The not-so-secret science ecosystem

Jeremy Baumberg has an idea: Let’s think of science as “a restlessly evolving ecological system.” If we identify the key species and subspecies and the sources of competition, we can characterize the ecosystem as a whole and seek ways to improve it. That ecological analogy is the “secret” out of which Baumberg has spun an ambitious yet frustrating new book, The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters.

Baumberg dubs his two major species of scientist “simplifiers” and “constructors.” Simplifiers seek “to understand the world’s natural scientific system.” Their archetypal science is the search for the Higgs boson. Simplifiers have the most authority in cosmology, biology, and particle physics. Constructors use the insights of the simplifiers “to synthesize new scientific domains.” Their archetypal science is developing the implications of Maxwell’s equations. Most of the world’s roughly 8 million scientists, Baumberg writes, are constructors, but simplifiers get the most media attention.

Other participants in the global scientific ecosystem work for journals, universities, governments, subdisciplines, and the media. Survival of the fittest and descent with modification create intense competition within and among those agents. The result is a global scientific environment that is in “rude health”—handsomely funded and producing plentiful results—but is skewed by growing tensions and global competition. Participants feel trapped in a system over which they have no control.

Throughout the book, Baumberg explores the workings of science through that rather loose ecological analogy. He examines Nobel Prizes, for instance, and determines that three-quarters of awardees from 1952 to 1981 were simplifiers, but constructors received the majority from 1982 to 2011, a reflection of the rise of constructor science. He also writes about the harmful role of competition, which he says has fed a “clamor for attention” in the media and has created a proliferation of interchangeable conferences.

Sometimes Baumberg’s use of the analogy grows glib and thin, such as when he writes, “Just as sunlight corresponds to the funding needed to develop science, people are more like the rain that fertilizes everything, the water cycle of the science ecosystem.” At other times, the analogy spins out of control. Describing the impact of competition on conference talks, he writes, “Each iridescent butterfly of an idea strives for the most dramatic wings to flash sunlight-flecked colors into the furthest distance, hoping for a better mate.” As the book goes on, Baumberg’s science ecosystem grows more complex and difficult to follow.

None of it is wrongheaded. What’s exasperating is Baumberg’s claim that he is observing virgin territory. There is “no good place to find a description of the way science actually works,” he writes. Really? One wonders about John Ziman’s excellent books Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means (2000) and An Introduction to Science Studies: The Philosophical and Social Aspects of Science and Technology (1984), both of which offer detailed portraits of the complex network that makes up modern science. Baumberg’s chapters on scientific publishing and media attention would have profited from Bruce Lewenstein’s studies on that subject, and he could have learned much from Daniel Sarewitz’s studies of science policy. In this very magazine, Catherine Westfall and I have compared scientific research with an evolving ecosystem (May 2016, page 30 ). In The Secret Life of Science, Baumberg prefers to reinvent the wheel.

Baumberg says that he aims to write like a mainstream sociologist of science. Yet he appears to have consulted none of the relevant sociological literature, and the book has no footnotes or bibliography. It has the feel of a blog that wants to be considered the bird’s-eye view on the subject. And in fact, Baumberg does have a blog, www.thesciencemonster.com , which he mentions four times. I wish that the Princeton University Press reviewers had insisted that Baumberg engage with more of the relevant literature. Researchers customarily cite and discuss related work not to be fussy or pedantic but out of a deep scholarly motive; it enables readers to consider a new piece of research with respect to what else is known. Without that information, it is impossible for Baumberg’s readers to gauge how much of what he is telling us here is really a secret and how much is already in the public domain.