The New York Times has a great article today on Edward O. Wilson. Since my undergraduate days I have been fascinated by his work on evolution. I loved his book Consilience which is incredibly thought provoking. But the real reason to read the article is to get a sense of how slowly the wheels of science can turn. For instance, it refers to Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology which had ideas in it that more than three decades later are still contested. There are many reasons for this rate of progress and they are all worth reflecting on. Two that stand out for me are our great difficulty in accepting scientific results that go against the grain of century (millenia?) old believes and the lack of process transparency for much research (where only positive conclusions are published but not the failed experiments and discarded theories). The closer research is to applied products the less these factors matter because commercial markets are such efficient selectors. But these markets cannot be connected to fundamental questions, such as how evolution shapes behavior or what matter is made of.
