Did anyone actually read Wilson's article... including the irate, myopic blogger who is projecting his own bias while criticizing Wilson for the same?
Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.
In my fifteen-or-so years as an academic scientist, I have found this observation to be 100% correct and I have worked with some incredibly famous and well-respected scientists not unlike E.O. Wilson.
Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.
In other words, math skills have nothing to do with creativity and science is driven, at its most fundamental level, by creative thinking.
Pioneers in science only rarely make discoveries by extracting ideas from pure mathematics. Most of the stereotypical photographs of scientists studying rows of equations on a blackboard are instructors explaining discoveries already made.
Math is a descriptive language, not an engine for discovery, duh.
Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence. When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward. If that step proves too technically difficult for the person who made the discovery, a mathematician or statistician can be added as a collaborator.
Modern science is too complex for one generalist to do everything (and to take credit for it). These days everyone is a specialist, with a PhD in a very specific subject, and they all work together to bring ideas through to discoveries and eventually to technology. Would anyone argue that the POTUS runs the entire federal government by himself, being a world-class expert in everything from speech writing to foreign policy? Then why is it so hard to imagine that great discoveries are supported by the collaborative efforts of many, with one generally receiving the lion's share of the credit for the actual discovery?
The response of the blogger focuses on the idea that Wilson is an outlier and that, like Bill Gates dropping out of college, his resume should not be used as a template. But Wilson is not arguing that he was successful because he was semi-literate at math, he is arguing that you can be successful by focusing on what your good at, and complimenting your abilities with fruitful collaboration. His reason for making this argument is simple; too many people that would otherwise make talented scientists shy away from the sciences because they aren't good at math.
My two cents: there are, very broadly speaking, two principle kinds of scientists (with many exceptions). There the creative types, who are rarely good with math, often lack attention to detail, but who are astonishingly good at creative problem solving. Then there are the analytic types, who are too skeptical to be creative, are often detail-oriented, but who are astonishingly good at analyzing and understanding raw data. The best science is performed by teams comprising both types of people who respect and trust one another.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/9M2q6uv0OX0/story01.htm
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