6 - Citizen Social Science

Summary

Over the four centuries since Galileo, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, the social structure of science has become ever more organized, possibly rigid, and definitely expensive. In some of the sciences that emphasized direct observation of physical specimens, from paleontology to archaeology to ornithology, amateurs still played a valuable role, but in the past decade professional scientists have begun to enlist ordinary citizens as unpaid but respected assistants across several of the natural sciences.