Ecology speaker emphasizes power of observation in science
Challenging some of the fundamental principles which have governed experimental ecology over the last two decades, David Skelly spoke to a standing-room only audience of faculty and students Wednesday in the Natural Resources Building auditorium.
The theme for Skelly’s speech was “recipes for developing unreliable knowledge.” He explored the fallacies of “hypothesis-driven” ecology, namely, when you try to expand the results of a controlled laboratory experiment to the natural world.
“Most of how we do science doesn’t hold water,” Skelly said. “In the search for generality we get results that don’t apply anywhere.”
Skelly said his “love affair” with natural history started when, at 7 years of age, he was given a Styrofoam T-Rex skull for Christmas.
“I was as excited as much as anyone could possibly be,” Skelly said.
Realizing that studying population dynamics in living dinosaurs presented some challenges, he said he turned to some of their closest living relatives: reptiles and amphibians. Studying newts and frogs from Vermont to Michigan, he became one of the premier American herpetologists and since 1996 has taught in various positions at Yale University.
In one study concerning frog limb deformities, Skelly said he ended up sampling a pond on the property of Ben and Jerry’s corporate headquarters.
“The guard was very nice and would let us into the experimental freezer to taste the new flavors, in our waders,” Skelly said.
The common belief was that the startling nationwide increase of extra or deformed legs was due to a fungal parasite, Skelly said. It had been shown in lab experiments conducted across the country that the fungus could be the mechanism behind the abnormalities, he said. When Skelly collected actual frogs from their natural habitat, however, he found no evidence of fungal activity.
“The question shouldn’t be ‘can this happen,’ but ‘is this actually happening in nature?'”
Some of the reasons for the recent reliance on controlled experiments are logistical, Skelly said.
“It is 20 times faster to set up an experiment in a cattle tank,” he said.
Often, when trying to isolate a variable from a complex natural system, he said researchers end up with a different pattern not representative of what’s going on in nature.
But pure observation is often looked at as old-fashioned, a pursuit for amateur naturalists, he said.
“If you just tell people that you’ll be a really good looker, that’s not a great way to secure funding,” Skelly said.
Skelly said until scientific journals, as well as the public, start demanding natural science based on observation of the natural world, it will be hard for things to change.
“People want hypothesis driven science,” he said.
Skelly concluded his speech with an examination of the famous ecologist G.E. Hutchinson.
“There is fundamentally only one way we learn anything, namely by experience and reflection thereon,” Hutchinson said almost 50 years ago.
“He was British so you have to excuse the ‘thereon’,” Skelly said. “Hutchinson was comfortable, half a century ago, with the idea that there isn’t a unifying theory in ecology.”
Skelly said ecologists need to start working in larger teams to tackle questions about natural systems.
“We’re still lone rangers in a sense,” he said, expressing a reluctance to give up the freedoms of solitary work. “One of the reasons I became an ecologist is because I’m somewhat asocial and I like to go off alone with my frogs and Styrofoam dinosaur skulls.”
Skelly said his skepticism of the basic methods of ecology can benefit other sciences as well, where, like in ecology, “we learn the most when we’re surprised by what we find.”
–ben.abbott@aggiemail.usu.edu