Knowledge is more than just information. Even the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, owner of one of the smallest brains we know, forages to maximise information about its environment, and so its chances of staying alive and reproducing.
But as far as we know C. elegans, or indeed any species other than our own, doesn’t ponder the universe’s origins; they certainly don’t publish papers on it or build particle accelerators to find out (see “Knowledge: Of chimps, curiosity and quantum mechanics“). Knowing as we understand it involves abstracting information and interpreting it for use at different times and in other contexts. “When you have knowledge, you can do lots of things,” says epistemologist Duncan Pritchard at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “You can deal with entirely new situations in creative ways.”
Reading this article – weighing up its beliefs, truths, justifications and perhaps misapprehensions – won’t get you a square meal or make you more attractive to a potential sexual partner (or perhaps only indirectly). And yet brain-imaging studies show that when we answer trivia questions or look at blurry images designed to pique curiosity, areas associated with our response to food and sex light up. That suggests we treat knowledge as a similar primary reward.
The precise details of how we first came to love knowledge may always elude us. But it is easy to see how it would have spurred our success as individuals and as a species, furnishing us with the tools – often literally, if you think of cutting blades or fire – to survive and prosper.
In that case, we are in some way addicted to knowledge because it has served us so well in the past – as it still does today, in everyday life as well as at the frontiers of technological progress. As Abraham Flexner, founder of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, pointed out in a 1939 essay “The usefulness of useless knowledge“, radio communication and all that came with it wasn’t ultimately the invention of Guglielmo Marconi. It was down to James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, scientists who worked out the basics of electromagnetic waves with no practical objective in mind.
There are plenty of similar examples, says Robbert Dijkgraaf, current director of the IAS, who has written a companion essay to a reissue of Flexner’s original this year. “The theory of general relativity is used every day in our GPS systems, but it was not the reason Einstein solved it,” he says.
That doesn’t mean science gets a blank cheque – and certainly not in a world where children are going hungry, as Wilson made plain in his testimony. There is such a thing as useless scientific research – it is just hard to say what it is, says aMassimo Pigliucci, a philosopher of science at the City University of New York. “That is why scientists need to make a case to their peers and to the public for why what they do is interesting or important.”
As to why they do it, it’s no different for scientists than for anyone else. Seeking knowledge is what separates us from the worms.
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