Using Amphibians and Reptiles to learn the Process of Science

The National Research Council's document, Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (2000) describes an elementary science classroom as one that is composed of learners who are engaged in scientific processes. In such a setting, children ask real-world questions and seek real-world solutions. As students pursue their inquiries, they often move away from science textbooks, and they implement mathematical skills, read literature, conduct research in electronic databases, write stories, and so forth in a larger context. What was originally a regular science lesson becomes an opportunity for integration across the curriculum. This article describes an integrated unit on bats and specifically addresses the National Science Education Standards.     

Leaks in the pipeline: separating demographic inertia from ongoing gender differences in academia

Identification of the causes underlying the under-representation of women and minorities in academia is a source of ongoing concern and controversy. This is a critical issue in ensuring the openness and diversity of academia; yet differences in personal experiences and interpretations have mired it in controversy. We construct a simple model of the academic career that can be used to identify general trends, and separate the demographic effects of historical differences from ongoing biological or cultural gender differences. We apply the model to data on academics collected by the National Science Foundation (USA) over the past three decades, across all of science and engineering, and within six disciplines (agricultural and biological sciences, engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, physical sciences, psychology, and social sciences). We show that the hiring and retention of women in academia have been affected by both demographic inertia and gender differences, but that the relative influence of gender differences appears to be dwindling for most disciplines and career transitions. Our model enables us to identify the two key non-structural bottlenecks restricting female participation in academia: choice of undergraduate major and application to faculty positions. These transitions are those in greatest need of detailed study and policy development.     

``Why Study History for Science?'

David Hull has demonstrated a marvelous ability to annoy everyone who caresabout science (or should), by forcing us to confront deep truths about howscience works. Credit, priority, precularities, and process weave together tomake the very fabric of science. As Hull's studies reveal, the story is bothmessier and more irritating than those limited by a single disciplinaryperspective generally admit. By itself history is interesting enough, andphilosophy valuable enough. But taken together, they do so much in tellingus about science and by puncturing the comfortable popular illusion abouthow science works. Ultimately, David Hull shows by his example thathistory and philosophy of science can make science better. I agree, and withits focus on the history of science in particular, this paper explores why.     

The replicability crisis in science and protected area research: Poor practices and potential solutions

The reliability of some published research from well-funded disciplines of medicine and psychology has been brought into question. This is because some researchers failed to achieve consistent results after replicating published studies using the same methodology. Researchers have referred to this as the ‘replicability in science crisis’ and have identified several practices contributing to unreliable science. Protected area and other conservation researchers are unlikely to be immune from these poor practices given they use the same scientific approaches as other disciplines. Fortunately, there are solutions to the poor practices contributing to unreliable science. In this paper I identify those poor practices and describe solutions as identified by researchers from a range of disciplines. These solutions are transferable to protected area science and related conservation disciplines. Most solutions are not costly or demanding to implement. Adopting these solutions can improve the reliability of both published and unpublished research.     

A conceptual framework for understanding the perspectives on the causes of the science–practice gap in ecology and conservation

