http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-basic-science-1445613954

If you have any sort of decent attention span, I urge you to stop right now and read the entire article. I've pulled out specific sections that I thought were particularly interesting, but I've copied less than a third of the article. It's very thorough and insightful.

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

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As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

It is just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had precisely the same idea after reading precisely the same book, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. It thus qualifies as a living organism, at least in the sense that a coral reef is a living thing. Sure, it could not exist without animals (that is, people) to build and maintain it, but then that is true of a coral reef, too.

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Indeed, the history of technological prohibitions is revealing. The Ming Chinese prohibited large ships; the Shogun Japanese, firearms; the medieval Italians, silk-spinning; Americans in the 1920s, alcohol. Such prohibitions can last a long time—three centuries in the case of the Chinese and Japanese examples—but eventually they come to an end, so long as there is competition. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, these technologies continued to grow.

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Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and deterring rivals as about sharing ideas. And that discourages innovation.

Even the most explicit paper or patent application fails to reveal nearly enough to help another to retrace the steps through the maze of possible experiments. One study of lasers found that blueprints and written reports were quite inadequate to help others copy a laser design: You had to go and talk to the people who had done it. So a patent often does not achieve the openness that it is supposed to but instead hinders progress.

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Like most innovation, Portugal’s navigational advances came about by trial and error among sailors, not by speculation among astronomers and cartographers. If anything, the scientists were driven by the needs of the explorers rather than the other way around.

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In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.”

I'm not going to tl;dr this, because I think this is a really fantastic essay that anybody with an interest in science, economics, or politics ought to read. What it asserts, however, is that the development of technology is an organic, evolutionary process that drives scientific understanding, not the other way around. We understand more about astrophysics because we went to the moon; we didn't go to the moon because we already knew what it could teach us. The article is chock-full of other historical examples.

It'd be interesting to see further discussion about the implications of this theory for early hominids; did they develop tools and society as a result of higher intelligence and larger brains, or did they evolve larger brains and higher intelligence in response to the development of tools and societies? Maybe I'm mischaracterizing it, but I'd be interested to see the discussion. I think the author's reasoning is flawed, and his credible citations of economic impact of private versus state funding for science don't accurately parallel his theses about the reversed relationship between scientific understanding and tangible innovation.

Anyway, post your thoughts after reading the article.