  Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an
important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also
been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards
conservatism -- the increasing production of what Kuhn (1970) would have called
`normal science'. This paper will explore a possible explanation for this sort
of trend: that the process by which scientific research groups form, grow, and
dissolve might be inherently hostile to high risk science. In particular, I
employ a paradigm developed by Smaldino and McElreath (2016) that treats a
scientific community as a population undergoing selection. As will become
clear, perhaps counter-intuitively this sort of process in some ways promotes
high risk, high reward science. But, as I will point out, high risk high reward
science is, in general, the sort of thing that is hard to repeat. While more
conservative scientists will be able to train students capable of continuing
their successful projects, and so create thriving lineages, successful risky
science may not be the sort of thing one can easily pass on. In such cases, the
structure of scientific communities selects against high risk, high rewards
projects. More generally, this paper makes clear that there are at least two
processes to consider in thinking about how incentives shape scientific
communities -- the process by which individual scientists make choices about
their careers and research, and the selective process governing the formation
of new research groups.