Applying scientific knowledge to confront societal challenges is a difficult task, an issue known as the science–practice gap. In Ecology and Conservation, scientific evidence has been seldom used directly to support decision‐making, despite calls for an increasing role of ecological science in developing solutions for a sustainable future. To date, multiple causes of the science–practice gap and diverse approaches to link science and practice in Ecology and Conservation have been proposed. To foster a transparent debate and broaden our understanding of the difficulties of using scientific knowledge, we reviewed the perceived causes of the science–practice gap, aiming to: (i) identify the perspectives of ecologists and conservation scientists on this problem, (ii) evaluate the predominance of these perspectives over time and across journals, and (iii) assess them in light of disciplines studying the role of science in decision‐making. We based our review on 1563 sentences describing causes of the science–practice gap extracted from 122 articles and on discussions with eight scientists on how to classify these sentences. The resulting process‐based framework describes three distinct perspectives on the relevant processes, knowledge and actors in the science–practice interface. The most common perspective assumes only scientific knowledge should support practice, perceiving a one‐way knowledge flow from science to practice and recognizing flaws in knowledge generation, communication, and/or use. The second assumes that both scientists and decision‐makers should contribute to support practice, perceiving a two‐way knowledge flow between science and practice through joint knowledge‐production/integration processes, which, for several reasons, are perceived to occur infrequently. The last perspective was very rare, and assumes scientists should put their results into practice, but they rarely do. Some causes (e.g. cultural differences between scientists and decision‐makers) are shared with other disciplines, while others seem specific to Ecology and Conservation (e.g. inadequate research scales). All identified causes require one of three general types of solutions, depending on whether the causal factor can (e.g. inadequate research questions) or cannot (e.g. scientific uncertainty) be changed, or if misconceptions (e.g. undervaluing abstract knowledge) should be solved. The unchanged predominance of the one‐way perspective over time may be associated with the prestige of evidence‐based conservation and suggests that debates in Ecology and Conservation lag behind trends in other disciplines towards bidirectional views ascribing larger roles to decision‐makers. In turn, the two‐way perspective seems primarily restricted to research traditions historically isolated from mainstream conservation biology. All perspectives represented superficial views of decision‐making by not accounting for limits to human rationality, complexity of decision‐making contexts, fuzzy science–practice boundaries, ambiguity brought about by science, and different types of knowledge use. However, joint knowledge‐production processes from the two‐way perspective can potentially allow for democratic decision‐making processes, explicit discussions of values and multiple types of science use. To broaden our understanding of the interface and foster productive science–practice linkages, we argue for dialogue among different research traditions within Ecology and Conservation, joint knowledge‐production processes between scientists and decision‐makers and interdisciplinarity across Ecology, Conservation and Political Science in both research and education.     

转基因大米品尝会:中国情境下的公众参与科学

以转基因大米品尝会为例,通过问卷调查、访谈法、观察法研究由公众主动发起的科学传播活动及其参与者。描述了该类活动的发起和组织过程,发现参与者是一群热爱科学、认同科学价值并愿意传播科学的人,他们的行动对自己、对亲友、对社会都产生了一定的影响。转基因大米品尝会以及类似的活动是转型期中国情境下的公众参与科学实践。     

Tribute to Tinbergen: Public Engagement in Ethology

Public engagement in research, called citizen science, has led to advances in a range of fields like astronomy, ornithology, and public health. While volunteers have been making and sharing observations according to protocols set by researchers in numerous disciplines, citizen science practices are less common in the field of animal behavior. We consider how citizen science might be used to address animal behavior questions at Tinbergen's four levels of analysis. We briefly review resources and methods for addressing technical issues surrounding volunteer participation—such as data quality—so that citizen science can make long‐standing contributions to the field of animal behavior.     

Science and the Concept of Evolution: From the Big Bang to the Origin and Evolution of Life

The common thread of evolution runs through all science disciplines, and the concept of evolution enables students to better understand the nature of the universe and our origins. “Science and the Concept of Evolution” is one of two interdisciplinary science Core courses taken by Dowling College undergraduates as part of their General Education requirements. The course examines basic principles and methods of science by following the concept of evolution from the big bang to the origin and evolution of life. Case studies of leading scientists illustrate how their ideas developed and contributed to the evolution of our understanding of the world. Evidences for physical, chemical, and biological evolution are explored, and students learn to view the evolution of matter and of ideas as a natural process of change over space and time.     

The plaza and the pendulum: two concepts of ecological science

This essay explores two strategies of inquiryin ecological science. Ecologists may regardthe sites they study either as contingentcollections of plants and animals, therelations of which are place-specific andidiosyncratic, or as structured systems andcommunites that are governed by general rules,forces, or principles. Ecologists who take thefirst approach rely on observation, induction,and experiment – a case-study or historicalmethod – to determine the causes of particularevents. Ecologists who take the secondapproach, seeking to explain by inferringevents from general patterns or principles,confront four conceptual obstacles which thisessay describes. Theory in ecology must (1)define and classify the object it studies,e.g., the ecosystem, and thus determine theconditions under which it remains the ``same'system through time and change. Ecologistsmust (2) find ways to reject as well as tocreate mathematical models of the ecosystem,possibly by (3) identifying efficient causes ofecosystem organization or design. Finally,ecologists will (4) show ecological theory canhelp solve environmental problems both inpristine and in human-dominated systems. Afailure to solve – or even to address – theseobstacles suggests that theoretical ecology maybecome a formal science that studies themathematical consequences of assumptionswithout regard to the relation of theseassumptions to the world.     

