Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?

In biology, genetic variation often results in things that look more or less the same. Despite the panoply of genetic sequences in our cells, for example, we end up with a limited number of tissue types. This is known as canalization, the idea that, despite genetic variation, environmental forces, and randomness, lots of genotypes yield the same phenotype. This is why many different diseases cause similar symptoms. Or why body shapes are more limited than one might expect.

As a lapsed biologist, a favored pastime of mine is taking ideas from biology and applying them to other domains; parachuting into a field with a simple model shouldn’t just be the province of physicists! So I am tempted to ask where we find canalization in the world of metascience.

One obvious place to look is institutional forms, or “phenotypes” if you will. While there’s a high-dimensional space of possible institutional forms, we have traditionally only explored a small subset of it: universities, corporate research labs, startups, and a handful of others. Gratifyingly, over the past few years, there has been an explosion of new research organizations; researchers are trying new things and traversing this space, and I’ve been collecting them in my Overedge Catalog.

Yet, it seems that the new research organizations that have cropped up are not all that different from previous iterations. Many are cool and interesting, and I’m thrilled they exist, but, whether in the Overedge Catalog or not, many appear almost interchangeable in their structure. There has been a canalization of organizational forms.

If you go the route of a for-profit research lab, for example, your institution might end up looking like a startup. Or you might try to construct a strange research institution but end up with something that looks like an independent version of a university department, with colleagues that look like faculty and perform faculty-like tasks. While canalization is potentially valuable in biology in that it provides a kind of developmental robustness, it is probably not ideal for institutional innovation, as it constrains the form, and thus the function, of these organizations.

But why does this canalization occur in science?

Well, with organizations that end up looking university-like, it comes down to risk, or more precisely, risk aversion. Imagine you build a weird institution devoted to some odd interdisciplinary topic. Then, you hire people to work in it. These are