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Terrible Advice From a Great Scientist
Shipud writes "E.O. Wilson is the renowned father of sociobiology, a professor (emeritus) at Harvard, two time pulitzer prize winner, and a popularizer of science. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Wilson provides controversial advice to aspiring young scientists. Wilson claims that math literacy is not essential, and that scientific models in biology, intuitively generated, can later be formalized by a specialized statistician. One blogger calls out Wilson on his article, arguing that knowing mathematics is essential to generating models, and that lacking what Darwin called the "extra sense" is essentially limiting to any scientist."
From that WSJ article: "If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have."
I don't really see anything wrong with telling people to still keep thinking about things, find out what they like to study, and get more math. More 'don't let current lack of math get you down' than 'you don't need math at all'.
Code or be coded.
Sociobiology is theories about how observed human behavior and social structures have arise from evolution. Where does cooperation come from? Where does homosexuality come from? How are these traits beneficial for animals and humans, and why haven't they been selected against? Sociobiologists come up with plausible and reasonable sounding theories for many of these, but most of them remain just guesswork if there isn't hard data and hard mathematical modeling (many remain just guesswork even with data and models). Wilson is right that you don't need to be proficient at math to succeed at science. But that's perhaps more a testament to the poor criteria by which some areas of science measure success than to what a scientist actually needs.
Increasingly it does (minus the artsy chick, some fantasies never die). Very few current articles in biology have been written by one or two people. Even those articles have a long list of people that the researchers relied on for technical and intellectual support. It's not Charles Darwin walking down the road any more.
While there may be great insights developed by single 'intuitive' biologists, the intellectual foundations of those insights are going to come from thousands of disparate people. DNA chemistry and sequencing is an example here - how many biologists understand the chemistry of the analyzers? How many chemists understand the software?
I don't think H.O. is really correct though. At the complexity level that biologists are working at 'intuitive' thinking isn't going to help much. Working the numbers will.
I'd rather train a mathematician to be a biologist than the other way around.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Are sensationalized bullshit. The original article did not make that claim, only that you shouldn't let a fear of maths or advanced maths prevent you from a career in the sciences. Obviously, don't plan a career in Physics, but there are plenty of interesting areas of study that don't require Calculus+ areas of math proficiency (sociobiology being one).
As an ECE, most of my studies were centered around differential equations. However, my sister, who did biology/chemistry(two hard sciences) with an intent to move on to dental school, hardly had to touch maths at all.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.