"the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade"

"In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent."

Some scientists suggest that these problems could be solved by exponentially increasing research funding to match the exponential increase in PhDs, just as some economists suggest that an exponential increase in food production is the solution to exponentially increasing population. But neither of those is going to happen. So, the article suggests, maybe we should:

"move away from the winner-take-all system, in which grants are concentrated among a small fraction of scientists. One way to do that may be to put a cap on the grants any one lab can receive. Such a shift would require scientists to surrender some of their most cherished practices -- the priority rule, for example, which gives all the credit for a scientific discovery to whoever publishes results first."

I don't think the link between winner-take-all and the "priority rule" is so clear. I can only think of two cases, over my whole career, where someone beat me to a specific result I was working on also. But labs with more resources than mine get more total results, which helps them out-compete me for grants, so that they get even bigger. Should we limit this process of cumulative advantage?

We're talking about tax money here, so we should do what's best for society as a whole, not necessarily what's best for individual scientists or aspiring scientists. But there may be societal benefits to making scientific careers more achievable, or at least perceived as more achievable. Kids who aspire to be scientists rather than football players may learn more in school and subsequently make more contributions to society, whether or not they actually become scientists.

Even leaving such role-model benefit aside, data from NIH show that labs with less total funding produce more papers per dollar. So the public might get more research per tax dollar by spreading the wealth around to more labs.

For example, she says that cash incentives offered in China, South Korea, and Turkey have led to a 46% increase in submissions to Science, but no increase in publications. Officials in offending countries are presumably indifferent to the workload of Science reviewers, so is this really a perverse incentive, from their point of view? It could be, if papers from their country get such a bad reputation that even good papers suffer guilt by association.

She argues that graduate students should be supported mainly by broad training grants rather than research assistantships tied to specific research projects, because the training grants have lower overhead costs (8% versus 50%). This is nonsense. Unless we somehow reduce the actual costs of educating grad students, which would likely reduce the quality of their education, the money has to come from somewhere. Universities subsidize training-grant students by diverting money from 50%-overhead grants to cover the difference between 8% and the actual cost of those students. Eliminate the 50%-overhead grants, and the whole thing falls apart. On the other hand, she may be right that students in training grants get a better education. If so, maybe we should support more training grants, but we'll have to pay for them.

But is the 50% overhead rate fair? It may be too high. I would argue that the socially optimum overhead rate is the rate at which university administrators would accept a grant iff they thought it would increase the university's (or their own) prestige, not just for the money. At 50%, they would probably accept a grant to study almost anything (the healing power of prayer, say), so long as incremental costs of providing facilities for that research were much less than 50% of the grant amount. On the other hand, an administrator at UC Davis told me not to apply for USDA grants, because they only paid 15% overhead. So the fair overhead rate is probably somewhere between 15% and 50%. 8% isn't enough to cover even the marginal costs of research.

Stephans discusses various perverse incentives that make individual labs grow too big -- smaller labs publish more per dollar -- which she attributes to "bonuses" based on external funding. I don't think eliminating such bonuses would much effect. The real problem is that grants tend to go to those who have published the most, not those who have published the most per dollar. So big grants lead to more big grants, a process known as "cumulative advantage." I discuss this problem in more depth in the "Selection Among Ideas" chapter of my forthcoming book, Darwinian Agriculture.

Stephans also discusses perverse incentives that make universities build too many buildings. If they borrow money for new buildings, they can include the interest on the loans in their overhead costs. In addition to this perverse institutional incentive, there may be perverse individual incentives. The administrator who takes credit for the new building puts it on her CV and uses it to get a higher-paid job, leaving the costs of maintaining the building (as state and federal funding declines) to her successors.

The issue of "training more PhDs than there are jobs" is more complex than Stephans implies. What's best for the millions whose taxes support research universities isn't necessarily best for individual students. Click "careers in science" for my past discussions of this topic.

Turtle eggs deeper in a nest are exposed to lower temperatures. Since they don't regulate their own temperature and since the rate of development depends on temperature, you might expect these eggs to hatch later than those above them. If their older siblings leave first, that could reveal the location of the nest to hungry predators. Some turtle species have solved this problem -- all the turtles emerge together, in contrast to what would be predicted by differences in temperatures to which they were exposed.

The authors of this paper tested the hypothesis that some form of communication between eggs is involved. They exposed eggs to different temperatures, to get different stages of development, then mixed them to see whether the less-advanced eggs accelerated their development when mixed with more-developed eggs.

Mixing with more-developed eggs led to higher respiration rates and heart rates, both of which were measured noninvasively. You might expect that accelerating hatching would lead to problems, but apparently not: the baby turtles were just as good at righting themselves after being turned over.

It would be interesting to compare the question of synchronous emergence in turtles versus germinating seeds. A group of seeds might mostly come from the same mother plant. So, like turtles, they would have fairly high genetic relatedness, which would tend to promote cooperation. But a seed that germinates a little sooner than its neighbors may end up shading them all season. What about turtles? The last turtle to reach the water may have the highest risk of predation, but the first one isn't necessarily safer than those in the middle. Adult trees may benefit from synchronizing their seed production, for predator-saturation reasons similar to those that apply to turtles. But for seed germination, the benefits of being first may outweigh any benefits of synchrony.