Pregunta 1
Reading Passage 3 – The Myth of the Solitary Genius
A Popular accounts of scientific discovery have a remarkably consistent shape. A single exceptional individual, frequently misunderstood by contemporaries, perceives what others have overlooked and, in a moment of illumination, transforms an entire field. The apple falls in Newton's garden; Archimedes leaps from his bath. Such narratives are durable precisely because they are satisfying: they supply a protagonist, a climax and a moral about the power of individual brilliance. Whether they describe how knowledge is actually produced is another matter, and a considerable body of historical and sociological scholarship suggests that, at best, they capture a fragment of a far more collective process.
B One persistent difficulty for the heroic narrative is the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. In 1922 two American social scientists, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, compiled a list of nearly 150 cases in which the same discovery or invention had been made independently by two or more people at around the same time. The sociologist Robert Merton later argued that such 'multiples', far from being curious coincidences, were the normal pattern of science, and that singletons – discoveries made only once – were the cases that required explanation. Calculus was developed by both Newton and Leibniz; the theory of evolution by natural selection was arrived at by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, whose ideas were presented together in 1858; oxygen was isolated within a few years of each other by Carl Scheele and Joseph Priestley. If discoveries tend to occur once the necessary ideas, instruments and questions are in place, the individual who happens to make them first looks less like the sole cause than like the most visible point of a wider convergence.
C It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that individuals are interchangeable. The fact that a discovery would probably have been made eventually does not mean that it would have been made in the same form, or at the same time, and the differences can matter a great deal. Darwin's decades of accumulated evidence gave the theory of natural selection a persuasive force that a brief paper alone might not have achieved, and historians continue to debate how far the timing and character of particular breakthroughs depended on the temperament of those involved. The more defensible position is not that genius is a fiction, but that it operates within, and depends upon, conditions that the heroic narrative tends to leave out.
D Those conditions are partly material. Scientific work has long relied on instrument makers, technicians, assistants and, in many historical cases, family members whose contributions went largely unrecorded. The laboratory notebooks of eminent researchers frequently reveal the hands of others in experiments later credited to a single name. Correspondence, too, played a decisive role: much of the intellectual exchange of early modern science took place through letters, in which ideas were tested, criticised and refined long before they appeared in print. When Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in 1675 that he had seen further 'by standing on the shoulders of giants', he was, whatever his private motives, describing something real.
E The tendency to attribute collective achievements to individuals is not merely a feature of popular history; it is built into the reward structures of science itself. Prizes are typically awarded to a small number of named people, and the most famous of them, the Nobel Prize, may be shared by no more than three individuals in any one category. Funding bodies, too, frequently require a single 'principal investigator' to be named on each grant, so that responsibility – and recognition – is concentrated in one person even when the work is distributed across a large group. Merton identified what he called the 'Matthew effect', whereby researchers who are already well known receive disproportionate credit for work done jointly with less established colleagues. Such mechanisms do not simply reflect the perception that science is the work of exceptional individuals; they actively reinforce it.
F Contemporary research, meanwhile, has moved decisively in a collaborative direction. Analyses of millions of scientific papers have found that the proportion written by teams has risen steadily over the past half-century in almost every field, and that team-authored papers are, on average, more frequently cited. In some areas of physics and genomics, individual papers now list hundreds or even thousands of authors, and a growing number of journals now ask for a statement describing what each of them actually contributed. It is tempting to read this as a break with the past, but the argument of this article suggests otherwise: modern authorship lists arguably make visible a collaborative reality that was always present, but which earlier conventions of credit allowed to remain hidden.
G None of this is to deny the importance of exceptional ability, nor to suggest that the stories of individual scientists are without value. They can inspire, and they convey something genuine about the persistence and imagination that research demands. The danger lies in mistaking a convenient narrative for an accurate description. A public that believes progress depends on rare lone geniuses may be less inclined to support the infrastructure – the training, the institutions, the long-term funding – on which discovery actually depends. And young researchers who measure themselves against an impossible ideal of solitary brilliance may conclude, wrongly, that science has no place for them.
Questions 37–40. Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G.
39. Papers produced by teams
- A. may reduce public support for the systems that research relies on.
- B. tend to be cited more often than work by individuals.
- C. proved that individual ability plays no part in discovery.
- D. recorded many cases of the same advance being made independently.
- E. was intended to correct the bias in favour of famous scientists.
- F. gives well-known researchers excessive credit for shared work.
- G. has made it harder for young researchers to publish their work.
Ver respuesta y explicación
Respuesta correcta: B. tend to be cited more often than work by individuals.
Explicación
B. 'Team-authored papers are, on average, more frequently cited.' G is not stated anywhere.