visual link of eye-contact between lecturer and audience. The situation of real time social communication makes students spontaneously more vigilant than when alone with a book or computer, because a student’s failure to pay attention can be observed. By contrast, in a very large lecture auditorium (or when electronic media are used to transmit a lecture remotely) the lecturer cannot maintain eye-contact with all members of the audience. Remote students are not participating in the here-and-now social event: they are excluded from the lecture situation – they might as well be watching TV.

A properly-conducted lecture also exploits the psychological disposition to attend to persons of authority in social situations [6]. In effect, the formal lecture is a mutually beneficial ‘collusion’ between class and lecturer. The structure of a lecture theatre enables a situation in which a group’s attention is focused on the lecturer, and this artificially generates authority in the lecturer. Humans have evolved to attend and remember the words of authoritative individuals. The collusion is that a class of students implicitly, by their silent attention, awards temporary authority to the lecturer (authority which happens to be gratifying for the lecturer) for the purpose of making learning more effective (which is gratifying for the students – and is the aim of the exercise).

A further aspect is that lectures should where possible be given as a whole course – not as one-off events – and by a single lecturer – rather than by a team. It needs repeated interactions for a relationship of trust to build up between lecturer and class – and only when trust is established (if it is established) will students learn effectively.

It is precisely because the authority structure of a formal lecture is so powerful an instrument for focusing attention and improving learning that the lecture medium can be abused for propaganda purposes – for example by political or religious orators who orchestrate mass-meetings or rallies. Because they so effectively exploit human psychology, lectures are intrinsically a form of imposition by one upon the many. There may need to be safeguards, such as an explicit and externally approved curriculum, to prevent the lecture situation being used to pursue non-educational goals.

Conclusion

Scientists, who usually have something to teach which is worth learning, should feel more confident about the value of lecturing and the appropriateness of the method. Students are not being fobbed-off with an inferior medium when lectures are the focus of teaching, nor should the spoken lecture be seen as secondary to the provision of written handouts or transcripts.

So, lectures should not be perceived as redundant elaborations on a text. On the contrary, good lectures cannot be missed without loss, texts are there to support what is spoken, and it should be a clear educational advantage for students to attend lectures.

Furthermore, lecturers should resist the temptation to make lectures more entertaining by over-using ‘visual aids’. Since lectures are primarily ‘aural’, the visual material should generally be appropriate for students’ to record in lecture notes during the actual lecture period – which usually means simple summary sentences, tables and diagrams.

Lectures should be enjoyable, but should not strive to be entertaining as their major goal; lectures ought to be compelling and memorable rather than amusing and diverting. And – because students learn to trust their teachers only gradually – to be educationally effective, lectures should be delivered as a course, not as one-off interactions.

Lectures retain a major educational role because they exploit evolved human psychology to make learning easier and more effective compared with electronic and textual media. Instead of trying to phase-out lectures, we should strive to make them better. And, if the university teaching of science as a general education is to expand in the future [2], it is important to make learning science as easy as possible.



References

[1] B.G. Charlton, Science school and culture school: improving the efficiency of high school science teaching in a system of mass science education, Med Hypotheses 67 (2006), pp. 1–5. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (75 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[2] B.G. Charlton, Science as a general education: conceptual science should constitute the compulsory core of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees, Med Hypotheses 66 (2006), pp. 451–453. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (63 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus

[3] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, Crit Quart 47 (2005), pp. 30–39. Full Text via CrossRef

[4] M. Trow, Some consequences of the new information and communication technologies for higher education. In: K. Roberts and F. Webster, Editors, The virtual university? Information, markets and managements, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002), pp. 301–317.

[5] H. Brody, The other side of Eden: hunter-gatherers, farmers and the shaping of the world, Faber, London (2002).

[6] J.H. Barkow, Prestige and culture: a biosocial interpretation, Curr Anthropol 16 (1975), pp. 553–572.

