Despatches from the Frontiers of Science (I)

Just don’t ask me what day it is. I know I arrived in Perth, WA, yesterday afternoon, and have been fully involved in this Frontiers of Science meeting ever since, but I’m damned if I know if it’s Sunday, Monday, or Saturday just now. But I know it’s been really really good, in a way that standard scientific conferences can’t match, so I thought I’d share with you a bit of the magic. So, FoS meetings work like this (and avid readers – if indeed such a species exists -will note certain similarities with the NESTA Crucible programme I wrote about last (or this??) week):

The Frontiers of Science programme is a prestigious series of international meetings for outstanding early career scientists, initiated by the US National Academy of Sciences in 1989, and which has since been adopted by the Royal Society and a number of other prestigious national science academies… These multidisciplinary meetings aim to bring together future leaders in science to discuss the latest advances in their fields, and to learn about cutting edge research in other disciplines in a format that is designed to encourage informal networking and discussion, and to explore opportunities for collaboration.

The exciting thing about this particular meeting (apart, that is, from the sound of the Indian Ocean that I can hear from my hotel balcony) is that, for the first time, it is themed – glorying, no less, in the title of Frontiers of Marine Science. What this means in practice is that all of us here, from microbiologists to global climatologists, start with a certain vocabulary in common. So, as an ecologist, I may know nothing about the physics of eddies or the chemistry of carbonates, but at least I know what they are, and how they might impact the ecological communities that I study. For an interdisciplinary enterprise, such shared language is both vital and unusual.

Take today, for example – the first full day of the meeting, we’ve already had sessions on the feasibility of geoengineering solutions to climate change, the significance of symbioses (for example, between sponges and bacteria, or between animal and plant in corals), and the importance for global climate models of small-scale water turbulence, involving biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and geologists. But underlying themes are already emerging. The desire to understand the carbon cycle, for example, or the pervasive effect of climate change (in all its many guises – including temperature rises and pH declines) on every facet of the natural world.

We still have two days left to get to the bottom of these issues, with discussions of ecology, physics and geology to come. What’s great, though, is the chances offered to formulate plans of action in the bar at the end of the day. Until you’ve listened to someone with an entirely different training to your own talk about the kinds of problems that really interest you, it’s impossible to see what insight a physicist, say, may be able to offer an ecologist. But it’s almost certain that insight will arrive, if you get the right people together. Within the next few days, I expect to be blogging on various far-reaching solutions to the crises in marine ecosystems (to my previous plea to restore the great whale populations, you can already add, for e.g., re-planting seagrass beds for carbon sequestration, fisheries replenishment, and coastal defence).

To those sceptics among you who might suggest that my optimism is fuelled by the excellent Western Australian wine that has been forced upon me since arriving, I would concede that you may have a point. But – I have seldom felt more inspired than when attending these kinds of multidisciplinary meetings; it can’t all be put down to the grape, and getting the right people in a room, talking about science, policy, and solutions, is a tremendously valuable process.

Trust in Darwin?

It’s the beginning of the academic year, which means students – hundreds of them, with their haircuts and their baggy skinny jeans and their enthusiasm. Indeed, I’ve just seen one of our zoology undergrads in a ‘Trust in Darwin’ T-Shirt, which reminded me of the uneasy feeling I occasionally felt during last year’s Darwinfest – the dual anniversary of the birth of a great man, and of the publication of his seminal work 50 years later. Let me explain. I would never dispute Darwin’s exceptional qualities, difficult though they are to pin down. For instance, last autumn I saw Jim Moore, co-author of Darwin’s Sacred Cause, present his thesis that Darwin drew his motivation from his moral drive, and that his firm abolitionist stance was key in the development of his ideas of a single family of all human races (and by extension all of life).

I found this a pretty convincing argument; just as, a few weeks before, I had been convinced by Phil Rainbow from the Natural History Museum, who had argued Darwin’s painstaking study of barnacles – culminating in a series of monographs that are still widely consulted – was the real making of him. Surely, studying repeated patterns in the morphology of these atypical crustaceans might easily have stimulated his thoughts on common descent?

In the end, I concluded that what made Darwin exceptional was in fact this combination of qualities – the zeal of the moral crusader, the patience of the brilliant natural historian, the analytical mindset of the natural born scientist. He had the good fortune to be an educated gentleman during a particularly receptive period for new ideas, but his skills, insight and dedication turned these advantages into a series of works of global significance.

So clearly, it is right to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin. But the whole ‘Trust in Darwin’ thing concerns me, and seems indicative of the continued conflation in many peoples’ minds of man and his oeuvre with the entire science of evolutionary biology. This is evident wherever creationists venture, using ‘Darwinist’ as a term of abuse, and gleefully pointing out errors or inconsistencies in Darwin’s 150 year old work. Personally I don’t think this is helped by the kind of reverence in which Darwin is held by a certain vintage of evolutionary biologist – you know, the middle-aged professor who fancies himself (it is always a him) as an old school Victorian gentleman naturalist.

