The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon

Author:Thomas Homer-Dixon [Homer-Dixon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37586-5
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2000-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Basic science—that is, the research that gives us a deeper and more finegrained knowledge of the natural world around us—must be the foundation of any new practical technology. And we are adding to our stock of scientific knowledge at a rate of 4 to 8 percent a year, as measured by publications in scientific journals—a doubling time of ten to fifteen years.12 But the connections between this continuing effort and the useful technology it produces are often indirect and long delayed. Decades may pass before an obscure bit of number theory in mathematics or an odd finding in particle physics makes its way into a new process for compressing data or making computer chips. Sometimes cross-fertilization is key: the findings of basic science in an apparently unrelated area can turn out to be crucial for a new technology. So it’s often not clear in advance what line of research will produce the biggest payoffs in practical technologies. Are we more likely to generate useful cancer treatments by investing in cellular biology or by mapping the human genome? Can we best increase the yields of our corn crops by focusing on the molecular biology of nitrogen fixation, or by searching for new genetic strains of corn in the wild?

As well, the knowledge generated by such basic science is cumulative: each new discovery builds on a host of earlier ones. Under normal conditions, scientists generate knowledge much as a bricklayer builds a wall, one brick at a time. Each brick—each new piece of well-tested knowledge—sits atop a sturdy foundation of other bricks and becomes part, in turn, of an ever growing foundation for other bricks.

The rate at which the wall grows—that is, the pace of cumulative scientific discovery—is marked by jumps and lags as scientists make breakthroughs or lose time pursuing fruitless leads. Roughly speaking, four factors affect this pace and, in turn, our supply of technical ingenuity.

The first factor consists of human cognitive limits, some of which I discussed in the chapter “Brains and Ingenuity.” These limits hamper our ability to understand our world’s natural phenomena, and they are especially telling when we try to unravel the workings of fundamentally complex systems like the planet’s ecology and climate. We cannot fully grasp the emergent properties and behavior of these systems if we only study their component parts in isolation from each other; sometimes we must study the systems as integrated wholes.13 But an integrated approach means that we must think simultaneously about many components and the causal links between these components; in other words, we have to be able to hold and manipulate in our minds multiple ideas at the same time, which is very hard for our brains to do. We can compensate by developing large mathematical or computer models of these complex systems, like the general circulation models that climate scientists use. Yet such models confront us with an inescapable trade-off: the more accurately they represent the reality of the complex systems we are studying, and the more accurately

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