I've certainly seen this in biology. The rapid growth of molecular biology graduate programs in the 90s and early 00s lead biology to becoming a career path wit

I've certainly seen this in biology. The rapid growth of molecular biology graduate programs in the 90s and early 00s lead biology to becoming a career path with a lot of mediocre talent entering graduate school. To keep research faculty happy and inexpensive hands at the bench, the historical filters for clarity of thought and careful logical analysis were reduced in qualifiers and dissertation defenses. Simultaneously, there was a shift from biological experiments designed to carefully test a hypothesis with a limited number of logical outcomes to genome-scale (e.g., gene expression) experiments that were more likely to lead to pattern matching and post hoc story telling exercises. This shift reduced the filter for careful thinkers even more. The overall trend lead to more hierarchy in the sciences, which has limited the number of topics, the acceptable answers, and the funding for carefully thought out, but non-mainstream research. In biology, the complexities of the subjects are very high relative to physics, so determining the important questions is much harder. Studying bacterial immunity, which lead to CRISPR, was and is a very niche field, but led to a very important biological technology.