Letters to a Young Scientist

by Edward O. Wilson

At the end of the season, as we all prepared to leave, the director held a popularity poll. The campers, most of whom were assistant snake hunters, placed me second, just behind the chief counselor. I had found my life’s work. Although the goal was not yet clearly defined then in my adolescent mind, I was going to be a scientist—and a professor.

Now determined to be an entomologist and work in the outdoors as much as possible, I kept up enough effort to make A’s. I found that not very difficult (it is, I’m told, very different today), but soaked up all the elementary and intermediate chemistry and biology available.

The momentum I built up in my southern childhood and at Harvard carried through to an appointment at Harvard as assistant professor. There followed more than six decades of fruitful work at this great university.

It is quite simple: put passion ahead of training. Feel out in any way you can what you most want to do in science, or technology, or some other science-related profession. Obey that passion as long as it lasts. Feed it with the knowledge the mind needs to grow. Sample other subjects, acquire a general education in science, and be smart enough to switch to a greater love if one appears. But don’t just drift through courses in science hoping that love will come to you. Maybe it will, but don’t take the chance. As in other big choices in your life, there is too much at stake. Decision and hard work based on enduring passion will never fail you.

If, on the other hand, you are a bit short in mathematical training, even very short, relax. You are far from alone in the community of scientists, and here is a professional secret to encourage you: many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.

the remaining large majority of basic and applied scientists map the terrain, scout the frontier, cut the pathways, and raise the first buildings along the way. They define the problems that mathematicians, on occasion, may help solve. They think primarily in images and facts, and only marginally in mathematics.

None better than Michael faraday.

Why should I care? Because such math-phobes deprive science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent and deprive the many scientific disciplines of some of their most creative young people. This is a hemorrhage of brainpower we need to stanch.

the language of mathematicians can be learned well enough to understand the majority of mathematical statements made in scientific publications. Exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines.

Far more important throughout the rest of science and its applications, however, is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes in visual images by intuition. It’s something everyone already does to some degree.

Pioneers in science only rarely make discoveries by extracting ideas from pure mathematics. Most of the stereotypical photographs of scientists studying rows of equations written on blackboards are instructors explaining discoveries already made. Real progress comes in the field writing notes, at the office amid a litter of doodled paper, in the corridor struggling to explain something to a friend, at lunchtime, eating alone, or in a garden while walking. To have a eureka moment requires hard work. And focus.

I offer the following principle with confidence. Let’s call it Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.

James Dyson comes to mind, as example of mathematics that don’t work but engineering that does.

If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan on raising it, but meanwhile know that you can do outstanding work with what you have. Such is markedly true in fields built largely upon the amassing of data, including, for example, taxonomy, ecology, biogeography, geology, and archaeology. At the same time, think twice about specializing in fields that require a close alternation of experiment and quantitative analysis. These include the greater part of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties within molecular biology. Learn the basics of improving your mathematical literacy as you go along, but if you remain weak in mathematics, seek happiness elsewhere among the vast array of scientific specialties. Conversely, if tinkering and mathematical analysis give you joy, but not the amassing of data for their own sake, stay away from taxonomy and the other more descriptive disciplines just listed.

Darwin on one end; Claude Shannon on the other.

An important step for you to take is to find a subject congenial to your level of mathematical competence that also interests you deeply, and focus on it. In so doing, keep in mind Principle Number Two: For every scientist, whether researcher, technologist, or teacher, of whatever competence in mathematics, there exists a discipline in science for which that level of mathematical competence is enough to achieve excellence.

When I was a sixteen-year-old senior in high school, I decided the time had come to choose a group of animals on which to specialize when I entered college the coming fall. I thought about spear-winged flies of the taxonomic family Dolichopodidae, whose tiny bodies sparkle like animated gemstones in the sun. But I couldn’t get the right equipment or literature to study them. So I turned to ants. By sheer luck, it was the right choice.

It was choosing ants in the first place. These little six-legged warriors are the most abundant of all insects. As such, they play major roles in land environments around the world. Of equal importance for science, ants, along with termites and honeybees, have the most advanced social systems of all animals. Yet, surprisingly, at the time I entered college only about a dozen scientists around the world were engaged full-time in the study of ants. I had struck gold before the rush began. Almost every research project I began thereafter, no matter how unsophisticated (and all were unsophisticated), yielded discoveries publishable in scientific journals.

when you are selecting a domain of knowledge in which to conduct original research, it is wise to look for one that is sparsely inhabited.

I might add, obvious and useful yet lacking understanding.

I advise you to look for a chance to break away, to find a subject you can make your own. That is where the quickest advances are likely to occur, as measured by discoveries per investigator per year. Therein you have the best chance to become a leader and, as time passes, to gain growing freedom to set your own course.

If a subject is already receiving a great deal of attention, if it has a glamorous aura, if its practitioners are prizewinners who receive large grants, stay away from that subject.

learn how and why the subject became prominent, but in making your own long-term plans be aware it is alread...

Take a subject instead that interests you and looks promising, and where established experts are not yet conspicuously competing with one another, where few if any prizes and academy memberships have been given, and where the annals of research ...

Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns. Observe the fray from a distance, and while you are at it, consider making your own fray.

Once you have settled upon a subject you can love, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become a world-class expert.

