Curiosity-driven Science Research Articles

System Science Can Relax the Tension Between Data and Theory

The actual hype around machine learning (ML) methods has pushed the old epistemic struggle between data-driven and theory-driven scientific styles well beyond the academic realm. The potential consequences of the widespread adoption of ML in scientific work have fueled a harsh debate between opponents predicting the decay of basic curiosity-driven science and enthusiasts hoping for the advent of a ‘theory-free’ objective science. In this work, I suggest how the system science style of reasoning could drastically de-potentiate this (sometimes deceptive) opposition through the generation of multi-purpose relational theoretical frames stemming from the network paradigm. The recognition of the virtual non-existence of purely ‘theoryfree’ approaches and the need for a careful balancing of theoretical and empirical contributions is the main claim of the present work.

From Empedocles to Symbiogenetics: Lynn Margulis's revolutionary influence on evolutionary biology

As a primary expositor of the work of Lynn Margulis collaborating with her over thirty years on over thirty books and forty articles, scientific and popular, I attempt here to summarize her unique and lasting influence on evolutionary biology. Describing life on Earth as the multi-billion-year evolution of microbial communities, from prokaryotes maintaining Earth's atmosphere away from thermodynamic equilibrium to all eukaryotes as polygenomic beings, Margulis's interdisciplinary work has deeply influenced multiple fields including systematics, theories of the evolution of metabolism, paleobiology, and biogeochemistry. Overturning the neo-Darwinist narrative that speciation almost always occurs by the gradual accumulation of random mutations, Margulis's work revives a discarded philosophical speculation of the pre-Socratic Empedocles, who suggested that Earth's early beings both merged and differentially reproduced (were naturally selected); a speculation that was rejected by Aristotle probably because it smacked of mythological chimeras that had no place in observational biology, and later by Charles Darwin, who mentioned Aristotle's rejection of Empedocles to show that he knew of but did not accept natural selection, thus helping lay his own claim to its own proper scientific presentation in a Victorian culture whose thinking of origins was dominated not by Greek mythology but Christian special creation. Margulis's curiosity-driven science, collaborative work ethic, status as a woman, embrace of novelty, philosophical stance, current status of her theories, and the proposal for a new science of symbiogenetics are among the topics examined.

2016 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar lecture The curious history of curiosity-driven research.

Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a 'love of truth', but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question 'why?'. The aside made by Albert Einstein in private correspondence in 1952-'I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious'-has now become a meme. Yet in the twentieth century, science was shaped by many forces, and the practical utility of science in the real, messy problematic worlds of its formation seem far removed from the seeming innocence of curiosity-driven research. In my lecture and this paper, I ask why scientists say they ask 'why?', and trace the curious history of the idea of curiosity-driven science. In particular, I distinguish between a long and short history of curiosity in science, with the latter associated with the term 'curiosity-driven science' and the UK administration of Margaret Thatcher.

Risking Justice: Women’s Studies Beyond Measure

Risking Justice:Women’s Studies Beyond Measure Miranda Joseph (bio) “That justice exceeds law and calculation … cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles … justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. … And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate. … we must take it as far as possible. … Politicization … is interminable.” —Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law” (1992) In finding my way and making my peace with a (so far) nearly twenty-year career as a full-time faculty member in women’s studies (with a substantial secondary affiliation with LGBT studies) while sustaining fundamentally anti-identitarian theoretical, political, and methodological orientations, Robyn Wiegman’s thinking has been importantly enabling. Her essays on women’s studies envision the possibility of commitment to these spaces as infrastructure for serious and unconstrained intellectual endeavor, shameless in its engagement with Theory. In a passing remark from the audience of a conference session, Wiegman urged that we in women’s studies, as we embrace and debate the inter- and transnational as rubrics for our work (from the repurposed domestic buildings on the fringes of campuses in which we are so often located), not ignore, but rather engage the larger and better-funded internationalizing projects of our universities in their fancy, new, centrally located buildings on our campuses. This imperative has stayed with me, inspiring my own recent effort to engage across substantial theoretical, methodological, and political differences with those doing a large and well-funded policy- and media-ready social science [End Page 135] project in a fancy new building down the block.1 That is, I have taken Wiegman to be offering an expansive and empowered mode of inhabiting the field and the university. At the same time, Wiegman’s works incisively identify and assess the constraints against which we must be vigilant. In Object Lessons (2012) and her earlier women’s studies essays, she recognizes the neoliberalization of the university that has been the focus of much of the recent critical work on the academy.2 But she has chosen to focus on explicating the constraints of our own making, those we project/construct as necessary to the fulfillment of our desires, our political desires specifically. While Wiegman has never, to my understanding, rejected the aspiration of feminist scholars to contribute to the cause of social justice, she has identified and criticized interpretations of “the political” that narrow our field of view and action, confine the temporal and methodological range of our knowledge projects, and ultimately limit our potential contributions. In her response to Wendy Brown’s “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” (1997), which she pointedly titled “The Possibility of Women’s Studies” (2005), Wiegman suggests not that women’s studies is inadequately feminist, but that contemporary feminism might not be adequate to women’s studies (41). As she explains in Object Lessons (2012): Many of my own critical inquiries of the last decade have … been tracking the range of despair that might be said to turn U.S. academic feminism “against itself.”3 Throughout this work, I have been developing an argument … that contemporary U.S. feminism in not adequate to the knowledge project of Gender or Women’s Studies, which means that I have been refusing to consign the itinerary of the interdisciplinary project feminism inaugurated to any public political manifestation of it. My goal has been to argue instead for the importance of differentiating among feminism’s various and incommensurable deployments. (115–16) Wiegman’s position has reminded me of a defense of basic science (now disparaged as “curiosity-driven science”)—and the unpredicted though potent discovery—in the face of relentless pressure to produce knowledge that can be immediately commercialized (Joseph 2010, forthcoming). In a stricter analogy, she would have been arguing against the imperative to undertake “policy-ready” research, which has been explicitly advocated by some in gender/women’s studies and is powerfully compelled, whether we like it or not, by the demands of privatizing “entrepreneurial” universities for grant- and contract-funded research. But Wiegman’s concern has been less with the imperative to...

