Return from the Frontiers of Science

My plan to blog nightly from the Royal Society / Australian Academy of Sciences FoS meeting in Perth, which started promisingly, was stymmied rather by the packed and punishing schedule. Add on >24h travelling either end of a 4 day meeting, and I’ve basically been away from a keyboard for a week. But, I did want to give some closing thoughts on the whole process. First, anyone who is at all environmentally aware will feel pangs of guilt about flying to any scientific meeting, let alone UK-Australia-UK in less than a week (especially when I should really have been manning the Science is Vital barricades). When half the meeting is spent discussing the consequences of similar patterns of consumption over the last couple of centuries – climate change in the broadest sense, with particular focus on ocean acidification – there is a special irony. But this is one kind of meeting where Skype doesn’t cut it, and on balance I feel that the carbon has been well spent.

Certainly, seeds of several ideas have been sown in my head – the kinds of ideas that almost never arise when attending a standard ‘disciplinary’ conference (meaning, a conference based around a single discipline, rather than anything kinky…). In part this was due to the structure of the sessions (each one consisting 1h of talks followed by a further hour of general discussion), and the broad mix of people there. But also, the total immersion in the meeting (to the extent that I only managed to stick my toe in the Indian Ocean, fully 5 minutes walk from the hotel, just before leaving) meant that ideas continued to ping around late into the night. (If this makes the experience sound horribly formal, let me add that these later ideas were inevitably generated in the bar, and, on sober reflection the following day, proved not all to be quite as superb as originally thought.)

Asked to sum up the conference, I chose one word: interdependence. Partly, this was to reflect the repeated message that to study the ocean is inevitably to enter the realms of interdisciplinary science. You can’t undestand marine ecology without some understanding of physics (e.g. ocean circulation) or chemistry (e.g. the availability of biologically essential trace metals); but equally the production and transfer of biomass through ecological networks affects both the physics and chemistry of the marine environment.

There was a lot of other intedependence on show too. The mutualism between modellers and empiricists, for example. A model not grounded in real data is perhaps diverting, but ultimately useless; collecting data with no theory for guidence is unlikely to be particularly profitable. And the need to integrate insights from the past – whether from the fossil record, or from the historical record of people’s exploitation of the sea – with contemporary data, both to understand the present and to predict the future as we enter climatic conditions unkown in human history.

Finally, there is always the temptation among the scientifically minded to take an engineering approach to managing natural systems. This leads to the mentality that human intervention is required to ‘fix’ the marine environment. Unquestionably, some such interventions are needed – setting some limits on fisheries, for example, and curbing carbon emissions (although I remain sceptical of some of the more drastic geoengineering suggestions, such as iron fertilisation to induce phytoplankton blooms – how much energy is needed to extract and transport that much iron to the Southern Ocean?). But this conference reminded us that really it is us who depend on the seas, and that the most convincing argument for managing them more wisely is simple self interest.

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.