From: Climate Etc.

By: John Ridgway

Date: September 8, 2025

The Matthew Effect, Mono-cultures, and the Natural Selection of Bad Science

Any politician faced with the challenge of protecting the public from a natural threat, such as a pandemic or climate change, will be keen to stress how much they are ‘following the science’ — by which they mean they are guided by the dominant scientific narrative of the day. We would want this to be the case because we trust the scientific method as a selective process that ensures bad science cannot hope to survive for very long.  This is not a reality I choose to ignore here, but it is something I would certainly wish to place in its proper context. The problem is that the scientific method is not the only selector in town, and when all others are taken into account, a much murkier picture emerges – certainly not one that is clear enough to place a dominant narrative upon an epistemological pedestal.

Feedback reigns supreme

Of all the selection pressures that operate within a scientific community, perhaps the most fundamental is not the peer review of academic papers but one that can be summarised as follows:

“For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29, RSV).

This is the so-called Matthew effect [1], also known as ‘cumulative advantage’. It is a positive feedback that serves to place fame and influence in the hands of a select few. This is true in life generally but also in academia specifically. For example, work that has already received a significant number of citations will tend to attract even more, if only because a currently large number of citations raises the likelihood of further reference resulting from any random selection from existing citation lists. This bibliometric phenomenon, in which success breeds success, was first studied by the physicist Derek de Solla Price, who emphasised its essentially stochastic properties:
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The Matthew Effect, Mono-cultures, and the Natural Selection of Bad Science