THE ODD BIT OF CARBON

Anthony Hill joined Gordon Stone's research group as a post-doctoral research assistant from 1986-8 in the halcyon days of the “E317” lab at the University of Bristol. The supportive environment of creative and imaginative synthetic design that Gordon fostered in Bristol was unparalleled, quite without apology for the pursuit of curiosity-driven science that bordered on molecular fine arts. In 1996 Gordon handed over the reins of Advances in Organometallic Chemistry, the journal series, now running to some 60 volumes, which Gordon inaugurated in 1964 with Bob West. During Gordon's mid-career phase, when he had a mere 400 publications to his name, carbyne chemistry held special interest for him. The work to follow reflects the enthusiasm those times engendered in this intriguing class of compounds.

John Michael Ziman

John Michael Ziman

Chronobiology: implications for marine resource exploitation and management

Chronobiology began as a curiosity-driven science and now impacts significantly on the science of medicine through medical rhythm research and chronotherapeutics. However, whilst it has long been evident that rational exploitation and management of living organisms and their environments require detailed biological understanding, incorporation of the time-base of living systems into such activities has been slow. Evidence suggests that marine management and conservation strategies, whether directed towards the environment or fisheries, are only slowly taking account of the time-scales of endogenously controlled rhythmic animal behaviour as a basis from which to achieve their objectives. Similarly, in commercial aquaculture practices, there is a need for greater evaluation of the role of photoperiod manipulation and optimization of feeding regimes against the background of the endogenous rhythmicity of the organisms concerned. Correct synchronization of an organism’s endogenous biological oscillators, of tidal and/or daily to annual periodicities, is fundamental to its optimal physiological performance and survival.

Mentors for the new millennium : advice to a young cardiologist

“Congratulations! Today is your day, You’re off to great places, You’re off and away … You have brains in your head, You have feet in your shoes, You can steer yourself, Any direction you choose …” —Dr. Seuss1 Along time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a solitary young cardiologist standing at the crossroads of his medical career. As a starry-eyed college undergraduate, he had dreamed of combining the life of a scientist with the practice of medicine. This academic calling would intertwine the intellectual fruits of curiosity-driven science and the emotional satisfaction of making a lasting difference in the lives of patients. Although he had a gift for science in his coursework and was fascinated by new medical discoveries and therapies for heart diseases, he had little practical laboratory experience. The nagging questions of self-doubt, the difficulties of obtaining grants from the National Institutes of Health, and the war stories of younger faculty seemed to point to the default pathway of clinical cardiology in the nonacademic setting. However, the road to private practice was also littered with casualties, thus creating the current dilemma of choosing a career path. Unfortunately, the dark side of managed care had changed the balance in academic medicine, and there were too few academic role models to allow for an informed decision. Although he had “brains in his head” and “feet in his shoes,” he did not know which “direction” to choose. In short, he needed a mentor. Perhaps it is time for young cardiologists to look outside of cardiology for mentors in the next millennium. Toward this goal, this current perspective garners the collective wisdom of several important men who acted as mentors: Lewis Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, and Yogi Berra. “Halfway technology represents the kinds of things that must be …

The SSA and Government Relations

I t is not news to SSA members that science is undergoing a profound metamorphosis, and these changes are affecting the way “seismologists do seismology.” Since the early 1990s federal funding of Earth science has shrunk, and unless federal policy changes, the recent budget deficit deal will put further pressure on research dollars. Further, some members of Congress seriously question the value of federal funding of basic research; the phrase “curiosity-driven science” is freely used as a metaphor for worthless academic exercises. The public is only slightly more generous in its view of science and only embraces science when there is a tangible, short-term goal to be achieved. Probably every SSA member has been asked the rhetorical question “when is the Big One going to destroy L.A.?” Since we can't answer the question with a simple sound bite like “on July 4, 2002,” the public rightfully wants to know what we...