Scientific productivity is declining

String Theory

A team of Chinese and American researchers published on arXiv an article in September 2024 summarizing their study of the development of science and technology over more than two centuries. The study analyzes 213 million scientific articles published between 1800 and 2020, along with 7.6 million patents granted between 1976 and 2020.

The result of this study is the following: while the number of scientific publications has grown exponentially, the knowledge obtained by humanity grows linearly; in other words, the speed of knowledge acquisition is constant and does not grow in the same proportion as the number of publications.

Was Teilhard de Chardin persecuted for defending evolution?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In a previous post I have mentioned some myths related to the persecution of scientists as a result of their scientific ideas, for religious reasons. I mentioned, for example, Giordano Bruno and Miguel Servet, wrongly presented as martyrs of science, when in reality they were persecuted for their religious ideas, not for their scientific activities, which in the case of Bruno were practically non-existent.

The presentation of a recently published video publicizes one of these myths, also widespread: the claim that Teilhard de Chardin was repressed by his Jesuit order for advocating evolution. That this is false can easily be deduced from the fact that Teilhard was able to publish dozens of articles on the evolution of the ancestors of man in scientific and philosophical journals of impact, without being prevented from doing so by his order. One of these journals was Études, edited by the Jesuits. A curious way of repressing him for advocating evolution.

Successes and failures in biological and environmental conservation

Usually, when the media talk about environmental conservation and endangered species, the news they give is almost always negative: Everything is going very badly; there are ever more species at risk of extinction; human activities are corrupting the environment; our planet is in danger of becoming a wasteland incompatible with life… Actually, when we say the highlighted phrase, we are using the trope called synecdoche in the form called macrocosm, that is naming the whole by the part, because it is not the planet that is in danger, but us, human beings, along with many other living beings.

I have just read a book published in 2012, written by Andrew Balmford and entitled Wild hope: on the front lines of conservation success, which tries to emphasize the opposite: not all the news is negative; lately there have been a few successes in the conservation of animal species in danger of extinction, or of environments endangered by human voracity. His analysis of these cases points to shortcomings in environmental conservation processes led by politicians, which sometimes achieve exactly the opposite of what they intended, as I indicated in this blog in a post published almost six years ago, entitled The ecological ignorance of ecologists.

Boethius, time and eternity

Medieval manuscript of
Consolation of Philosophy

1,500 years have passed since the death of Boethius, but the event has gone unnoticed. A century ago, this would not have happened, as history was still being studied. In our times, however, history is despised. And we know what happens to those who despise it, in a phrase attributed to George Santayana: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was a politician and philosopher of the 5th and 6th centuries, who held important positions in the Ostrogothic kingdom that emerged in Italy shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In his political activity, Boethius was successively senator, consul and advisor to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric.

Truth versus usefulness

Alvin Plantinga

As I said in a previous post, natural selection is the statistical observation that, in general, individuals better adapted to their environment tend to leave more descendants than those less adapted. It is, therefore, a question of usefulness. A trait that will increase the reproduction of an individual is, in principle, statistically favored by natural selection.

In my popular science book published in Spanish (Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man) I mentioned that 

Evolution acts in the same way, both on life and on culture, although its way of acting is adapted to the specific environment on which it is applied (genes, nervous systems or cultural elements). 

Is research on LLM AI slowing down?

John McCarthy

It looks like the fate of the field of computer technology, wrongly called artificial intelligence, is to alternate between excessive optimism and unbridled pessimism. Here is a sketch of the history of this technology:

1. At the Dartmouth College summer school in 1956, the name artificial intelligence was proposed for computer programs that could perform tasks that had traditionally been considered exclusively human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another. The attendees, led by John McCarthy, predicted that within ten years these two problems would be solved. They hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of beating the world chess champion, and others that could translate perfectly between any two human languages. When these objectives were not achieved so early, research into artificial intelligence stopped. At universities, research topics in this field were frowned upon, because they were thought to have no future.

The kingdom of lies

Abraham Lincoln

 Abraham Lincoln is credited with having said this:

You can deceive some people all the time. You can deceive everybody part of the time. But you can't deceive everybody all the time.

When I was young, if a politician was caught lying, he must resign, because he had deceived the people. This was true back then. Famous politicians who resigned during that time because they had lied included John Profumo, the British minister, in 1963, and Richard Nixon, the US president, in 1974.

This is quite rare now. Today, politicians who resign when they are caught lying are not the rule, but the exception. Many politicians lie whenever they speak, they know that everyone knows that they are lying, but don't care about it. This is an example of the discredit into which the concept of truth has fallen, which was one of the most important criteria in history, not just for politics, but for science and all forms of human thought.