Natural History
August 24, 2017 7:02 AM   Subscribe

Why Ecology Needs Natural History "The two fields' intertwined histories show that most theoretical breakthroughs are preceded by the kind of deep observational work that has fallen out of vogue in the past half century."
posted by dhruva (20 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I loved this! I love field-based natural history and ecology, and I hate it when people ask what sort of experiments I'm doing and I have to explain that because I'm working with endangered animals with incredibly long lives in a protected area I'm doing non-invasive observational research, and then their faces fall and they don't believe my science is rigorous, interesting, or useful.
Instead of telling new biologists to decide on a question and then pick a model organism that will answer that question, we need to also encourage taking time to simply observe, and then letting the questions come.
I have always felt sort of ashamed in ecology classes because yes, my scientific interest is in the order primates and they're not model species for studying a particular subset of questions, but I am particularly interested in how primates do x, y, and z. I had a TA in undergrad who was telling me she had developed a really cool question in a particular plant system, but it was too complex to study in plants so she switched to yeasts in a lab. Part of why I love my science is specifically because of the "magic of the field," and I suspect if I was studying the effects of resource availability on yeast or lab mice instead of on primates, I would not have completed my dissertation because it would have made me so bored and sad. Not to say that bench science and controlled experiments on a particular context are boring and sad, but that science is a big, broad endeavor with lots of ways to understand the world, and there should be space to fund and support these complementary threads.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:40 AM on August 24, 2017 [13 favorites]


I really enjoyed this article and strongly agree with his points. I am not a scientist, but I am a naturalist, and I love being in the Caribbean because it is still a place where most work is done in the field.
posted by snofoam at 8:26 AM on August 24, 2017


I have read that one of the big problems with primary and secondary biology education in the US is that we've shifted from a naturalist model that focuses on botany and zoology and natural history to a model dictated by microbiology, where students start memorizing the structures of the cell and how genes work, without any understanding of why that matters for living organisms. Some pedagogy experts encourage a big shift back to teaching natural history as the foundation for biology, and as they start to understand the environment and living organisms, start to introduce the deeper questions that are answered by cells and genes and so forth. (And, yes, as the article notes, fewer and fewer students have any real experience with the natural world, through farm work or extended play in natural areas or animal husbandry or hunting or anything like that, so many children are absolute blank slates in terms of direct knowledge of biological systems other than humans, parks, and neutered pets.)

I personally think I would have done much better in biology (a big weak spot for me in high school) if it had been introduced this way; I never really had any idea what I was doing or why, pretty much literally all I recall learning was cell structure, genes, and mitosis and meiosis, and it was lots of memorizing without knowing why any of it mattered or what it did, beyond the parroted explanations. Much later in life, I got into gardening and read a book called "Botany for Gardeners" that was recommended by a friend, and got to the stuff about plant cell walls and suddenly understood what the fuck was wrong with my wilting squash vines, and a whooooooole bunch of stuff about biology suddenly clicked into place and became a lot more interesting and comprehensible. And I know I'm not the only science learner who has to understand the real-world (/macro-world) context of a question before I can understand or mentally structure the theoretical or microbiological answers.

I have also read that the problem is exacerbated by biology education in colleges being so focused on students going into medicine or research -- not teaching. So even if we decided to make a big shift to teaching primary and secondary biology in a natural history mode, it would be hard to find science teachers trained outside the microbiology paradigm who could competently and enthusiastically share the natural history component with students. (It would also require science teachers to become rather expert on the local environment, in order to use the local environment for teaching students where they live, which a lot of science teachers do because they're awesome, but isn't currently required or a major focus, and would be another paradigm shift in K-12 teaching.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:41 AM on August 24, 2017 [7 favorites]


Natural History is a great gateway drug to all other branches of SCIENCE. Dose the kids.
posted by Kabanos at 8:50 AM on August 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah - when I took AP Bio in high school, my teacher told us the sections on evolution and ecology weren't as important as the microbiology that composed the majority of our textbook, so she assigned it as optional reading over spring break and didn't cover it in class.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:01 AM on August 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


I literally just finished reading The Invention Of Nature, a biography of Alexander von Humbolt and an examination of his work and how it influenced others. The last couple chapters are about how his work influenced others - they mention Darwin, but also Thoreau and John Muir. Von Humboldt comes across as the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the early 1800s - trying to make science accessible to everyone.