The science of research: The principles underlying the discovery of cognitive and other biological mechanisms

Studies of cognitive function include a wide spectrum of disciplines, with very diverse theoretical and practical frameworks. For example, in Behavioral Neuroscience cognitive mechanisms are mostly inferred from loss of function (lesion) experiments while in Cognitive Neuroscience these mechanisms are commonly deduced from brain activation patterns. Although neuroscientists acknowledge the limitations of deriving conclusions using a limited scope of approaches, there are no systematically studied, objective and explicit criteria for what is required to test a given hypothesis of cognitive function. This problem plagues every discipline in science: scientific research lacks objective, systematic studies that validate the principles underlying even its most elemental practices. For example, scientists decide what experiments are best suited to test key ideas in their field, which hypotheses have sufficient supporting evidence and which require further investigation, which studies are important and which are not, based on intuitions derived from experience, implicit principles learned from mentors and colleagues, traditions in their fields, etc. Philosophers have made numerous attempts to articulate and frame the principles that guide research and innovation, but these speculative ideas have remained untested and have had a minimal impact on the work of scientists. Here, I propose the development of methods for systematically and objectively studying and improving the modus operandi of research and development. This effort (the science of scientific research or S2) will benefit all aspects of science, from education of young scientists to research, publishing and funding, since it will provide explicit and systematically tested frameworks for practices in science. To illustrate its goals, I will introduce a hypothesis (the Convergent Four) derived from experimental practices common in molecular and cellular biology. This S2 hypothesis proposes that there are at least four fundamentally distinct strategies that scientists can use to test the connection between two phenomena of interest (A and B), and that to establish a compelling connection between A and B it is crucial to develop independently confirmed lines of convergent evidence in each of these four categories. The four categories include negative alteration (decrease probability of A or p(A) and determine p(B)), positive alteration (increase p(A) and determine p(B)), non-intervention (examine whether A precedes B) and integration (develop ideas about how to get from A to B and integrate those ideas with other available information about A and B). I will discuss both strategies to test this hypothesis and its implications for studies of cognitive function.     

Why do older workers have problems with technology?

Why do older workers seem to have problems with technology? In this paper, I will review several possible reasons and illustrate them with evidence, often anecdotal, from our work as ergonomics practitioners. We find that older workers have more to "unlearn" from their accumulated experience. They may suffer from gradual or not so gradual ailing faculties of sight, hearing, dexterity, stamina, memory, and reaction time. They may exhibit a fear of making mistakes, and they may have strongly established preferences and pessimism about technological gimmicks. But the real problem is often that the designers have failed to anticipate the requirements of their users; they have failed to design for a range of abilities broader than their own; they have failed to test their designs with real people; and they have failed to learn from the experience of the market. Getting design right for older users is really only a continuation of getting design right for all.     

The joy of a career in cell biology

Science is a career where you do what you love everyday. Our science is built on the shoulders of those who came before us, and in turn we provide shoulders for our students and colleagues to build upon. Of course, seeing the seeds of ideas that we plant bear fruit as interesting science is why I love being a scientist. Looking back it also has been a particularly gratifying challenge to mentor members of the younger generation in building their careers.     

