What is ecology? What is evolution? Seems like a really simple question from an ecology or evolution perspective, until you bring a different field into the mix, e.g., transposon/genome biology. When we started the TE (formerly known as genome) ecology group, sometimes in March 2010, I had no idea we would end here, with a publication in a journal with a higher impact factor than Ecology.
Our starting point for this publication was the appeal of using ecological theory to explore the dynamics of transposable elements in the genome.
Most of you readers probably followed the US elections with varying degrees of interest and passion, but as scientists are also aware of the “role” of Nate Silver and his blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Lots has been written about his success, which is “just” a nice example of the strengths of the scientific process, and thus not that surprising. What does surprise me, is the reluctance of journalists to come to terms with what he does.
The title of my “Teaching Philosophy” statement (that I completely rewrite every year), is “Research-Teaching-Learning Link”. In it, I try to point out the obvious and maybe not so obvious connections between these different aspects of my professional life. One of the items that is hardest to prove, though, is how teaching can inform my day-to-day research focus.
And now I can finally provide evidence for this: our comment in Trends in Ecology and Evolution “The terminology of metacommunity ecology”.
Ryan Norris via Tom Nudds sent me a link to this web site, and I think all three of us had the same “What the …” reaction after reading the entry by Irene Pepperberg, titled “The Fallacy of Hypothesis Testing”:
“I was trained, as a chemist, to use the classic scientific method: Devise a testable hypothesis, and then design an experiment to see if the hypothesis is correct or not. And I was told that this method is equally valid for the social sciences.
… rests on actually reading and understanding each other’s words.
This is a difficult exercise, and not only for students. Tom Nudds and I just covered in community ecology the rationale for protected areas planning based not only on representativeness (making sure that all species are protected), but more importantly also on persistence (see his article in Biodiversity and Conservation for a summary of their ideas). If the target areas have all the species you want to conserve, but lack essential components that would ensure their actual persistence through time, representativeness means nothing.
An interesting paper in Science by Stumpf and Porter takes a hard look at “general” power laws in science:
“A striking feature that has attracted considerable attention is the apparent ubiquity of power-law relationships in empirical data. However, although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law behavior to be scientifically useful (see the figure).
I just started teaching Community Ecology with Tom Nudds again, and one of the main themes of this course is exposing students to the importance of uncertainty in science (or Science, if you want). Today anotherinsightful article by John Timmer in Ars Technica appeared, and provides a real-life example of this uncertainty.
It tells the story of Peter Duesburg, a scientist with an impressive academic history:
“He did pioneering work in the characterization of retroviruses (viruses that are transmitted using RNA as a genetic material, but then copied into DNA and inserted into their hosts’ genome), helping to show that they could pick up genes from their host that enabled them to induce cancer.
For me, one of the biggest mysteries of the scientific method (see e.g. this post), is that it provides such a rigid structure, yet at the same time so creative. It turns out that constraints actually lead to more global, conceptual, and maybe thus more creative thinking.Jonah Lehrer in Wired provides some excellent context for a recent study that investigated this link explicitly. Highly recommended.
At the same time, this could also explain one of my other pet peeves: why concept mapping is such a powerful method.
According to Christopher Booker, there are seven basic plots. I had always the intuition that the scientific method was an example of “the quest”: the scientist (i.e., hero) goes looking for something, often with collaborators. But I never thought that the link between story telling and the scientific method would be so obvious. I recently read an article in Wired about Dan Harmon, the creator of and screen writer for Community.
As I recently noticed, the majority of my posts here are unconsciously driven by the courses that I am preparing. The couple of posts on natural history and science are basically an illustration to my field course that I will be teaching next week (hopefully I will get some time to blog from the field). And in the fall, I will be teaching a grad stats course for the first time.