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Thomas Jefferson was a botanist, architect, paleontologist, president of the American Philosophical Society, politician and other things I'm surely missing. Benjamin Franklin had a similar resume. An LLM or a better historian than myself could fill in the blanks for some real Renaissance era Renaissance men.
Fast forward to the mid-late 20th century, and we're in an era where scientists can conceivably read every manuscript/major text in their field. By the 90s, the scope narrows a bit so that you could reasonably have read every paper in your subfield, by the 2000s we're talking sub-sub field. Today, if you look at one of the popular genes to study there are literally >100,000 papers published on it, with about 5,000 more coming out per year. The scope has narrowed from comprehensive knowledge about biology -> subfield (genetics, immunology, oncology, etc) -> sub-subfield (autoimmunity, leukemias, etc) -> gene or gene family -> some aspect of a gene family or cell type. Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before. My main paper had over 50 authors and included dozens of different specialties and techniques I have no idea how to do.
Biology is a shoggoth we can't ever grasp as a whole. Maybe there are limitations to intelligence, and no being is ever going to truly grasp biology in a comprehensive way. But if you want to keep making progress, you either need to build a shoggoth-oracle and have it teach us or you need to enhance our brains somehow a la neuralink. Otherwise, we're just going to keep spinning our wheels pumping out shitty papers that nobody reads or can fit into any kind of coherent picture.
Yeah, with this approach we can still make progress in terms of scientific knowledge, but I think we've largely slipped past a point where a single person can keep it all in mind. Maybe that's fine, or maybe it's causing problems or maybe we're missing critical insights. But the discomforting thing is that we're losing the ability to tell. We can see trees, but not the forest. In an ironic way, it's almost a reversion to a more primitive state, albeit at a massively larger scale.
In a hunter gatherer tribe 10,000 years ago, you could rely on knowing what everyone else knew. Nowadays it’s impossible for someone to say science doesn’t know x. There’s too much science. Things are coming to the edge where human understanding is finding it increasingly difficult to penetrate to higher levels of understanding the natural world. Maybe future AI will represent a new information/industrial revolution of sorts and take us to places we can’t go and in a way, it’s already doing that.
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