Busy-ness in modern society

Editorial

The busy shall inherit the earth: The evolution from ‘hard work’ to ‘busyness’ in modern science and society

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 67: 1003-1005

Summary

Although ‘hard work’ and ‘busyness’ are somewhat similar terms, there seem to be significant differences in the way that they are used. While hard work has always been a feature of complex societies, modern society can be seen as evolving toward being dominated by jobs characterized by busyness. Busyness refers to multi-tasking – having many sequential jobs to perform and switching frequently between them on an externally-imposed schedule. Traditionally, the individual gifts of a successful scientist were mainly in terms of knowledge, theoretical or technical aptitude. But nowadays the successful scientist is often one who has been promoted from hard-work to busyness: an expert in synthesizing a sufficient degree of scientific ability with a broad range of managerial and political skills. It is psychologically tough to be busy, because busyness is a consequence of human beings being constrained by the functioning of abstract social systems. In a complex modern organization, individual psychology is subordinated to inflexible programs of being in specific places at specific times doing specific things – this is both tricky to do well and demanding to do at all. Since people are paid (mainly) to do difficult but necessary things they would prefer not to do, busyness has become a major reason why people are paid a premium salary. In the long-term, many straightforward jobs will be analyzed and routinized out of existence, with the narrowly-skilled worker being replaced by teams, machines or computers. But busy jobs are hard to eliminate because they are those in which it is optimal for a variety of disparate and unpredictable tasks to be done by a single person. Consequently, those individuals who can cope with, even thrive-upon, busyness are becoming indispensable. In future ‘the busy shall inherit the earth’ (or, at least, the most powerful and highest paid jobs), not just in science but in all major social domains.


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Although ‘hard work’ and ‘busyness’ are somewhat similar terms, there seem to be significant differences in the way that they are used. Modern society can be seen as evolving from an ethos of hard work to being dominated by jobs characterized by busyness. In other words, people are increasingly paid to be busy rather than work hard in the traditional sense.

Hard work may refer to high productivity of a fairly narrow and clearly defined sort: such as making lots of things, or prolonged performance of a process or task. By contrast, busyness usually seems to refer to multi-tasking – having many jobs to perform and switching frequently between them.

Hard work in modern society is therefore usually associated with specialist technical labour – in science this might be a diligent PhD student or post-doctoral researcher putting in long hours reading papers and doing experiments. But busyness is more characteristic of a manager than a technical specialist. For example, the successful scientific grant-holder who divides their time between writing funding applications and papers, presenting at conferences, sitting on committees, teaching at a university, and running a large research team is much ‘busier’ than a PhD student, even when the grant-holder does not work any ‘harder’.

In this sense, the successful scientist is often one who is promoted from hard-work to busyness. For instance, James D. Watson worked hard while he was a post-doc discovering the structure of DNA (hard work which nonetheless famously allowed considerable time for relaxation [1]). But when Watson later became a professor, director and research administrator in the USA his life became much busier than it had been in 1950s Cambridge, UK. Interestingly, Francis Crick – the other DNA discoverer – seemed to resist the usual career of increasing busyness, retaining through his long life many of the vocational patterns of a hard-working post-doc. Significantly, Crick was critical of many features of the ‘busy’ life which characterized modern scientists [2].

The sociology of this shift from scientific hard work to busyness is closely-related to the shift from ‘academic’ to ‘post-academic’ science which was analyzed and described by the late John Ziman (a member of the editorial advisory board of Medical Hypotheses) [3]. In traditional academic science, the individual gifts of a successful academic scientist were mainly in terms of theoretical or technical aptitude – e.g. knowing more, having better ideas or doing better experiments than the competition. But these are the days of Big Science in which the social structures of research are much more complex. The successful scientist is now more likely to be someone who is an expert multi-tasker, synthesising scientific abilities with a broad range of managerial and political skills. The critical aptitude involves juggling the many competing demands entailed by running a large research team on a mega budget.

