"Thomas McDonald" wrote in message
...

"David James Polewka" wrote in
message
...
http://www.panix.com/~clays/Una/una3.html

THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS
87. Science and technology provide the most important
examples of
surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are
motivated by "curiosity," that notion is simply absurd.
Most scientists
work on highly specialized problems that are not the
object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an
astronomer, a
mathematician or an entomologist curious about the
properties of isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not.
Only a chemist is
curious about such a thing, and he is curious about
it only because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is
the chemist
curious about the appropriate classification of a new
species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only
to the
entomologist, and he is interested in it only because
entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and
the entomologist
had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the
physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their
abilities in an
interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit,
then they couldn't giver a damn about
isopropyltrimethylmethane or the
classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of funds
for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become
an insurance
broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have
been very interested in insurance matters but would have
cared nothing
about isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not
normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity
the amount of time
and effort that scientists put into their work. The
"curiosity" explanation for the scientists' motive just
doesn't stand up.

David,

This fellow is a comedian. How interesting that he
feels competent to
rule on what is "normal".

FWIW, pretty much everyone I know who has a very
narrow scientific focus
has a range of curiousity and excitement about other
areas. Hell, even
Gould was a Red Sox fan, and wrote on baseball.



Most scientists I know read things like Science News or
Science Digest, and have an avid interest at least in all
areas of science (and usually many other areas of learning
as well). Alas, we live in a world of specialization which
particularly rewards specialists, grant-wise.

I can't tell you how many times I've had a grant proposal
criticized on the grounds that it wasn't being submitted by
a recognized expert in the field in which the work was
proposed. That's fine, but this actually happened once in a
field my lab had invented, and in which there WERE no
experts working on the technique but me and a couple of my
team members! The reviewers seemed to think I should also be
expert in several related fields, even though I was the
inventor, and all those experts in related fields hadn't had
the idea in the first place. *******s. If you came up with a
genuinely new idea in science, you'll still get "peer
reviewed" for grants, even though in a very real sense, you
don't have any peers at that point. I've never seen a
reviewer with the humility to recognize that.

SBH