Thiago successfully defended his PhD in Brazil! Congratulations! You will be able to read all the innovative research he has done the last couple of years as they will become part of the vetted ecological literature, no doubt about that. But I think he learned more than “ecology” during these last years. Here is an excerpt from his acknowledgments:
“Tive muita sorte de conhecer o meu co-orientador Karl Cottenie. Para minha surpresa, um quadro branco e uma caneta preta - e não um programa de estatística - me mostraram como rabiscos podem gerar ideias e muito conhecimento.
A preview of things to come in the subarctic.
Since we seem to be on a roll on the what should come first in science, this Nature article actually presents a much better written and argued case in favour of combining the strengths of both approaches (maybe scientists should do what they are good at, science, and leave the writing to, journalists with a PhD?). Some of the costs for doing these genome studies: US$1 billion. How does that stack up to other funding, I have no idea, but this is a big number.
We discussed these two articles mentioned in a previous post in our Community Ecology class, and this is the summary of the very interesting discussion between the students, the TAs, and Tom and I:
It is not one or the other (which is actually acknowledges by using the “first” in the title)The scientific method is cyclical and depends on data, hypotheses, predictions, increased information, or is cyclical as is illustrated by TomBut I added (which was not supported by the majority of the students, or Tom ;-) that the start of the scientific method is data, or the description of a natural phenomenonI also tried to argue that the “hypotheses first” in its extreme is related to religion, since religion is essentially a hypothesis (causal mechanism) without data to support it, but at this point I was way outside my zone of expertise