As someone who completed a PhD and knows many people who went on to academic positions, there tend to be three stages for people who come to accept the status q

As someone who completed a PhD and knows many people who went on to academic positions, there tend to be three stages for people who come to accept the status quo. 1. A desire to make big breakthroughs in the field. 2. A frustration with the slow progress being made in the field, the apparent inability of the field to produce big breakthroughs, and the proliferation of papers whose net contribution to knowledge is small or zero. 3. An acceptance that the stagnation in the field is (1) partly an artifact of it being hard to recognize progress when it is happening and (2) a consequence of the fundamental nature of the discipline, e.g. all the simple elegant theories have been explored already. It's not that there are not problems in academia, but most academics (at least in my field) don't consider these to be a major barrier to progress. I was particularly wary of the claim: I will still publish my book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, which contains an important novel theory on the emergence of life. Surely a novel theory on the emergence of life would be of great interest in the field? At worst I imagine you would have to dress it up in some mathematical model. EDIT: I found a chapter from a previous version of the book in progress here: http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.pdf http://themoralsignal.com/TheMoralSignal%20-%20Chapter%201.p... readers can judge for themselves, but it didn't strike me as work that academia would be foolish for ignoring.