If the subject is still thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work even become the world authority at a young age. Society needs this level of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it.

Principle Number Four: In the search for scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity. The more difficult the problem, the greater the likely importance of its solution.

This brings me to the ways in which scientific problems are found and discoveries made. Scientists, mathematicians among them, follow one of two pathways. First, early in the research a problem is identified, and then a solution is sought. The problem may be relatively small (for example, what is the average life span of a Nile crocodile?) or large (what is the role of dark matter in the universe?). As an answer emerges, other phenomena are typically discovered, and other questions raised. The second strategy is to study a subject broadly, while searching for any previously unknown or even unimagined phenomena.

Number Five: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or other entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. (Example: a kind of mollusk, the sea hare Aplysia, proved ideal for exploring the cellular base of memory.) Conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which it is ideally suited. (Example: bats were logical for the discovery of sonar.)

The subject for you, as in any true love, is one in which you are interested and that stirs passion and promises pleasure from a lifetime of devotion.

I guessed (made a hypothesis) that the undertaker ants were using the odor of decomposition to recognize death. I further thought it likely (second hypothesis) that their response was triggered by only a few of the substances exuded from the body of the corpse. The inspiration for the second hypothesis was an established principle of evolution:

To repeat the experiment another way (and admittedly for my and others’ amusement), I dabbed tiny amounts of oleic acid on the bodies of living worker ants. Would they become the living dead? Sure enough, they did become zombies, at least broadly defined. They were picked up by nestmates, their legs kicking, carried to the cemetery, and dumped.

I then came up with another idea: insects of all kinds that scavenge for a living, such as blowflies and scarab beetles, find their way to dead animals or dung by homing in on the scent.

A generalization of this kind, widely applied, with at least a few facts here and there and some logical reasoning behind it, is a theory. Many more experiments, applied to other species, would be required to turn it into what can be confidently called a fact.

What, then, in broadest terms is the scientific method? The method starts with the discovery of a phenomenon, such as a mysterious ant behavior, or a previously unknown class of organic compounds, or a newly discovered genus o...

The scientist asks: What is the full nature of this phenomenon? What are its causes, its origin, its consequence? Each of these queries poses...

How do scientists proceed to find solutions? Always there are clues, and opinions are quickly formed from them concerning the solutions. These opinions, or just logical ...

It is wise at the outset to figure out as many different solutions as seem possible, then test the whole, either one at a time or in bunches, eliminating all but one. This is ca...

If something like this analysis is not followed—and, frankly, it often is not—individual scientists tend to fixate on one alternative or another, especially if they ...

When a phenomenon displays invariable properties under clearly defined conditions, then and only then can a scientific explanation be declared to be a scientific fact.

when research is still incomplete, the idea is a theory. If the theory is proved wrong, it was not necessarily also altogether a bad theory. At least it will have stimulated new research, which adds to knowledge. That is why many theories, even if they fail, are said to be “heuristic”—they are good for the promotion of discovery.

As a scientist, keep your mind open to any possible phenomenon remaining in the great unknown. But never forget that your profession is exploration of the real world, with no preconceptions or idols of the mind accepted, and testable truth the only coin of the realm.

Since so much of good science—and perhaps all of great science—has its roots in fantasy, I suggest that you yourself engage in a bit right now. Where would you like to be, what would you most like to be doing professionally ten years from now, twenty years, fifty? Next, imagine that you are much older and looking back on a successful career. What kind of great discovery, and in what field of science, would you savor most having made?

I recommend creating scenarios that end with goals, then choosing ones you might wish to pursue. Make it a practice to indulge in fantasy about science. Make it more than just an occasional exercise. Daydream a lot. Make talking to yourself silently a relaxing pastime. Give lectures to yourself about important topics that you need to understand. Talk with others of like mind. By their dreams you shall know them.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.

Keep in mind that innovators in both literature and science are basically dreamers and storytellers.

In the early stages of the creation of both literature and science, everything in the mind is a story. There is an imagined ending, and usually an imagined beginning, and a select...

The surviving fragments are variously joined and separated, and moved about as the story forms. One scenario emerges, then another.

Words and sentences (or equations or experiments) are tried to make sense of the whole thing.

As the best fragments solidify, they are put in place and moved about, and the story grows until it reaches an inspired end.

IF YOU CHOOSE a career in science, and particularly in original research, nothing less than an enduring passion for your subject will last the remainder of your career, and life. Too many Ph.D.s are creatively stillborn, with their personal research ending more or less with their doctoral dissertations. It is you who aim to stay at the creative center whom I will now specifically address.

The frontier of scientific knowledge, often referred to as the cutting edge, is reached with maps drawn by earlier investigators. As Louis Pasteur said in 1854, “Fortune favors only the prepared mind.” Since he wrote this, the roads to the frontier have greatly lengthened, and there is an enormously larger population of scientists who travel to get there. There is a compensation for you in your journey, however. The frontier is also vastly wider now, and it grows more so constantly. Long stretches along it remain sparsely populated,

Like a growing circle with an expanding circumference.

both accomplishments along the frontier and the final eureka moment are achieved more by entrepreneurship and hard work than by native intelligence. This is so much the case that in most fields most of the time, extreme brightness may be a detriment. It has occurred to me, after meeting so many successful researchers in so many disciplines, that the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it.