🍎your Scholarly Digest 3rd April, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

If there’s a common thread running through this week’s Digest, it’s this: science and scholarship thrive on openness: of thought, of imagination, of borders.

Whether it’s Warren Weaver urging science to move beyond reductionism and embrace complexity, Isaac Asimov writing about creativity as the ability to connect ideas others wouldn’t dare to, or a poetry competition inviting us to turn research into verse - each piece makes the case for thinking differently, for opening up new ways of knowing.

And yet, against this backdrop of imaginative possibility, we’re faced with a political climate doing the opposite. The USA yesterday imposed tariffs on its trading partners, which may seem like a bureaucratic footnote, but they’re part of a larger trend: a closing in, a stifling of the very conditions that allow knowledge to breathe. When collaboration becomes harder, when mobility is restricted, our knowledge production suffers.

So this week’s Digest is a kind of double exposure: one image of the world as it could be - curious, bold, interconnected, and another of the obstacles standing in its way.

BRAIN FOOD

Science and Complexity

Any scientist worthy of the title accepts that there are limits to what we can know, and that knowledge always depends on certain conditions being met. And yet, despite this formal allegiance, many scientists find it difficult to fully reconcile with these principles in practice, often regarding their knowledge as providing the ‘correct’ or ultimately ‘rational’ solution to problems. These tensions were not lost on the mathematician Warren Weaver.

As director of the Natural Sciences program at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver played a pivotal role in extending mathematical and physical methods into other domains of science - a trend that continues to shape research today. But in a quietly radical essay titled ‘Science and Complexity’, published in the years after his advocacy for quantification across disciplines, Weaver was more reflective. Here, he issued a caution: 

a science built on unified theories, universal laws, and reductionism is not equipped to study all kinds of problems. Some require different tools, and perhaps even a different idea of what science is. 

Some systems, Weaver argued, involve only a few variables and can be studied using traditional deterministic methods - these he called problems of simplicity (think Newtonian physics). Others, with millions (or billions) of variables, fall under the category of disorganized complexity, best approached through statistical methods. But between these extremes lies a third category: organized complexity - systems with many interdependent parts that nonetheless form coherent, structured wholes. These cannot be studied either by reducing them to a handful of variables or by statistical averages. And it’s precisely in this middle zone that most of what matters to the human experience lives: psychology, sociology, economics, biology, politics, history.

Weaver recognised that, up to that point, science had developed tools to deal with the simple and the disorganized, but not with the organized complexity that defines so much of lived reality.

Reading “Science and Complexity” in 2025, one might be tempted to feel that the mainstream has made little progress. In many fields, the prevailing approach still favors reductionist methods and statistical certainties lest the research produced be labelled “unscientific”. 

But perhaps that’s too pessimistic. There is now a growing interest in ways of doing research that embraces complexity, systems thinking, emergence, and qualitative nuance. The challenge of organized complexity hasn’t disappeared, but we are seeing more scientists acknowledge that not everything worth knowing can be measured, and that respecting complexity does not mean abandoning rigor. As Weaver warned us, the next evolution of science does not lie in choosing between simplicity and complexity, but in learning how to think - and work - with complexity.

RESOURCE

How To Generate New Ideas?

In 1959, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was invited to join a classified US military project that was developing a new missile defense system. He left the project after only a few meetings with his only contribution being a short essay on scientific creativity - which is this week’s resource. It’s a fun, easy read that just might give you a few ideas to help you break through your own research blocks. And even if you’re not stuck in your research right now, it’s a great read to start approaching research more creatively. 

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Even though Asimov is best known as a science fiction writer, he also enjoyed a storied academic career (excuse the pun). After earning his PhD in Chemistry he became a tenured associate professor at Boston University. In his memoirs, he tells of how, a few years later, his department head tried to fire him for spending more time writing novels than research papers. Asimov agreed to stop taking a salary but refused to give up his position on the faculty and, since he had tenure, he kept it. 22 years after the attempt to fire him, he was promoted to professor. 

If you’ve never read any of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction, you really should. There’s something about his work that feels really relatable to scholars, beyond the obvious fact that it’s about science and research of course. 

NEWS

Tariffs and the Knowledge Economy

The Trump Administration announced tariffs on a wide range of goods and services imported into the USA yesterday, with many countries expected to counter by imposing tariffs on U.S. imports: essentially, the cross-border movement of a lot of stuff is going to get more difficult. Most of the discourse around these tariffs is purely ‘economic’ (e.g. food prices, inflation, consumer sentiment) but the “economies” of research and knowledge will not be untouched. 

It goes without saying that material goods are needed to produce knowledge: rising costs could affect everything from gloves to computers, eating into research budgets while extra paperwork could lead to delivery delays. And while “knowledge” doesn’t necessarily get transported in shipping containers, the Administration’s broader policies have consequences for intellectual property and even cross-border movements of researchers for conferences.   

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic job openings

• Postdoctoral and Academic Positions @ Indiana University Bloomington, USA : click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Edinburgh, Scotland click here

• PhD, Postdoc, and Research Positions @ Uppsala University, Sweden: click here

• PhD, Postdoc, and Research Positions @ University of Turku, Finland: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

The Brilliant Poetry Competition

Science and art have always had a close relationship. Einstein famously played the violin to help him think. The father of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, created beautiful, detailed drawings of neurons and structures of the brain. Perhaps you, dear scholar, are not just good with words for articulating your research academically - how do you feel about poetry?

The Brilliant Poetry Competition 2025 will be accepting submissions for poetry that makes “the complex and often abstract world of scientific inquiry accessible and captivating to all”. There’s prize money on offer, but we know that’s not the reason you’ll submit your work.

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