March 17, 2019
Nobabies.net
James A. Evans (with Lingfei Wu and Dashun Wang)
Knowledge Lab
Computation Institute
5735 South Ellis Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Jevans@uchicago.edu
Sir:
I read with great interest the article (Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, James A. Evans “Large Teams Develop and Small Teams Disrupt Science and Technology,” Nature vol. 566 no. 7744 Feb. 21, 2019 page 378) your team published. You find value in “disruptive” concepts as well as pedestrian ones. Not many do 😊. I have, as I hope to demonstrate, the world’s all time “champeen” disruptive scientific insight. The AAAS meeting this year had for a theme “interdisciplinary studies”. I reflected that my work involved selection, speciation, the race to speciation, danger incurred by that race, regulation of populations in animals, the same mechanism evident in humans, genetics, epigenetics, the epigenetic basis of that regulation, the underlying chemistry, folic acid, fertility and how the wrong mating strategy will lead to extinction. I lined up a biologist and a geneticist to talk about their own work but I could not find a sociologist. Robin Fox had taken an interest, had written “Marry in or Die Out,” but he could not come.
I needed a sociologist to comment on how this disrupted the understanding of what drives us to form identity groups, why such groups are so terrible to each other, history, ancient history, and
computational social science (source code to be tweaked for smoother modeling of population size trajectories and closer approximation of reality, calculation of population size for fastest growth and for greatest stability, estimation of when Swedish birth rate will fall to zero). In the end, I got rejected within two working hours after the deadline for submission. When I looked at the schedule later, so far as I recall there was not a single lecture or series on interdisciplinary stuff, and they’d changed the theme.
None of this is difficult. It’s almost all drawn from prestige science journals. It’s only daunting because there are so many independent lines of evidence saying the same thing.
I boldly enclose a DVD (files can be opened, read, copied or whatever on the Windows 10 version of Word) which has the bulk of the evidence under the heading “collection” and also a longer version and a snatch I copied from gapminder.com.
I’d like to thank Dr. Evans (the only one I checked out, he being the one providing an email address) for having children; if we survive as a species, I imagine they will contribute. Meanwhile if somebody would be kind enough to publish a book and warn the world the result might be that they have a fighting chance. All I ask is that when the time comes, I get an invitation to Stockholm. If there is anything I leave unclear, please call me up and grill me.
Sincerely,
Linton Herbert MD