Physicists vs. biologists - cognitive smackdown

Gene Expression
By Razib Khan
Apr 14, 2006 9:00 AMApr 18, 2023 6:06 PM

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Alex and PZ point me to this quote from one John Barrow:

When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”

Ouch!!! Many physical scientists look down on life scientists. I had a friend, who shall remain nameless (who knows his own name) who was habitually contemptuous of the likes of life scientists. I was only a righteous pagan, besmirching my program of study in chemistry with that dreaded adjective, bio. Ah, how things change. Just a few months ago I was on Boston at a party stocked with the best and the brightest from the science departments of Cambridge’s two top universities (the hostess even worked in a lab on Alex’s side of the river from what I recall). My friend from my undergrad days was my chaperone, and he reintroduced me to vague acquaintances from years ago. It was a couple, a woman who was finishing up her grad work in biochemistry and a man who was a physical chemist. The woman was mentioning how everyone from her lab was being snapped up by Boston Consulting and what not, and the man jokingly sneered, “Ah, if you put bio in front your title are hot all of a sudden.” This, from an individual who works in the laboratory of a recent Nobel winner! (he has a nice postdoc in the wings, don’t cry for him)

My point is that one might sneer at biology, but it is the hot field of our century, it is arguably the new Queen of Sciences. We all know of the prestige attached to molecular biologists and all their sundry subdomains, biophysics, biochemistry, molecular genetics, etc. I would argue that the rise of genomics and yes, in silico methodologies, is going to revolutionize evolutionary biology, as the bedrock upon with theory and prediction are built upon becomes progressively firmer.

But why are biologists still so dumb?

Let me explain.

Here are the GRE scores for test takers by intended graduate field of study (source):

Verbal Mean: Biological Sciences – 491 Chemistry – 487 Mathematical Sciences – 502 Physics & Astronomy – 534 Engineering – 467

Quantitative Mean: Biological Sciences – 632 Chemistry – 682 Mathematical Sciences – 733 Physics & Astronomy – 738 Engineering – 720

Writing: Biological Sciences – 4.4 Chemistry – 4.4 Mathematical Sciences – 4.4 Physics & Astronomy – 4.5 Engineering – 4.2

So there you have it. Not only do people intending to study physics give biology folks a smackdown quantitatively, they ream them one verbally too. And, they aren’t subpar writers, at least in comparison with other fields (at 5.1 Philosophy has the highest writing score, with English at 4.9 right behind).

But there’s more. These are people who intend to pursue a course of study, and biology is hot, you would assume more people who force their way into this field, which might make it less selective (eg., only those with a real passion might pursue physics, not because they want to impress their future interviewer for McKinsey).

So look at this table:

As you see, the distribution is what you’d expect, a far higher % of physics people lay above the 700 threshold than biology people (actually, the overall verbal mean is rather low, so I should rescale it, but it doesn’t really add much to my point so I won’t bother). But look at the number of people going into each field, even though few of those intending to pursue biology proportionally make it above the cut off, there are so many biologists that in absolute numbers they still outnumber the physicists at the high ends.

Biology is a big field. Two of the population biologists who invented 20th century theoretical genetics, R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane were trained in mathematics, not biology (Sewall Wright was trained as a biologist, he picked up his mathematics later). Eminences of the field like Robert MacArthur and Richard Lewontin (M.S. Mathematical Statistics) are often very quantitatvely adept. It’s a big pool out there, and there are all sorts. If you took the average IQ of a physicist vs. biologist (yes, for those who care, I think standardized tests do measure something important) I would still bet on the physicists…but, there are so many biologists out there today that there may simply be more high IQ biologists running around than high IQ physicists in absolute numbers (for a scientist, I assume high IQ would be north of 145, 3 standard deviations above the norm).

But back to the original quote which prompted this post. Are biologists just idiotic atheists who can’t see the forest from the trees? They might be, but here are some numbers….

Prominent American Natural Scientists – N.A.S. members (1998, sample size ~ 250) and “eminent” scientists in 1914 & 1933 Source

Believe in personal God?

Discipline Yes No Not sure  Physics 7.50% 79.0%   Biology 5.50% 65.2%  

From a broader survey in 1996

The 1996 survey showed that scientists in mathematics are most inclined to hold belief in God (44.6 percent). While biologists showed the highest rates of disbelief/doubt in Leuba’s day (69.5 percent), that ranking was given to physicists and astronomers this time around (77.9 percent).

So, I would hold that physicists are on average smarter than biologists, but, since there are more biologists than physicists there are still more smart biologists above any given cognitive threshold than smart physicists, while in both cases they aren’t the most God-believing folk in any case so the dismissal of Dawkins as a unsophisticated biologist was neither here nor there since sophisticates seem to hold the same opinion as the unsophisticates by and large (it doesn’t matter which tribe are the kings of the hill, they survey the same general landscape).

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