“The tools of the discipline: Biochemists and molecular biologists”: A comment

Conclusion and Issues for Further Investigation This last result leads, rather naturally, to some concluding observations and a series of questions for further investigation. These case studies show that in all of the sites examined, the institutionalization of molecular biology as a discipline was primarily driven by the need to separate groups of practitioners with divergent but overlapping interests within the local context. Thus molecular biology was contingently separated from agricultural or medical biochemistry, virology, work on the physiology of nucleic acids, and so forth for contingent local institutional reasons. This makes it even more pressing to try to understand how molecular biology came to be delimited on a larger scale. How did it come to be a discipline with specific intellectual content (or did it?), including some problems, tools, and practices and excluding others? How did it gain authority as the forefront biological science by the mid-1960s? We need to understand the ways in which the tensions between different practices, projects, aims, understandings of the goals of molecular biology, and so on were resolved, on what scale and in what venues, so that something approximating the political character of a discipline, rather than a federation, was achieved. If these case studies provide a sound starting point, it will nevertheless prove difficult to answer the interconnected questions implicit here satisfactorily.One means of getting at such questions that should prove of considerable interest is to examine carefully the work of those who were widely cited in the papers of the late fifties through the mid-seventies by the people now considered major founders of molecular biology. By studying the contributions of those who are now omitted in the standard histories and recollections, we will gain a clearer sense of the possibilities that were open as molecular biology took shape. It is already widely recognized that the contributions of a number of biochemists have been given short shrift, but (as the example of Ernest Gale in Rheinberger's study illustrates) there are a great many more figures whose line of work were then crucial but who are now overlooked.⁶ To understand both what molecular biology was at the time of its early institutionalization and what is has become, it will be enormously helpful to understand at what point the definition or ideology hardened and the grounds for inclusion and exclusion of individuals and lines of work were reformed. Studies of this sort are appropriate in many other areas as well, of course; in general, they should different histories, political standing, and institutional bases of those disciplines in their national cultures. It is likely (but a matter for investigation!) that such differences influenced the opportunities for introducing new bench practices, if in no other way than by delimiting the niches within which certain practices could be initiated.⁷ And since new practices can fail to achieve their objectives, can transform the direction of work and disciplinary allegiances of their practitioners, can lead to only routine results, or can open up important new vistas, the character of the available niches from which to work can prove to have a strong influence on the direction that new work takes if and when it starts to flourish. A key aspect of this problematic (not yet adequately studied, I believe) is the problem of drawing boundaries between different kinds of work and determining where each should fit among established disciplines and/or within some new construct. To the extent that an international solution is ultimately achieved to such problems, it must surely be achieved in light of initially different ways of dealing with it in different countries.Underlying work of the sort we have been exploring is the thorny problem of how best to contextualize the work being studied. This, I believe, is one of the major historiographic problems that we must face in the history of science. It is by no means a new problem, of course, but a particularization of the age-old problem of the (seeming) overdetermination of historical events. If we deal with local cultures, to understand how they develop and their fate we need to understand their location within larger cultures. But it is utterly unclear how to draw appropriate boundaries on the relevant larger culture(s). As even this brief discussion has shown, institutional cultures, the cultures of sponsoring agencies, the culture of science (or of biological science, physical science, etc., as appropriate), and national cultures all can provide relevant contexts, all can occasionally determine the fate of work undertaken in a particular local context. The potentially intractable problem of delimiting the boundaries of investigation looms large here, but it is one that must be faced explicity if we are to profit fully from the enormously stimulating investigations of local cultures exemplified in the four papers published in this symposium. My own view is that we have no abstract standard available for determining which boundaries are appropriate to a given study, and, indeed, that no single contextualization is adequate to the examination of any given case, but that, nonetheless, we can (at least sometimes) distinguish useful and explanatory delimitations of the larger context from others that prove to be misleading.Against this background, I hope that the four papers published in this special issue will stimulate the readers of the JHB to carry out similar studies—that is, studies that seek to characterize and contextualize local experimental cultures —over a wide range of cases. I also hope that some of those who take up this challenge will deal with the larger questions raised by the need to find a way of balancing different, sometimes competing, contextualizations of such studies. The fact that any given case requires multiple contextualizations, resulting in multifaceted representations no one of which is alone adequate, will surely land us in fascinating, hopefully fruitful and productive, controversies.     

Australian Indigenous Studies: A Question of Discipline

This paper is an early discussion of the ways we are approaching Indigenous Studies in Australian Universities. The focus is on how disciplinary and scholarly issues within Indigenous Studies can be interrogated and yet retain the necessary cohesion and solidarity so important to the Indigenous struggle. The paper contrasts Indigenous Studies pursued by Indigenous scholars to other disciplinary perspectives in the academy. Categories such as the Indigenous community and Indigenous knowledge are problematised, not to dissolve them, but to explore productive avenues. I identify one of the problems that Indigenous studies faces as resisting the tendency to perpetuate an enclave within the academy whose purpose is to reflect back an impoverished and codified representation of Indigenous culture to the communities that are its source. On the other hand, there is danger also in the necessary engagement with other disciplines on their own terms. My suggestion is that we see ourselves mapping our understanding of our particular Indigenous experiences upon a terrain intersected by the pathways, both of other Indigenous experiences, and of the non‐Indigenous academic disciplines. My intention is to stimulate some thought among Indigenous academics and scholars about the future possibilities of Australian Indigenous Studies as a field of endeavour.     

