Archive for category Science
So you want to be a great reviewer
In my current position as Editor-in-Chief of the American Naturalist, I read all kinds of reviews of scientific papers from all kinds of people. I routinely get asked, particularly by graduate students, what makes a good review. Here are a few thoughts on the subject.
Read the rest of this entry »
Unifying the unified theories of biodiversity?
A paper in Ecology Letters describes a “unification” of the six unified theories of ecology (doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01449.x). I didn’t know we had six “unified” theories to start with. (How can there be more than one “unified” theory? But that’s beside the point.)
Read the rest of this entry »
New Authors and Rejection
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel of Editors that was answering questions from scientists about how scientific papers are published, and giving advice to help authors. This happened at the joint, American Society of Naturalist/Society for the Study of Evolution/Society of Systematic Biologists meeting in Moscow, Idaho. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the degree to which new authors think that the system is stacked against them or that their “enemies” are all reviewing their papers and having them rejected.
Read the rest of this entry »
Why don’t we do experiments anymore?
I came into the science of ecology during the mid-1980′s. This was a time when ecologists were learning the lesson that one cannot simply go out and collect observational data to test hypotheses. Proving that species compete by demonstrating Hutchinsonian ratios proved to be a rather futile endeavor, to say the least. The problem is that many different causal mechanisms can create the same general pattern in the data that one collects.
Read the rest of this entry »
The hardest transition
One of the hardest transitions that students have to make on the way to becoming a scientist is embracing the uncertainty of what you have to do. Science is a very weird endeavor. The philosophy of science explains why a scientist can never know whether they have the correct answer to a question; one can only know if they are wrong. Moreover, science is much more about defining a question, which means that we don’t even know what the right questions to ask are. Thus, being a scientist means that not only will you not know if you have the right answer, you won’t even know if you’re asking the right question.
Read the rest of this entry »
One Trait of a Good Scientist
David Brooks in a recent column in the New York Times highlighted the shift in thinking about what makes someone a “genius”. The upshot of the argument is not that raw intellect and inate talent are the sources of genius, but rather it is practice, practice, practice.
Read the rest of this entry »
Doing Science
The best faculty member in any discipline at a major university integrates teaching and research into one seamless endeavor. These activities are at one level synergistic: teaching forces the faculty member to think beyond the narrow confines of the current grant or the current experimental result, while research maintains the desire for discovery that pervades the best teaching. However, when considered at a more fundamental level, they are in fact the same endeavor.
Is my graying hair adaptive?
As with most people my age, my hair is starting to turn gray. Just at the temples right now, but I’m now on the way to gray. Other mammals’ hair goes gray as well. We know the biochemical and physiological basis of the process, and we know that this process has a genetic basis. Thus, the process of graying hair can evolve!