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[Dumb question warning -- I know nothing about science or academia]
Could it also be a result of the commodification of scientific work? I think this is related to the low hanging fruit theory. As a total layman, when I think of scientists, I think of some lone genius fascinated by a specific topic holed up in a lab furiously running experiments powered half by reason and half by intuition. Or even of some rich 18th century Royal Society guy making discoveries in his hobby lab.
Speaking with zero knowledge, I'd imagine there are a few key differences today. First, there are way more "scientist" jobs available because of the massive increase in university attendance. A department that took in 50 undergrad students might have produced 5(?) graduate scientists while a department that takes in 1000 today with easier coursework might produce 700(?) (no idea about these numbers, but I'm sure there's orders of magnitude difference). Instead of a small collection of cskilled artisans, you now have a large army of somewhat less competent assemblyline workers, and so they all get put to work grinding out tiny incremental improvements on the assembly line for much lower pay and prestige.
I would also imagine that there was more of an apprenticeship system in the past, where you attached yourself to a scientist and learned his theories and maybe even carried on and developed his line of thought, almost like ancient Greek philosophers did. Whereas now, profs are graduating large batches of students that each get the same Artificially Flavored Homogenized Education Product crammed into their heads before getting put to work on the assembly line.
Perhaps there are still scientists in my idealized image out there but they are just a vanishingly small subset of so-called scientists? Not sure if any of this is on the mark, but I'd be interested in reading your thoughts.
I really don't know how things used to work, but that certainly seems plausible. Certainly as we produce more scientists the bar is probably lowered since the distribution of human intelligence is relatively fixed over time (the Flynn effect is not enough to make up for the expansion in the number of scientists, especially because it works mostly by lifting up the bottom of the distribution so we have more average people and less profoundly stupid people).
The idea of larger labs causing eroding an old apprenticeship model is interested, though in my experience smaller labs can be pretty bad learning environments because the professor does no research and there are not enough older grad students to mentor the new grad students. Maybe things would have been different if all labs were smaller and more professors actually did their own research.
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