What's news in science?

Every year for the past two decades, John Brockman has been posing what has become known as the Edge Question. (Find it at Edge.org.) It is always science-related, and scientists and others interested in science are invited to answer it in their own way. He then gathers the responses together in a book. I recently read Know This, the book that resulted from his 2016 question: What was the most interesting scientific news of the year?

The book has more than 200 essays, ranging from a single short paragraph to five pages in length. Most were written by scientists, but others are from science writers, philosophers, artists and even show business personalities such as actor Alan Alda and singer Peter Gabriel.

Even when several contributors give the same basic answer — climate change, for example, or the Higgs boson — their perspectives are so different that the essays never seem repetitive. Some writers are much too technical for general readers. Consider this line from Maximilian Schich: “Driven by the quantification of nonintuitive dynamic cultural science is accelerated in an autocatalytic manner.” Yet most writers keep it as simple as possible most of the time.

A bigger problem for me is that so many contributors stray from science into politics, feminism, theology or whatever their personal hobbyhorse happens to be. Journalist David Berreby writes about how wonderful it will be when America no longer has a racial majority and everyone is more tolerant of others, then shoots himself in the foot by saying, “We are seeing inevitable ethnic renegotiation, as what was once ‘harmless fun’ (like naming your football team the Redskins) is redefined as something no decent American should condone.” No decent American? How tolerant is that? It's like saying, how wonderful it will be when everybody thinks the same way I do.

Imagining brave new worlds is, in fact, a common theme in many of the essays, as if the Edge Question had to do with science fiction, not science news. One considers the possibility of head transplants, another announces that "self-driving genes are coming," another that some "bacteria may have jumped from Mars to Earth." Noga Arikha, identified as an "historian of ideas," mocks this sort of thing in his own essay about claims that reflect "wishful thinking rather than actual reality, typical of what constitutes fast-burning 'news.'"

When contributors stay on subject, the results can be edifying. Several, and these are among the most interesting, have to do with findings that a significant percentage of published research papers, especially in the field of psychology, cannot be replicated. The findings of such papers are often the ones most likely to be reported in news accounts. Yet when other researchers do the same study in the same way, they come up with different results. Too many researchers find what they want to find or what those paying for their research want them to find. As psychologist Philip Tetlock writes, "The road to scientific hell is paved with political intentions, some well intentioned, some maniacally evil."