At The Conversation, evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Morgan argues that the current mess in which science publishing finds itself, with so many fame papers and so much fraud, is best understood in terms of Darwinian evolution — natural selection (survival of the fittest). The image he chooses is of parasitic wasp larvae destroying a caterpillar (a process that Darwin thought was an argument against the existence of God):

Darwin’s parasitic wasps reveal two truths: Selection is both unavoidable and amoral.

Whatever the domain, selection can lead to outcomes you might not like. For science, these might include the emergence of paper mills, mass retractions, citation cartels, fraud, excessive fees or bizarre AI-written papers.

But science can also do tremendous good: It produced modern medicine, discovered electricity and computing, and put people on the Moon. Like Darwin with his wasps, those of us who care about the scientific enterprise don’t need to limit ourselves to asking why some people do bad things. Instead, we need to ask why bad acts are selected in the first place and design better systems.

Don’t blame the player, redesign the game. If we can put better rules in place, evolution will do the rest.

“‘Publish or perish’ evolutionary pressures shape scientific publishing, for better and worse,” September 12, 2025

Morgan is fooling himself. Whatever evolution may or may not have done with Darwin’s parasitic wasps, in science publishing, we are not dealing with insects. We are dealing with intelligent fellow humans. The stakes are not sheer survival but rather a choice of incentives.

All rules made by humans can be perverted by other humans, who are free to choose their incentives. We can choose to do the right thing or the most useful thing. The law that describes that process is not the law of the jungle but Goodhart’s Law: Once a policy becomes a target, it loses all information.

Once publishing alone becomes the target, just getting anything into print becomes the goal.

Science disciplines could reform the system by making something other than publishing the goal. In the medium term, that would help. Over time, of course, Goodhart’s law would prevail and the new reward system would be corrupted. So reform would be needed again.

The wasps, by contrast, cannot have any goal other than survival. That’s why the analogy is not useful.