the intrinsic critical lever

“The critical yardstick that allows reason, and indeed compels and obliges reason, to oppose the superior strength of the course of the world is always the fact that in every situation there is a concrete possibility of doing things differently.” T.W. Adorno

on exile and expats

“Sit with us, stranger, and after you have shared our meal, tell us, if you will, who you are and how you come here.”

Travelers, wherever they are, always aim for home. Return will always already have defined them. Not that, then.

Exiles are banished, expatriates live abroad by choice.

Banishment: decreed, or self-imposed, the state of non-reconciliation.

Expats may be reconciled, or not. Their distance does not exclude the identifications of patriots.

Exiles have lost, or cut, this umbilical cord.

Formed by, but severed from, motherplace.

A traumatic second birth, perhaps. But also a potential. Of critical production, of empowerment in dispossession.

As in: “silence, exile and cunning” of a Stephen Daedalus.

But what a gap of disaster between Stephen and us...

Too much to make a home of art, like that.

Still, the exile eye, then, for what it can see. And despairing cannot prevent.

The protest of words, artful or not, responding, dribbling out under flawed direction or ranting wildly, refracted through the estranged and alien optic of exile.

Bad singing, lector caveat.

Citation strategy in desert landscape

Edward

Regarding publication, shall I cite as few papers as is necessary for evidence and support, or shall I cite as many as possible to establish undeniable citation links for eternity, however unworthy is my work or their works? One is certainly tempted to adopt the latter option, which probably has a part to do with the proliferation and the lengthening of papers cited and fueled continuous in vacuous circles, and demise of trees as the age of reason grows into the age of scientocracy. It seems that an average scientific paper from 50 years ago contains many fewer references than that of today – how much of the current euphoria of citation is really attributed to scientific growth and increased complexity?

One of the most significant biology paper to have come out in the past century was George Price’s 1970 article titled Selection and Covariance. It spans three text columns in Nature and contains no reference – a solitary, immovable monument in the annals of science. It has been cited over 500 times to date.

That was a rather recent example, and a freakish one to be sure. It seems that us ordinary mortals are resigned to building self-sustaining social networks in which we cite ourselves and each others, almost by acknowledged consensus. The professional pressure to publish is so great and so reasonable, it seems unlikely that Price’s publication strategy would prevail very often. For the rest of us, is there nothing new to say?

Of course we all have something to say, even useful things, but in the back of my mind I always ruminate a more romantic version of a scientist wandering alone in vast intellectual deserts punctuated with cacti of wisdom where, at last, heroes gather, only to disperse again according to some evolutionarily stable strategy.

Biodiversity Trauma

My last week was largely structured around another bruising round with illness, lots of time in bed, plenty of spatial ecology readings, and inordinate amounts of ginger tea. With all this time to sit an think one might imagine that I emerged with some interesting thoughts on the role of space in ecological dynamics, but after two days of papers on dispersal induced population desynchronization, quasicyclic population dynamics, and spatial moment equations I felt decidedly uninspired.


Was the fault mine (i.e. do I have endogenous disinterest (little spatial ecology joke there)), or could my lack of inspiration be the result of the material too? Am I simply indifferent to ecological concepts like biodiversity, or is our approach to science is so abstract that one can hardly see the forest for the experimental trees? Are two-species reaction-diffusion models realistic portrayals of ecologic systems, and does their potential for spontaneous pattern formation help explain the origins of patchiness in the real world? How could go about addressing these questions?


I have also been reading a bit of Gilles Deluze’s Cinema 1: The Movement Image, and his commentary on Bergson’s thesis of “the whole.” Briefly, the “whole” is defined by relations, and is an indivisible continuity (i.e. it has no parts as subdivision would inevitably change it). How could this concept of the ‘whole’ relate to the scientific method, and in particular to ecology which is characterized by a phenomenal amount of relations? Are ecologic systems are in themselves ‘wholes’ in that they are defined by relations between components that work together to create the realities we perceive? And in such a case is it possible to exert a scientific focus without removing ourselves from the study of this ecologic ‘whole?’


Any theoretical ecologist will (justly) tell you that models are always approximations of reality, and that to be able to deal with analysis at all we have to keep things simple, and address the relevant questions. The same comment could, of course, be made about experimentation: in doing an experiment we remove as many extraneous interactions as possible so that we can better address the questions that we’re interested in. All of this to show that in some realities, at least, the phenomena of interest are possible, but what of our reality, the world outside that we are ostensibly interested in?


It is along these lines that I’ve been playing with the concept of a film exploring how the science of ecology is removed (alienated even) from the world it attempts to describe. The pictures here are the first stills I pulled off of some footage shot toward this aim.


