One of the year-in-review themes of 2009 is the year that scientists fell from grace. It may not be that anything unusual happened, but it happened publicly, got a lot of political attention and public discussion, and so exposed what had been largely ignored or excused in the past.

One of the tawdrier revelations has been the intolerance of diversity within disciplines. Is it truly worse than in the past?

the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational ‘revolutionary’ scientists in favour of industrious and socially adept individuals better suited to incremental ‘normal’ science.

Well, that seems fairly normal. It's true of any discipline or institution as it becomes established. It's why institutions need periodic destruction as they congeal and cease to be useful.

educational attainment depends on a combination of intelligence and the personality trait of Conscientiousness; and these attributes do not correlate closely. Therefore elite scientific institutions seeking potential revolutionary scientists need to use IQ tests as well as examination results to pick-out high IQ ‘under-achievers’. As well as high IQ, revolutionary science requires high creativity. Creativity is probably associated with moderately high levels of Eysenck’s personality trait of ‘Psychoticism’. Psychoticism combines qualities such as selfishness, independence from group norms, impulsivity and sensation-seeking; with a style of cognition that involves fluent, associative and rapid production of many ideas. But modern science selects for high Conscientiousness and high Agreeableness; therefore it enforces low Psychoticism and low creativity. Yet my counter-proposal to select elite revolutionary scientists on the basis of high IQ and moderately high Psychoticism may sound like a recipe for disaster, since resembles a formula for choosing gifted charlatans and confidence tricksters. A further vital ingredient is therefore necessary: devotion to the transcendental value of Truth. Elite revolutionary science should therefore be a place that welcomes brilliant, impulsive, inspired, antisocial oddballs – so long as they are also dedicated truth-seekers.

And, a pony. The defect I see in this proposal is the concept of "selection". It assumes even tighter institutional controls that more closely scrutinize aspirants for conformance to beauty standards. The standards may be a bit different than those that are currently used, but over time I suspect that this would create yet another congealed institution, albeit with different pathologies that some future critic would seek to reform.

A better heuristic might be diversity - heuristic diversity. It would be less peaceful and might not make the steady, measurable progress that bureaucrats love to record in their reports to upper echelons and funding sources, but it's a better group problem solving system, especially for the difficult problems that tend to stymie conventional institutions.