A particular pianist is remembered for their unique style of play, repertoire of musical pieces, and their distinctive command of the piano. In this sense we are all defined by our own style, methods, and toolkit. As scientists this may not seem so obvious, as we like to think we all employ the same scientific method and unlike a pianist, who may play Chopin with melancholy or rapture, we apply it in more or less the same bog-standard way. This cannot be further from the truth. Some scientists take a more broad approach: focusing on unifying large bodies of knowledge; a few hop between relatively small unrelated problems and fields; many work in a single field for most of their lives. Even in the latter category there are multitudes of scientific styles, methods, and tools. Laser tinkerers, gene creatives, equation eccentrics, software superheroes, and cell culture crews are but a swab of the various kinds of scientists out there. My point is that science can be, and is, done in many different ways.
We judge a pianists work by some arbitrary criteria that defines 'good' music (I don't have a clue what criteria this is). However, in science the threshold criteria for a work to be considered 'good' is anything but arbitrary. We call a theorists work 'good' if it makes predictions that agree with experiment, and those experiments are judged on whether they produce results that are reproducible by other independent experiments. It doesn't matter how you approach science, whether you use scribbles on paper or huge labs full of expensive microscopes, if it doesn't pass these criteria it's not only bad, it's useless.
I have deliberately left out any descriptions of the people behind the piano or doing the science. I did this because they are utterly irrelevant to the criteria of what constitutes good or bad work in a discipline. It does not matter if a black woman from, say, South London makes public a theory for some phenomenon by making use of novel computer simulation techniques, or whether a white man from, say, Princeton makes public an alternative theory using only one side of A4 with a few equations on it. Both works, to be classed as useful and 'good' science, will be judged by the same criteria.
Who does it ultimately doesn't matter. However, the fact that two different scientists from differing backgrounds, working on the same problem can only benefit progress on its solution. To make a crude analogy: an egg hunt with a handful of people who only know how to look in certain places with the same tools won't be that profitable, but add more people who look in different places with different tools and your egg hunt will be much more successful.
Science is like this egg hunt. Increasing the diversity of scientists will only benefit science. However, in today's world science is not as diverse as one would like to think. Many institutions, departments, and labs are dominated by white men from similar backgrounds. Not that there is anything wrong with white men (from any background) but the lack of diversity is limiting the progress science could be making. Women and people of color are particularly absent in all echelons of science. There are certain institutional obstacles and barriers that discourage alternative students, post-docs, and early career researchers who want to do 'good' science from staying in science.
It is for the sake of 'good' science, finding those wondrous eggs brimming with natures secrets, that we must ensure those people from all walks of life, of all colors, and of all genders are met with open arms. This, however, is not the view held by everyone. There are those who claim that 'good' science can only be achieved by those who are superior in the various tasks that gets 'good' science done. They purport that only a certain kind of human is superior in doing science. Women and blacks, they say, are biologically disadvantaged in comparison to the white man in this respect and giving them equal opportunities will only slow down progress (basically they will be in the way).
There is not one credible shred of evidence that a person of a particular gender, color, and ethnicity is superior in any of the faculties that a 'good' scientist has. Even if it were true (it isn't) that white men are just that much sharper and better at certain tasks than everyone else, it still does not justify excluding or discriminating other people from doing science. Going back to our egg hunt analogy: if a group of white men with a certain background could compute various possible hiding spots and collect eggs much faster than everyone else, they would no doubt be beaten by a competing group containing those white men and people having different upbringing, genders, and ethnicity. This is because a group consisting of people from different backgrounds with various ways of thinking can conjecture about much more hiding spots and come up with more methods of how to get to them.
One could argue that since all types of human are innately capable of doing the tasks that lead to 'good' science, the only thing that makes people diverse are their various unique upbringings, experiences, and languages i.e. their background. In the egg hunt, if we were to have a group of white men each having a specific background that matches the diverse (different ethnicity and gender) group, then by my very own argument they should perform the same. This would be true of course, but as we know in real life it is highly unlikely that we would find a group of white men that have the same, upon accumulation, upbringing and experiences as a multi-ethnic and -gendered group.
Even if people of different ethnicity and gender all have the capability to perform scientific skills at the same level, they might still have slight phenotypical differences that would not be detected by some contrived test of these skills. Since work at the edge of science requires new thinking, normally in highly specialized and established fields, that breaks away from that of the past, any slight difference in thinking will confer an advantage. It therefore seems reasonable that a more diverse group of scientists is more likely to generate, at a faster pace, work that counts as 'good' science compared to that of a uniform group, with everything else being equal.
This argument is not restricted to humans, it just so happens that the species that can and want to do 'good' science are similar to us. If any other species or forms of life want to do 'good' science and are able to communicate with us, we will only be the better for it. Even a machine, the product of humans, may at some point in the future be able to do 'good' science in ways that we cannot as yet fathom. We should allow them to join in on our science too.
Anyone and anything that can play the piano, hunt for eggs, or do science should be encouraged by us to do so. Our music, bellies, and science will be forever richer for it.
