Nobody at the top

Abstract

Science bears some hallmarks of religion. But, unlike many organized religions, there is no central authority and no tenet remains unchallenged.

Science is a global endeavour, a unifying mission to obtain an objective understanding of the natural world. Most of its practitioners will never meet each other or interact directly or even indirectly in any way, yet they all retain and share a sense of kinship in this open‐ended enterprise. They dwell in different societies or geopolitical entities, represent all nations, but remain bound together by a common search for objective truth (and occasionally, as here, by a propensity to indulge in pompous sermons on how wonderful and Enlightened they are).

In this sense, science—or more accurately the scientific method—bears some of the hallmarks of an organised religion. It encourages adherence to particular creeds, displays a distrust of unorthodoxy (particularly when it comes to allocation of research funds) and requires its acolytes to undergo gruelling trials to test their knowledge and worthiness for inclusion.

But there is one way in which science differs fundamentally from many organised religions: there is nobody at the top, neither a deity nor a person. While the Catholic Church is headed by the Pope in Rome, there is no individual or thing who represents science in the same way. Equally, science's tenets are not administered by a single authority, but continuously challenged, squabbled over, validated, or refused.

Catholic Christianity is in many ways a good example of how a religion can undergo profound and possibly stultifying centralisation. The welter of early Christian sects, each with its own spin on orthodoxy—memorably spoofed by Monty Python in Life of Brian with its “The shoe is the sign!”/“No, follow the gourd!” segment—gradually coalesced around a core set of beliefs and practices that formed the basis for future doctrinal entrenchment. Catholic practice was and continues to be dictated from on high in Rome.

This process has not happened in science, and it should not. No matter how influential individual scientists are, science itself is a fundamentally decentralised activity. There is no one source of funding for all scientists, and nobody can claim to speak for more than a fraction of the total number of its practitioners (and even those influential doyens are usually utterly unknown outside their own little fiefdoms—just ask a biologist to name a recent Nobel laureate in physics).

In some ways then, science resembles the Culture of Iain M. Banks’ science fiction novels. An anarchist utopia, the Culture is an interstellar civilisation whose activities are directed by AIs of phenomenal power. As the Culture has attained a level of technological sophistication that ensures a superabundance of all resources (a true post‐scarcity economy, in other words), its citizens enjoy lives of uninterrupted exploration, free to experiment with whatever lifestyle, gender, sport, or pursuit their curiosity takes them.

While this rather idyllic existence may reflect the life of a Max Planck director, and pretty much everybody's career fantasies, clearly the majority of scientists are not dwelling in a post‐scarcity state. Resources remain painfully finite, and the current political squabbles over allocations in the USA and looming uncertainty in the UK are just two examples of how precarious the funding landscape is at present.

Instead, the life of the average scientist, especially the younger ones, more closely resembles life at the frontier. Scientists may brag about being at the limits of human knowledge, but it is an uncomfortable truth that many are also near the limits of human endurance. It is a painful, scratchy existence with resources frequently in short supply and an uncertain and pitiless forecast for the way ahead.

This frontier environment more closely resembles that of America's Old West, another system that is often informally touted as an example of a functioning anarchy. Contrary to the violent and bloody fantasies propagated by Quentin Tarantino and other Western movies, the historical frontier was often a paradigm for cooperation, peaceable conflict resolution, and the establishment of institutions to manage property rights and social order: a code admirably elaborated in Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill's The not so wild, Wild West.

Here perhaps we find a fertile analogy for the world of science and its inhabitants. Free to move wherever the funding soil is most favourable, and banding together in small communities with a shared interest, they are an independent and rugged breed, relying on their wits and intelligence, and enjoying the fruits of their labour. These frontier communities may have spokespeople and leaders, but, fundamentally, for the enterprise as a whole there is nobody at the top. And that is just how we like it (Fig 1).

Figure 1.

Brooke Morriswood is a junior group leader at the University of Würzburg; Oliver Hoeller is a freelance science illustrator based in the California Bay Area. Together they produce the science blog Total Internal Reflection (https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com).

EMBO Reports (2018) 19: e46329