Seems the blogosphere has been chattering away about the new David Brooks piece that discusses the hate relationship between conservatives and academia[1]. A post by Virginia Postrel brings up the supply & demand issue-there are hundreds of English Ph.D.s out there for every job (I hyperbolize, perhaps), so your academic creds are almost a given, and you can be filtered out on other criteria (including politics). I get the impression that this isn’t as extreme in the natural sciences (the imbalance between supply & demand)-though there is the same problem in getting a tenure track position (as opposed to ending up teaching chemistry to community college students). But cultural issues might be at work in the natural sciences too-for instance, the 90% rate of non-religiosity in the NAS seems so high, I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists that aired their religious views were simply considered irrational and dismissed by the Great Men[2]. Anyway, if you want more info on this topic, follow the link that Mrs. Postrel provides and read away…..
On a mildly related note…as a follow-up to godless’ post on academic hierarchy of difficulty-when I graduated from my university, there were about 30 graduates with chemistry & biochemistry degrees, and almost 250 biology grads (out of about 2,000 graduates I think). I think it was safe to say that many of the biology majors were kind of stupid-but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were as many or more intelligent biology graduates in absolute numbers as chemistry graduates. In other words, the biology majors had a lower threshold to graduate-they did not have to take physical chemistry for instance-so they had a full spectrum of intellectual aptitudes and interests, from sociology-dumb to physics-smart, while people in the chemistry department were more self-selected and would switch majors if they couldn’t pass organic or physical chemistry (especially the latter). Once you get really high up in the sciences, I think the difference in mean g between fields (say biology & chemistry) shrinks, possibly because as godless alludes to, many prominent biologists, economists, etc. have strong mathematical backgrounds (E. O. Wilson taught himself population genetics while Francis Crick was by training a physicist, Keynes was very mathematical in orientation and ventured into economics almost as a personal challenge to his comparatively poor results in that field as opposed to math)[3].
fn1. This includes libertarians of course, I knew people who read Reason as their token far Right publication.
fn2. Carl Sagan was denied a spot in the NAS for a different reason-he was a big popularizer the last half of his career, which probably cancelled out the value of his earlier work.
fn3. I once went to a small talk given by Richard Dawkins to about 20-30 students as an undergrad. He is by training an ethologist-a researcher of animal behavior-traditionally a rather soft field, though population genetics and mathematical modelling have come to the fore recently. In any case, he is often dismissed as a "popularizer," and not strictly speaking an original thinker. This is true as far as it goes-but I was surprised to note that he tangentially went off into the details of the physics of sound and threw up a few equations and went on to relate how it affected animal auditory systems. My point? The guy might be a popularizer & an anti-religious crank, but he does strike me as rather intelligent and his drift into popular writing might be a calculation of the impact he might have on the public rather than a reflection on his inability to do original research.
Comments are closed.