On Tribes in Science
How scientists cherish tradition unknowingly
Hello reader,
When I set out to write this post, I started with the question of why hasn’t complexity science deeply integrated with the other disciplines yet?
The best parallel I can think about when considering complexity science as a discipline is data science. Data science is a descendant of mathematics. It is a language of discovery and analysis, and not the substance of discovery itself. Data science became the standard in quantitative analyses due to the proliferation of data and the corresponding tech improvements we had since the 2010s, more scientific and arts-oriented disciplines adopted their own data scientific curriculums - now we have academic fields spanning computational biology/bioinformatics, to quantitative social sciences.
Complexity science comes from the same family - it is the descendant of mathematics, data science and philosophy. Complexity science is the language that helps us explain systems, and everything we care about is part of a system - from how our cities are laid out, to how our economies work, to the Earth’s natural ecosystems, and to how our children learn and grow, they’re all systems and they’re all complex. So why haven’t fields formalized complexity methods into their curriculums?
The short answer is that complexity science as a field is still maturing.
The longer answer involves how scientists grow specific mindsets according to their disciplines.
Telling someone to quit smoking is difficult, telling someone to change how they think and do about everything is even more ambitious. When Kuhn wrote his famous book ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, he made the case that “a scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs”. In order for scientists to escape their boxed conceptions of how knowledge is constructed, a paradigm shift has to happen.
Here’s a summary of an essay that sparked the same conversations in biological fields: “Can a biologist fix a radio?’”
Typically, when young researchers join a field they do what their fathers do. They would use accepted and well-known templates of hypotheses and figuring things out. How would a biologist fix a radio, given that a living organism and a radio have similar aspects: different parts working together to achieve a function.
They would both have different ways of doing things:
So the engineer is pretty systematic, they would first lay out the functional components on a map, then one-by-one check for point of failure and fix it.
A biologist has a typical way of approaching living things, and it does not involve a mindset of functional mapping of complex systems.
We (the author and my illustrations) are not comparing engineers to biologists, for engineers have a different landscape of problems to solve. We’re just highlighting that 1- there are fixated mindsets 2- our understanding of the world would be much better given a different way of doing things, and that way could be the way of complexity science.
My inquiry ends today at the realization that scientific communities and societal tribes are similar - tradition is a comfortable value.
Have a great week,
Najla