Most creative people – such as scientists – enjoy their jobs, so that even hard work can be a fulfilling activity. But busyness is psychologically-tougher than hard work, because it involves being subordinated to elaborate schedules, multiple deadlines, time-management and all the rest of it. The recent evolution of science is therefore a principal cause of diminished job satisfaction [3], and this probably leads in turn to a need for higher pay for top scientists, to compensate for reduced intrinsic rewards.

The ultimate reason why busyness is stressful is that it is a consequence of human beings having-to fit themselves into the functioning of complex abstract systems [4]. A large organization cannot function predictably when taking into account a multitude of individual wishes, so the human being must fit around the needs of the organization for them sequentially to be in specific places at specific times doing specific things – whatever they may happen to feel about it. Since people are paid (mainly) to do necessary but difficult things they would prefer not to do [5], busyness is becoming a major reason why people are paid a premium on their salary.

Both hard work and busyness are typical of complex modernizing societies. The successful, hard-working but-not-busy individual, is usually a high level technical expert of some kind – perhaps an ace computer programmer, financial whiz kid or best-selling author. However, in the long-term these jobs tend to be analyzed and routinized out of existence – and the hard-working but-not-busy specialist worker is replaced by a cheaper and more reliable team, machine or computer [6].

But busyness is – almost by definition – that which cannot be reduced to a routine. Busy jobs are those in which it is essential (or optimal) for a variety of disparate and unpredictable tasks to be done by a single person. The ability to be busy is (still) a very human ability, hard to replace with computers, machines or teams. Indeed, it is possible to envisage the evolution of a world in which almost all high status and well-paid jobs are busy ones. For instance, busyness is characteristic of managers – especially senior managers; and the managerial role is expanding in modern economic life to the extent that being some kind of manager is probably the largest ‘middle class’ job category in liberal democracies [6].

And what of those – like Francis Crick - who hate busyness and avoid a management role? What of the talented young post doc who contemplates with horror the prospect of a career in Big Science research administration? Well, if an individual has special, necessary and currently-irreplaceable human expertise, then they can probably avoid busyness – at least for a while – albeit at some cost of foregoing potentially significant salary and status.

But in the longer term, my hunch is that the future belongs to the busy; not just in science but in all major social domains. Those individuals who are best-able and best-trained to cope with, even thrive-upon, busyness will be increasingly valued. The busy shall inherit the earth! And, given the inevitable stress of tightly-regulated multi-tasking, they will probably deserve it.



References

[1] V.K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: making a scientific revolution, John Wiley, Chichester, UK (2003).

[2] F. Crick, What mad pursuit: a personal view of scientific discovery, Penguin, London (1990).

[3] J. Ziman, Real science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK) (2000).

[4] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).

[5] W. Farrell, Why men earn more, Amacom, New York (2005).

[6] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, What is management and what do managers do? A systems theory account, Philos Manage 3 (2003), pp. 3–15.

Psychological neoteny - defined

*Since writing this piece my understanding has changed and I now believe it contains fundamental flaws. Anyone who would like further clarification is welcome to e-mail me at hklaxnessat- yahoo.com*

Editorial

The rise of the boy-genius: Psychological neoteny, science and modern life

Bruce G. Charlton

Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 67: 679-681

Summary

The mid-20th century saw the rise of the boy-genius, probably because a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous both in science and modern life generally. This is the evolution of ‘psychological neoteny’, in which ever-more people retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages. Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults. A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. It seems that this adaptation is achieved by the expedient of postponing cognitive maturation – a process that could be termed psychological neoteny. (‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity.) Psychological neoteny is probably caused by the prolonged average duration of formal education, since students’ minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’. Since modern cultures favour cognitive flexibility, ‘immature’ people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone of contemporary life: the greatest praise of an elderly person is to state that they retain the characteristics of youth. But the faults of youth are retained with well as its virtues: short attention span, sensation- and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. Nonetheless, as health gets better and cosmetic technologies improve, future humans may become somewhat like an axolotl – the cave-dwelling salamander which retains its larval form until death.




