Nietzsche and the leech's brain

I'm often reminded of how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, parodied the scientific mentality by presenting a scientist who devoted his life to understanding the brain of the leech.

I wonder what Nietzsche would have said if he had lived long enough to see the study of the single-neuron brain of Aplysia, the sea squid, turn out to have so many profound consequences for neuroscience and even psychology.

What often strikes me in science and math is that it's an equal amount of thinking, tedium and effort to explore a technical issue that's of critical and fundamental importance at a certain stage, from one that isn't. Choice of what problem to work on, is incredibly important.

Naturally you can build your skills by working on any problem at all, so long as it's not too trivial ... but that's a different issue.

And it's a sad fact that the research funding establishment often has a terrible intuition regarding what's critical and fundamental at a certain point, and what isn't. So you often have a choice between studying what's going to make a difference, and studying what society thinks is important for its own reasons (which are often just politics ... i.e. self-organizing dynamics in the social group of scientists ... some influential person liked X and a community built around it and just keeps going of its own momentum, etc.).

Nietzsche was right in general that most scientists are obsessed with the process and the tedious details and don't try to orient them toward the bigger picture as they should ... but it's funny that he chose an example so close to something that *did* turn out to be so fundamental, and such a *good* choice of problem to focus on...