Of course, my general complaint is not new, nor restricted to the sciences. In order to study anything we necessarily restrict our focus, and tend add context retrospectively: considering how other processes interact with our focal process, or adding a historical (marxist, feminist, queer, etc.) perspective to our analysis. I’m not super sure what the goal of the academy is, but let us for now assume it is to create an understanding, a narrative of consensus, that we can use to interact with the world. Certainly science has something to contribute to this understanding, but there is also a need for other epistemologies to contribute towards our understanding of ecologic concepts (and indeed other epistemologies have contributed). I suspect my bout of illness will have been the beginning of a long inquiry into just how all of our epistemologies might fit together.

The Cat's Away

With our fearless leader away in South Africa at Diversitas, followed by safari and some home time, the little Gonzalez lab mice have the run of the lab for three weeks. What sort-of rogue biodiversity science are we up to?
Here’s a list of a few things I’ve been working on, or thinking about working on.

I’m thinking about writing a review manuscript on how ecologists just flip-flop between niche and neutral ideas and never actually make much progress because no one wants to cite anything more than ten years old - A love story.

I have a suite of samples collected this summer that I’m playing with, and getting some surprisingly good data from. Depending on how the final data turn out, Jon and I will be collaborating to write a manuscript from these samples in the next few months. Should be exciting.

I’m thinking of writing a popular-style book on temperate rainforest mites. Wouldn’t your friends and family be impressed to find that on your coffee table? Lots of pictures and loaded with interesting facts. Low, low price of $19.99…maybe I’ll hold off until I find a publisher.

And, lastly, something that Michael and I have been working on (struggling with) for some time now, is a plot for our biodiversity movie. I want it to be funny, but Michael is pushing for a more serious tone. Unfortunately the rest of the lab has been reluctant to get involved (maybe they saw our last movie?) What do you think about a remake of ‘Casablanca’ using a cast of mites and collembola?

Feedback, collaborations and new ideas are always welcome.

Journal of non-significant results

Following the recent controversy surrounding publishing policies at PNAS, I got into a discussion with members of the Abouheif lab about the many quirks of scientific publishing, and some of the problems they cause for science in general, in particular:

• Loss of confidence in scientific integrity
• Publication biases

I'll focus on the second issue, which is perhaps a bit more subtle and more relevant to all scientists without getting too far into the sociology of science.
Publication bias is a concern for anyone who's ever written a review paper, conducted a meta-analysis, or interested in complex problems that require multiple experiments to tease apart interactive effects. In a nutshell, the reality is that journals aren't interested in publishing studies about non-significant results. If your study or experiment found no significant difference between treatments of interest, that's less likely to get attention (and thus improve the journal's impact factor), than statistically significant results. You can see how this can skew our perceptions of phenomena, if the only observations we are exposed to are the "interesting" ones.
Given how much we know about publication bias and the problems it causes, it has occured to Zoë and myself that what is really needed is a forum to publish all these non-significant results that no 'respectable' journal would sully their pages with. Given how easy it is to find even 'obscure' results via article databases, impact and significance may be more relevant at the scale of an individual article, rather than an entire journal (" the times, they are a-changin' ").

So, Zoë and I want to start 'the journal of non-significant results' to publish and provide access to all those results of experiments, studies, and methods that just didn't work out, or at least gave statistically non-significant, but perhaps scientifically interesting, results. Unless PLoS beats us to it (which would probably work better, actually).
Think about it for a moment:
How many grad students and research assistants have tried the same doomed method, without knowing that several people have already tried it before? How much better would results of meta-analyses become now that all the non-significant results could be included?
This is not intended to be entirely tongue-in-cheek (unlike the 'journal of irreproducible results' - that's totally different). Although it sounds cheeky, may not ever achieve the impact factor of Nature or even Ecology Letters, it would still provide a valuable and novel function in scientific publishing, with no shortage of suitable material. I think it's time to make science a little less sexy and a whole lot more practical and accurate.
In fact, this idea is not without precedent: there is already a Journal of Non-Significan Results in Education. Once again, education scientists are ahead of the curve (though apparently lagging in follow-through as the journal has yet to post it's first issue).

We also thought of the first spin-off sister journal: 'the journal of insignificant results' for results that are statistically significant, but biologically uninteresting.

Scientific revival tent

September, September, September. No month signals scholastic pursuits quite as much as the month that typically sees students of all ages returning to classes. Granted, there is really no such thing as summer vacation in biodiversity research, but September does generally mean an end to conference season, an end to field season, and the revival of campus life.

Nowhere is this revival more evident than the Gonzalez lab. After long months of separation, all of the lab members again find themselves under the same roof, and with no lack of things to do. Samples have to be processed and diagrams have to be drawn, but there are also social aspects to the return of lab-mates. Some of the lab-bonding highlights for the Gonzalez lab this fall include the following:

Lab-logo contest:

Lab members should endeavour to make a logo for the Gonzalez lab! Deadline Oct. 1, with a potential prize for the winning submission!

Biodiversity film contest:

This fall the auteurs of the Gonzalez lab have a hefty challenge on their plates, with an award for the best short made in the lab on biodiversity. Submission deadline is December 1.

Everybody put on your creative-science hats and have at it!