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The mid-20th century saw the rise of mathematicians and physicists who looked and behaved in a markedly youthful style, and this boy-genius stereotype spread to include most other branches of science. My suspicion is that a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous not just in science, but in most areas of modern life due to its need for flexible specialization. We are witnessing the evolution of ‘psychological neoteny’, in which ever-more people retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages.

Perhaps the most famous boy-genius was James Watson around the time he co-discovered DNA. Iconic is the famous 1953 publicity photograph of a gangly, shock-haired Watson gazing-up in wide-eyed wonder as a balding, middle-aged-looking Crick points at a big molecular model [1]. But surveying photos of the discoverers of molecular biology in Judson’s The eighth day of creation [1] the reader sees a parade of youthful enthusiasts. What a contrast between the skinny, bespectacled Max Delbruck (who often wore short trousers) and Victorian images of the bearded-ancient Darwin or the mutton-chop whiskered TH Huxley.

In physics, too, there is a world of difference between the sage wisdom of Einstein and the perpetual youthfulness of his best-known successor Richard Feynman. And despite chronic illness, their popular heir Steven Hawkins even now retains a distinctly ‘schoolboyish’ quality. There are also boy-genius types among scientists like Bill Gates who have become both rich and powerful.

In science, medicine, and most of modern life there has been a powerful and progressive trend toward specialization [2]. Originally science arose by differentiating itself from philosophy, which budded-off theology. Then science broke into physics, chemistry and biology – which have super-specialized into many thousands of sub-disciplines. Consequently, the scientist stereotype has transformed from an omniscient sage, with encyclopaedic knowledge of his whole general subject area, who worked essentially alone; to the current scientific research situation comprising (mostly) teams of super-specialized whiz-kids each of whom know only what is necessary to solve the problem at hand.

It should also be noted in passing that the phrase ‘boy-genius’ must now be taken to include women – since in modern science the whiz-kids are quite frequently female.

Traditional tribal and agricultural societies are characterized by ’initiation ceremonies’ marking very clear-cut transitions between the stages of life: especially the advent of formal adulthood [3]. Indeed, some traditional societies are ‘gerontocracies’ in which age accumulates prestige. But over recent decades in liberal democracies, these transitional ceremonies have dwindled in importance, and often disappeared altogether. The ‘coming of age’ now serves only as an excuse for a party. The reason is that, in an important psychological sense, some modern people never actually become adults – or, if they do, the process is delayed into late middle age when loss of youthful appearance and vitality becomes impossible to deny.

The timing of significant marker points of maturity – such as graduation from college, marriage, first child – which used-to occur at almost fixed ages, are in modern cultures stretched across a much larger time span than in the past, mainly by increasing delays in some individuals. This has been very obvious among educated people, where both marriage and childbearing now quite commonly occur over a span of more than two decades. With such a chronological spread of events, each individual’s experience is now probably unique in its specific combination and timing of such significant events – which further erodes the predictable progress through formal stages of maturity characteristic of traditional societies.

The gradual diminution of initiation ceremonies and indefinite postponement of adopting a stable, integrated adult personality is no accident: these facts recognize that modern societies are characterized by a continual requirement, throughout life, for a child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge [2] and [4]. People need repeatedly to change jobs, to learn new skills and information, to move to new places and cultures, to make new friends – all of these are a cultural novelty for human animals evolved to cope with small hunter gatherer societies of just a few hundred people [1] and [4]. Since mature adults have not evolved to manage these challenges, it seems that people have adapted by postponing their psychological maturation – a process that could be termed psychological neoteny.

