Basic research is at the very heart of evolution as Tony Wheatley discovers.
Research is the manifestation of man’s thirst for knowledge and although human knowledge has increased continually, the rate of progress has definitely accelerated in the last few centuries.
Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy, who was universally acknowledged as the ‘father’ of the nuclear powered submarine, estimated in the 1960’s that the sum total of human knowledge doubles about every 15 years.
Estimates of the rate at which knowledge is increasing today, based on the number of patents filed and the number of academic papers published, show that many fields are doubling in under 10 years and a few in as little as 2 to 3 years. Kenneth Boulding, who spearheaded an evolutionary approach to economics in the same era postulated, “Knowledge and the growth of human knowledge, therefore, is the essential key to economic development.”
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