This is unfortunate because – whisper it – Darwin’s not actually that relevant to the 21st Century student of evolutionary biology. Of course, to put the subject in historical context his works remain invaluable. Likewise, career-defining papers are still occasionally written on the basis of an untested hypothesis dredged from his notebooks. But for an overview of what we know about evolutionary biology, Darwin is probably the last place to look. Skip along the library shelf just a little bit, and you’d find the book that served me as an undergraduate primer in evolution – Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. There are plenty of others, with Steve Jones’ Almost Like a Whale particularly notable as it copies the structure of On The Origin of Species, simply updating every chapter with over a century of scientific progress.

And this is a crucial point, one that gets lost in an overly fawning appreciation of Darwin. It is a key difference between a scientific viewpoint and a faith-based position. Science allows no room for sentiment, and has no sacred texts. Darwin was brilliant, insightful, but not infrequently plain wrong, for instance on the matter of the mechanism of heredity. It is not heretical to point out these errors, and it is a strength of evolutionary theory that it has constantly, incrementally improved over 150 years.

So while it is right that Darwin’s anniversaries should be celebrated, let’s not fall into the cult of the personality, the fetishisation of his name as something to ‘trust’. We are, after all, supposed to be on the shoulders of giants, looking onwards, not at their feet, looking up.

NESTA Crucible: a eulogy

In these tough economic times™ lots of things that we care about, and which rely on public funding, are coming under increased scrutiny. The case for science has been well made elsewhere – I’m sure you’re aware of the Science is Vital campaign, and if not you should be. You should also take a look at Shrigley’s equally impassioned, and equally watertight case for the arts (it’s very funny too). Given the threats to both of these sectors, it is perhaps not surprising that the continued existence of NESTA, which exists to foster innovation across sciences and the arts, is also being questioned. (I should point out that NESTA is funded by an endowment from the National Lottery rather than through tax revenue, and that their stated aim to harness innovation to solve major economic and social problems sounds like the kind of thing that politicians have been asking for, but I digress…) The initiative that brought me into contact with NESTA is, however, already extinct. The Crucible programme ran for just a few years, and is described as

…a series of residential workshops run by NESTA to help researchers, who face demanding challenges in their own fields, to network and look to solve more complex challenges across several disciplines. By bringing bright thinkers together, Crucible was designed to help people see the bigger picture…

I came across Crucible early in 2007, when I was applying for jobs and fellowships left right and centre. I kept getting shortlisted, even had a few interviews, always followedby the professional equivalent of ‘I really like you but…’

I can’t remember where I saw the Crucible advert, but the application process was suitably short, and the questions suitably intriguing (‘Please tell us about yourself’, ‘Please give details of your activities outside research’, and so on) that I thought I’d give it a go. In fact, I ended up spewing out all the stuff I normally had to cut from ‘proper’ applications, in a continuous stream of consciousness, and just sending it off. (The wonders of Spotlight – I’ve just found my application, and cringe slightly at the first line: “I am an ecologist by training; by inclination I am a 17th Century Natural Philosopher”; and so on…)

So anyway, somehow I got on it, and it changed my life.

The 2007 cohort was a group of around 30 early career researchers – from across the natural and social sciences, from academia and industry. A major part of Crucible’s success, then, came from providing a space for people from different disciplines to interact, to recognise common ground, to explore possible collaborations. Many of the more memorable sessions involved the interface of science and the arts, visual and sonic, and I think this brought home to me more than anything how creative good science can be.

But it was the social aspect more than anything that defined Crucible. In our departmentalised world, we seldom get the chance to sit down and talk to people from across disciplines, about the kinds of issues that affect us all (I guess NN and other networks provide a similar forum, but virtually, and with less beer). It was kind of how I imagine an idealised high table to be at an Oxbridge College – stimulating conversation with intelligent and articulate people.

Of course, in our impact obsessed world, NESTA needed evidence of outputs, but that kind of missed the point of Crucible. The output was the event itself, the conversations and network and friendships, the seeds of ideas sown. For interdisciplinary work, this is in fact half the battle. So although many of us were prepared to write glowing statements about the effect that Crucible had on us personally, tangible results were thin on the ground. And I suspect this is the major reason why Crucible was culled – despite near universtal positive feedback.

Now, Crucible lives on in Scotland and Wales, but the NESTA’s involvement has ceased. It would be great to think someone else might take up the challenge to organise something similar in the future – something residential, interdisciplinary, creative. Crucible widened my horizons and picked me up from the confidence slump I was in at the time, and it’s sad to see it pass.