Lab life: more complex than publication lists suggest.© GettyImagesMale scientists are like criminals, a new study concludes1. Their productivity peaks at 30 and then goes rapidly downhill.
Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science examined the lives of 280 eminent scientists, including Pierre Curie and Albert Einstein. He found that 65% had published their best paper by the age of 35. What's more, unmarried scientists peaked later in life than those who had tied the knot. Crime, similarly, is a bachelor's game.
Picking locks and publishing papers are ways of catching the female eye, argues Kanazawa. As men find partners, get married and have children, he suggests, they no longer need to compete with each other. Indeed, testosterone levels, thought to boost action and conflict, fall after a man becomes a father.
"I'm hoping that I'm an exception to my theory - I wrote this paper before I got married and I'm now 40 years old," quips Kanazawa. His study did not cover female scientists.
The idea that fighting for grants and lab space is simply a modern version of flinging spears to attract the opposite sex is the latest in a long line of controversial theories about the evolution of creativity. Several psychologists have argued, for example, that competition for mates drives the production of great literature and music.
“I don't believe the pattern is inevitable”
John Maynard Smith
University of Sussex
With encroaching maturity, the urge to show off may wane, agrees evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool, UK. "As you settle into your bath chair, you may be less inclined to go out and do this kind of stuff," he says.
But the reality of lab life today is more complex than publication lists suggest. As scientists get older, they spend more time leading research facilities, writing grants and supervising students. So personal productivity may make way for collaborative endeavour.
"I don't believe the pattern is inevitable," says married octogenarian evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith of the University of Sussex, UK. "My productivity went up after 30." Maynard Smith, who published his most influential work at 50, teaches and writes books to this day.
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