Evolutionary Epistemology, Social Epistemology, and the Demic Structure of Science

One of the principal difficulties in assessing Science as aProcess (Hull 1988) is determining the relationship between the various elements of Hull's theory. In particular, it is hard to understand precisely how conceptual selection is related to Hull's account of the social dynamics of science. This essay aims to clarify the relation between these aspects of his theory by examining his discussion of the``demic structure' of science. I conclude that the social account cando significant explanatory work independently of the selectionistaccount. Further, I maintain that Hull's treatment of the demicstructure of science points us toward an important set of issues insocial epistemology. If my reading of Science as a Process iscorrect, then most of Hull's critics (e.g., those who focus solelyon his account of conceptual selection) have ignored promisingaspects of his theory.     

Vascular mechanics in the clinic

The bioengineer has more to contribute to medicine than he/she ever has in the past. The successful contribution must be based on such experiences as described by Donald McDonald in his collaboration with John Womersley. Clinician and engineer must come to know the other's problems, their weaknesses and their strengths. They must be prepared to compromise, but to know where compromise is warranted, and where it is not. The clinician must be prepared to change if he/she is to gain help from the engineer. Blind acceptance of old concepts (of "hypertension", and of cuff sphygmomanometric accuracy, etc.) needs enlightenment, while acceptance of physiological reality such as wave reflection needs emerge. The clinician's vocabulary will need to change. This chapter opens with a discussion of a time where knowledge of engineering, physics, physiology and medicine was meagre. These disciplines were small, but they did interconnect through the work of renaissance (and later) scientists. With increase in knowledge, the disciplines enlarged, and grew apart from each other. The challenge of today is to bring these closer together so that there may be some connection, some overlap, and so that the crevices between the disciplines are not so deep, and not such a deterrent to those who wish to engage in interdisciplinary activity.     

The excitability of plant cells: With a special emphasis on characean internodal cells

This review describes the basic principles of electrophysiology using the generation of an action potential in characean internodal cells as a pedagogical tool. Electrophysiology has proven to be a powerful tool in understanding animal physiology and development, yet it has been virtually neglected in the study of plant physiology and development. This review is, in essence, a written account of my personal journey over the past five years to understand the basic principles of electrophysiology so that I can apply them to the study of plant physiology and development. My formal background is in classical botany and cell biology. I have learned electrophysiology by reading many books on physics written for the lay person and by talking informally with many patient biophysicists. I have written this review for the botanist who is unfamiliar with the basics of membrane biology but would like to know that she or he can become familiar with the latest information without much effort. I also wrote it for the neurophysiologist who is proficient in membrane biology but knows little about plant biology (but may want to teach one lecture on “plant action potentials”). And lastly, I wrote this for people interested in the history of science and how the studies of electrical and chemical communication in physiology and development progressed in the botanical and zoological disciplines.     

Plans of mice and men: from bench science to science policy

The transition from bench science to science policy is not always a smooth one, and my journey stretched as far as the unemployment line to the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol. While earning my doctorate in microbiology, I found myself more interested in my political activities than my experiments. Thus, my science policy career aspirations were born from merging my love of science with my interest in policy and politics. After receiving my doctorate, I accepted the Henry Luce Scholarship, which allowed me to live in South Korea for 1 year and delve into the field of science policy research. This introduction into science policy occurred at the South Korean think tank called the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI). During that year, I used textbooks, colleagues, and hands-on research projects as my educational introduction into the social science of science and technology decision-making. However, upon returning to the United States during one of the worst job markets in nearly 80 years, securing a position in science policy proved to be very difficult, and I was unemployed for five months. Ultimately, it took more than a year from the end of the Luce Scholarship to obtain my next science policy position with the American Society for Microbiology Congressional Fellowship. This fellowship gave me the opportunity to work as the science and public health advisor to U.S. Senator Harry Reid. While there were significant challenges during my transition from the laboratory to science policy, those challenges made me tougher, more appreciative, and more prepared to move from working at the bench to working in the field of science policy.