The boy-genius can be seen as a specific instance of psychological neoteny which is apparently adaptive in modernizing cultures, and it occurred early in science because science is one of the most ‘modern’ and advanced social systems [2]. ‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity. It represents a relatively fast and simple way of evolving adaptations – for instance modern humans in Western Europe have evolved the ability for adults to digest dairy products (which were not a part of the hunter gatherer diet) by the simple method (presumably by a single gene mutation) of neotenously perpetuating the activity of the milk sugar-digesting enzyme lactase from the breast-fed infant throughout mature life.

Probably, the main proximate cause of psychological neoteny in modernizing societies is the prolonged duration of formal education – which may be why the boy-genius arose in an American context where mass higher education and extended schooling was first established [5]. So long as a person is in formal education, or is open to the possibility of returning for more formal education, their minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’. Perhaps this could be one reason why scientists so often strike other people as ‘immature’ in their manners and behaviour? Scientists need to be somewhat child-like in order to keep learning and developing. As mass higher education becomes a feature of all liberal democracies, and as the average number of years spent in formal education progressively increases [6], we may expect to accumulate ever-more chronologically middle-aged and elderly people who remain youthfully-minded.

Since modern cultures favour cognitive flexibility, such people tend to thrive and succeed and now set the tone of contemporary life. The biggest praise that can be given to an elderly person is that they have retained the characteristics of youth – not just a youthful appearance, but also the youthful vitality and drive. The modern exemplary geriatric should continue to compete for high status, remain actively interested in love and sex, show themselves adaptive to change, and continually seek new experiences and challenges. Because such attributes are highly valued, they seem to have become much more common.

But of course there is a downside to psychological neoteny, in that the faults of youth are retained as well as its virtues. Modern society is characterized by a short attention span, frenetic sensation- and novelty-seeking, ever-shorter cycles of arbitrary fashion, and (so cultural intellectuals would argue) a pervasive emotional and spiritual shallowness. There are a lot of divorces and broken families. Modern people – it seems fair to say – also lack a profundity of character which seemed commoner in the past. The personality difference between Einstein and Feynman shows this clearly: Einstein had a mature and harmonious personality of great wisdom [7]; while Feynman was vital, protean, witty and life-enhancing – but he was certainly not a sage, and was quicksilver-clever rather than deeply wise [8].

I would expect that this trend to maintain flexible immaturity through adulthood will continue. Psychological neoteny will be matched by perpetuation of youthful appearance: partly natural due to improved health and social conditions, and partly artificial due to continued advance in cosmetic technologies. In future, the most successfully adapted humans may become something like the axolotl – a cave-dwelling salamander which retains its larval form through sexual maturity and until death.

But even as whiz-kids dominate mainstream culture, the popularity in modern societies of traditional sources of insight and integration – from Rembrandt and JS Bach to Einstein and Tolkien – implies that a niche will surely remain for the profound repositories of ancient wisdom.




Acknowledgement

Thanks to Martin Trow, of the University of California at Berkeley, whose wise and deep comments sparked-off this line of thought.



References

[1] H.F. Judson, The eighth day of creation: makers of the revolution in biology, Jonathan Cape, London (1979).

[2] B. Charlton and P. Andras, The modernization imperative, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK (2003).

[3] J. Campbell, The masks of god: primitive mythology, Penguin, New York, USA (1991).

[4] B.G. Charlton and P. Andras, Universities and social progress in modernizing societies: how educational expansion has replaced socialism as an instrument of political reform, Crit Quart 47 (2005), pp. 30–39. Full Text via CrossRef

[5] M. Trow, Comparative perspectives on American higher education. In: Martin A. Trow and Thorsten Nybom, Editors, University and society: essays on the social role of research and higher education, Kingsley Publishers, London (1991).

[6] M. Trow, From mass higher education to universal access: the American advantage, Minerva 37 (2000), pp. 1–26.

[7] C.P. Snow, Variety of men, Macmillan, London, UK (1967).

[8] J. Gleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and modern physics, Abacus, London, UK (1994).