PhotoperiodEffect.com

25. Okay. as you've said in reply 2, part six above, scientists succumb to groupthink just like everyone else. Not only is that not surprising, it's inevitable. There's simply nothing to be done about it, so it's hardly worth going on about.

Wrong. Or science would be futile. If the rule of groupthink was truly unbreakable, the Royal Society would never have had any particular success, much less the spectacular successes it had in the decades after it was formed. Modern science, in 1660, was designed from its beginning precisely to attack and shatter this sort of thinking according to the authority of others. It's motto, “on the words of no-one” is no accident. The Royal Society used experiments not to expand knowledge a little here and there along the margins, as had been done forever. Instead, and radically, experiments were aimed directly at the most certain beliefs of the society and academies of the day, to destroy and replace those ideas if at all possible – with great success. This is why it was necessary for these experimenters to become a “Royal Society” under the direct and avowed protection of the new Sovereign, otherwise such a public project, which would be daring in our own day as well, could not have gone forward. (Aristocratic amateur members funded experiments, Charles II did not provide monetary support.) It is true that Galileo and Descartes had earlier laid the foundations for such inquiries, and made much progress, but both had had to flee or recant for their trouble; so a new beginning under more certain protection for innovation was necessary. Merely to accept the received results of these centuries-old inquiries is not science, but easily becomes its opposite – the uncritical acceptance of authority.

Notably, the present system exerts the most extreme control and uniformity on it's youngest scientists, in many ways – by deliberately graduating about twice as many graduate students as there are academic positions almost across the board, Universities leave all untenured staff and graduate students helpless, at the mercy of their established colleagues and mentors from whom they must seek recommendations, co-authorship of papers, and most importantly, vote upon their hiring and tenure. How much would Newton have accomplished if he had needed the votes of ordained Anglican and Aristotelian professors to proceed, to be employed, and then to be published? (We needn't ask this question of Einstein, as he was rejected for all academic posts at at the very start of his career by the beginnings of this system, yet unaccountably persisted at great personal sacrifice, outside any scientific academy.)

This rigid control of young scientists is an immense tragedy for all of us, because it is young and especially young unmarried scientists at the beginning of their careers who are overwhelmingly the most productive of new ideas and directions in science, even now they are the ones who make the really big discoveries over the protests of their elders. (together with older single, and older scientists in a new field.)

These were the scientists most likely to have asked “stupid or insane questions” about the health effects of extended light exposures on humans, had it ever been safe for them to do so. Inexorably, within the academy, with every passing year, it becomes less safe for young scientists to ask such questions – it is in the interest of those established within any profession to increase their power, unless sufficiently large failures can remove them. While tenure may have been intended to encourage diversity of opinion, it has been one of many factors that insures against real rebellion and novelty.

To quote a description of one study: “Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, reports in the August [2003] issue of the Journal of Research in Personality that a man's age and unmarried status appear to drive success in his field.” Further, and possibly a measure of the economic as well as pyschological power enforcing uniformity: “...regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV. Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to knowledge.” [http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s900147.htm]

We shouldn't just be allowing new scientists to innovate, and offend their elders instincts about where the next answers lie – which would be a large change in itself – we should be insisting on it.