Observational Approaches in Historical Context
Where did all these observational approaches to ecology come from, and why now, when ecology has had a fairly long run as a respectable discipline using robust theory and controlled experiments, have they begun to emerge everywhere we look? This chapter u
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Observational Approaches in Historical Context
Where did all these observational approaches to ecology come from, and why now, when ecology has had a fairly long run as a respectable discipline using robust theory and controlled experiments, have they begun to emerge everywhere we look? This chapter uses the historical context of how the science of ecology has changed to illustrate that the current changes are both a reflection of an earlier period in ecology and also a unique manifestation, wholly of the current period in environmental history.
The Roots of Ecology At its roots, ecology is an observational science, borne out of the work of amateur naturalists and gradually transformed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a professional discipline in private laboratories and universities (Fleischner 2005), but it has never been a monolithic enterprise with a single focus and a single pathway for achieving ecological understanding. Throughout this history there has been a tension between broad, expansive views of ecology—represented by efforts to relate observations of natural phenomena to larger questions in biology and sociology—and a desire to make ecology a “rigorous” science, represented by well-controlled tests of theory and predetermined hypotheses. This tension has driven continual change in the science of ecology, but R. Sagarin and A. Pauchard, Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-230-3_2, © 2012 Rafe Sagarin and Aníbal Pauchard
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the changes haven’t been random. Like most sciences, and like biological organisms themselves, ecology has grown recursively, that is, by building on its own past, and even as it explores new ideas and expands the problem-solving space in which it works, it often returns to previous ideas. In this way the growth of ecology is like the growth of a shelled mollusk—it is a spiral path. The coordinates along this spiral at any given time give ecology its dominant identity, but because it is a recursive form with a traceable history, its past identities are almost always accessible. Both the dominant themes and continually changing nature of ecology are easy to observe just by clicking through the electronic archives of an esteemed peer-reviewed journal such as The American Naturalist. Consider a jaunty paper from 1869 by Samuel Lockwood in volume 3, issue 5, with its vague and innocuous title, “Something about Crabs” (Lockwood 1869). The paper epitomizes both the type of people conducting ecological inquiries in the Gilded Age and the giddy spirit of discovery that drove early ecologists. Using the royal “we” of a proper nineteenth-century gentleman, Lockwood relates some charming anecdotes about various crabs, making literary allusions, drawing wide-ranging metaphors, and often delving into what modern scientists would sneeringly call “anthropomorphism” to describe the crabs as knights in armor, ladies of high stature, or crude strumpets. Describing the s
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