In a compelling inaugural lecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) on 25 June 2025, Prof Daryl Codron from the Department of Zoology and Entomology urged a return to curiosity-driven science. His lecture, Whither science? Ecology, evolution, and the future of curiosity in research, challenged the current academic focus on outputs and metrics, calling instead for a renewed emphasis on process-led discovery.

“I am where I am today because I see science as a thing of indescribable beauty,” he said. “However, I am concerned that beauty is being eroded because, within the current academic agenda, we are becoming increasingly focused on bibliometrics, and on social, political, and economic narratives, taking our attention away from the actual results and discoveries of our research.”

According to Prof Codron, academia’s growing emphasis on measurable outcomes risks narrowing scientific diversity. “Instead of leading challenges on the status quo, science is following the norms dictated by society at the macroscale, and by bureaucracy at the microscale,” he said. “In such a climate, instead of being curious about scientific outcomes, we are driven by a purpose-based rather than a process-based philosophy.”

A return to process: Lessons from evolution and research

Drawing from biology, Prof Codron explained how teleological thinking – the assumption that evolutionary developments occur for specific purposes – has historically hindered understanding. “If such a purpose were true of evolution, all herbivore species would need to feed, like giraffe, on treetops to avoid extinction, and all primates would need to walk about on two legs, like humans,” he said. “In the end, life on earth would be dominated by only a few long-necked, large-brained superspecies.”

“Quite evidently, outmoded reductionist representations of the great Charles Darwin’s thesis as a teleologic concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ are false,” he added.

He emphasised that Darwin’s real thesis was “the struggle for existence”, which he described as “a truly ecological concept.” “The lesson in this story is that diversity is promoted when things are not driven by outcome, but by process.”

He joined Julia Lee-Thorp, now Emeritus Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford (then based at the University of Cape Town), and Prof Matt Sponheimer, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Nutritional and Isotopic Ecology Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder (at the time affiliated with the University of Utah), in pioneering work using stable isotope analysis to reconstruct the diets of fossil animals. 

“They showed me how to question through a critical lens, and how to value myself as a researcher in my own right,” he said. “To them, aristocratic norms such as titles and standing on ceremony did not matter. Only the science mattered. I was not a student but a collaborator, a gift I can only dream of conferring upon my own students.”

His work revealed that C4 feeding in large-bodied primates is not only possible, but inevitable under certain environmental conditions. “It turns out that, though we may be closely related to chimpanzees, us humans are behaviourally convergent with our much-maligned enemy, the baboon,” he said.

In collaboration with Prof Marcus Clauss, Head of Research and Co-director of the Clinic for Zoo Animals, Exotic Pets and Wildlife at the University of Zurich, Prof Codron developed ecological models to predict herbivore feeding strategies and even co-developed a novel hypothesis on dinosaur extinction. “To whittle time while travelling on an overcrowded bus, we somehow derived the concept that ... small egg size coupled with necessarily complex ontogenetic development resulted in extraordinarily high levels of size-specific competition,” he recalled.

Further collaborations with the late Dr James Brink, then Head of the Florisbad Quaternary Research Department at the National Museum in Bloemfontein, and Dr Liora Horwitz, a Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – both expert zooarchaeologists – led to the discovery that emergent neutrality, the theory that species avoid competitive extinction by clustering in niche space, evolves over geological timescales.

“These, and other scientific results of my career are awesome because they are awesome,” Prof Codron said. “What they have taught me and my fellow scientists about the natural world is of far greater significance than any single purpose they may serve.”

He closed with a message to young researchers: “Let your research be similarly inspired, not merely by what you can do, but by what you can know. This is how excellence will be achieved, and how science will eventually lead society towards a better future.”

Career highlights and qualifications

Prof Codron has received several accolades over the course of his career, including the Henry Bradlow Bursary (2001), the Royal Society of South Africa’s Meiring Naudé Medal (2008), and a prestigious EU Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (2009), which supported his postdoctoral research at the University of Zurich. His work has been featured in Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, with independent appraisals highlighting his contributions to evolutionary biology and herbivore ecology. He held a C1 NRF rating in 2014 and currently holds a B3 NRF rating (2019).

His qualifications reflect a multidisciplinary journey: