The mediocrity lollipop: lick it once and you will suck forever

"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place", the Red Queen tells Alice in Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass. Carroll's quirky idea struck a chord with evolutionary biologists and gave rise to the Red Queen hypothesis, initially put forward by Leigh Van Valen in 1973.

The hypothesis proposes that, in an evolutionary system, species must continually develop merely to maintain their fitness, relative to the species with which they're co-evolving.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say, is that this somewhat esoteric topic should arise in the midst of a conference on livestock science. The University of Arizona's Professor Bruce Walsh, however, believes in applying the Red Queen hypotheses to science itself.

Walsh was addressing the Horizons in Livestock Science conference on the Gold Coast last year on the topic of the farm of the future. He believes that many research disciplines will shape that future: genetics, genomics, systems biology, reproductive and developmental biology, ecology, computer modeling, statistics and physiology to name a few. Environmental research, consumer and regulatory issues and economics would also have an influence on the future of farming.

This means increasing levels of complexity and the challenge of doing research in this very complicated space. It is a challenge facing all of science, not just the agricultural side.

"How can we effectively - and, ideally, optimally - manage all this information?" he asks. "Evolution deals with a similar degree of complexity, and with a large number of inputs that must be taken into account when trying to improve a population."

Walsh suggests that evolution offers insights, and more importantly, tools, that could help researchers plan for research in any realm of scientific endeavour.

"The evolutionary arms race means that a lot of effort is required merely not to lose ground. Moving ahead is even more difficult," he says.

"Many researchers feel this way as they try to stay current in their specialist fields, especially with the exponential advances occurring in many disciplines.

"In evolution, the object is to improve one's fitness. Thus, all of the complexity distils to a single objective function, called 'fitness'."

Evolution of a metaphor

Walsh offers a number of suggestions to help researchers plan their endeavours. "My first suggestion is to focus on a single, major objective in which you want to achieve," he says.

"Just as evolution has components of fitness, researchers can have components that contribute to the major objective, and researchers can work on each of these components to achieve their major objective.

"Variation is the raw material of evolution - mutation creates new variation, and recombination shuffles existing variation, providing the raw material for continued evolution.

"For the researcher, mutation corresponds to new ideas and methods. Some are useful, many are deleterious, if not actually wrong. The key is how to sort those that contribute to the long-term objective from those that simply add noise, clutter and confusion."

His second suggestion is to weigh new ideas and methods by how much they contribute to the long-term objective of the research.

"Those that initially prove useful should have their weighting increased - increased intuition is valuable here.

"Evolution can be enhanced by migration between subdivided populations - here, there's an obvious parallel. Fields that one doesn't necessarily consider may offer very useful ideas or methods for attaining long-term objectives.

"For example, many new statistical techniques have been developed to analyse microarrays. Almost all are the equivalent of methods that plant breeders have used for years to look for gene-environment interactions.

"My third suggestion relates to the fact that evolution instructs us to look at developments in other fields, especially those that may appear rather [removed] from the field of one's overall objective - have a beer with someone from a completely different field, and chat about your problem."

Walsh says researchers in different fields often have difficulty communicating - even commonly used terms can have different meanings.

And evolutionary changes are often regulatory, rather than structural in nature, he says. The evolution of a new function for a gene may involve regulatory changes to the timing of its activity, or the amount of protein produced, rather than a change in the amino-acid sequence of its protein.

"We can talk about the erector set of evolution - a fixed number of pieces that can be put together in very different ways. They may not cause structural changes, but regulatory changes can give very different evolutionary end products.

"Organisms sharing a very large number of genes may look structurally different, or similar, if the common pieces are used very differently.

"This leads to suggestion four: novel use of old ideas and methods can be at least as productive as structural changes, represented by new ideas and new methods."

The caveat, he says, is that evolutionary change can be adaptive or neutral. "Evolution is genetic change over time. It may improve fitness, or simply be neutral.

"Observed change is often viewed as adaptive when it has no positive effect on fitness. Similarly, scientific progress can be rather elusive to measure.

"A large scientific literature on a particular subject may be akin to neutral drift - change, without any adaptive consequence. So researchers should weigh the value, not the volume, of the research literature."

Sexy, smart and lazy

Research even offers a parallel to runaway sexual selection, he says. "The counterpart in research to obtaining a mate is the quest to appear sufficiently attractive for funding, regardless of the actual worth of the proposed work.

"This can lead to a runaway process where one focuses on strategies to obtain new grants, rather than daring or over the top."

He cautions researchers - particularly younger scientists - to "avoid the lollipop of mediocrity". "Lick it once, and you will suck forever," he says.

The lollipop effect was one of a number of useful axioms for the modern researcher. Others included:

• All ideas in science are wrong, at least at some level, so just get over it. But at some level, science reflects how right we are.

• Never take yourself or your ideas too seriously.

• If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.

• Science is fun, but we have to deal with the realities of funding.

• Being lazy is important. Individuals can be classified as smart or stupid. Smart, lazy people have the most creative solutions to problems.