Von Humboldt apparently even had early speculation about how man could influence climate change.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:49 AM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh! And I have Greg Nog to thank for this - over on Twitter he talked about the site iNaturalist, a sort of crowd-sourced, cloud-based amateur naturalist's site. I signed on and uploaded some photos from past vacations - some where I knew what the things were, and some where I didn't - and within a couple hours I already had someone tagging one of my photos and saying "oh, that's a Yellow Trout Lily." Greg Nog pointed out a new feature in their smartphone app that he said was "like real-world Pokemon" and he's absolutely right (I took my phone with me on a walk and realized "oh shit wait let me look for some stuff that might be around here").
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:55 AM on August 24, 2017


Great article!

I'm a bit surprised by the author's emphasis on travel; in the UK and Ireland, there has always been a strong tradition of amateurs making thorough observations in their own locality. Think of bird-watching, where an organization like the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) has a huge amateur base which supports a smaller group of professionals involved in bird studies and conservation projects.

Here in Ireland, I think there are now far more surveys and studies which can include amateur participation than there were thirty years ago: online presence, easier data entry, and the ubiquitous camera phone make things easier.
posted by Azara at 10:28 AM on August 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


Seconding Azara, the long series of phenological observations in England are terrifically valuable and don't require travel at all.
posted by clew at 11:43 AM on August 24, 2017


I'm reminded of James Watson's comment to E.O. Wilson that natural history is merely stamp collecting. Wilson, despite whatever theoretical disagreements you might have with him, is a good example of the article's claim that natural history (and a deep focus on one kind of organism) has a way of drawing people into science. You can be a respected scientist, win a Pulitzer or two, and get people fascinated by science by being really, really interested in ants.
posted by clawsoon at 4:54 PM on August 24, 2017


Hard for me to imagine a natural historian or an ecologist who isn't a deeply convicted conservationist, and that, as the EPA(?) official implied, can be highly inconvenient for economic development.
posted by jamjam at 6:44 PM on August 24, 2017


I agree that the emphasis on travel is weird. I am a southeastern US urban stream ecologist, and I can promise that most people who live in our cities never notice the natural world surrounding them. Whether I'm taking my students out to my field sites or just talking to people in the city parks where I work, people are shocked to learn that their neighborhood park has deer, foxes, coyotes, and in the streams, beavers and otters. You don't have to go far or try to find an "unimpacted site" (such a place does not really exist in the contiguous 48) to observe amazing natural history.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:54 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I totally agree with the emphasis on travel; seeing unfamiliar landscapes and their inhabitants is immensely inspiring.
posted by dhruva at 7:22 AM on August 25, 2017


Here's another article about the decline of natural history: "The ultimate consequence was that jobs for systematists and taxonomists likewise vaporized; observing and describing became passé; "natural history" and "naturalist" perjorative. Lab research brought "prestige, glamour, and grant money -- especially grant money", Pyle says. Natural history brought quiet ridicule, or at least condescension -- so much so that many young scientists would not even suggest they might be interested in organisms for their own sake."
posted by dhruva at 11:56 AM on August 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


I guess I should say that another reason I don't agree with the emphasis on travel is that my students can't afford it. I teach at a regional commuter college, open access, majority minority, mostly 1st generation college students. We have a few amazing study abroad opportunities, but at the same time far too many students who are food or housing insecure. If you don't know for sure what you're eating this weekend or that you can afford next month's rent, you're not going to Costa Rica this summer. But you can totally learn natural history in city parks.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:19 PM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I reckon that the emphasis on travel is more aimed at scientists/teachers than students.
posted by dhruva at 10:20 PM on August 25, 2017


The article does mention how useful it is to be independently wealthy if you want to become a natural historian.
posted by clawsoon at 4:04 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Are there any remaining university programs which are especially good at natural history?
posted by clawsoon at 4:06 AM on August 26, 2017


I think a lot of land grant schools still have programs in the -ologies. Agriculture, wildlife, and fisheries folks certainly still need those classes. But even our regional commuter college requires general biology majors to take one of botany/zoology/mycology/microbiology and offers additional electives in ichthyology and parasitology. We'd like to add ornithology, mammology, and herpetology (and have among us the expertise to teach them), but the dean is skeptical.

In general, an awful lot of this comes back to the divide between what I call "indoor biologists" and "outdoor biologists". I think that the author was a little dismissive of ecologists and evolutionary biologists myself--I certainly took those classes in grad school and value the ability to identify stuff as an important part of how we do ecology. But indoor biologists, and our dean is one of those, really don't see the value in any of it, and they are the ones for whom large grant money is available (they have the whole NIH basically to themselves) and who do the research that the public perceives as relevant to human health.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:36 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


Oh, so to directly answer your question, the big land grant schools that come to my mind as still being good at -ologies would be places like Cornell, UC-Davis, Virginia Tech, NC State, UGA, New Mexico, Missouri, Boise State, Montana.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:40 AM on August 26, 2017


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