Thinker's Block

One of the challenges of managing the progression from being ’somebody’s post-doc’ to an autonomous PI is to maintain the flow of new ideas. To start with, this is easy. After all, if you’re anything like me, you will have spend a considerable portion of the preceding few years developing and honing a whole stock of ideas, trying to convince employers and fellowship panels of their worth. The moment someone finally agrees to fund you, you’re up an running, free and gloriously independent to bring these thoughts to fruition. The first cracks in this blissful state of being start to appear a couple of years later. You’ve tried out those things that you were sure would make your name. They may have worked, to an extent – you’ve probably published a few papers of which you’re rather proud. And no doubt, your initial research has suggested all kinds of routes for future work.

The first decision you need to make is, should I be pursuing these new ideas myself? Or, should I be chasing the money, aiming to employ people to do the work for me? On the one hand, your institution will be desperate for the overheads that a big grant will bring (conveniently overlooking the generous overheads that your fellowship is already delivering…). But – you also need to think, how much do I want to be a manager? Especially when you know, deep down, that the person best qualified to do the work quickly and to the requisite standard is, well, you.

The second big mental shift you need to make is to recognise that there is no end point. There’s no final report, no thesis to hand in, after which you can go out and celebrate, relax. No. Even if you’ve achieved everything you set out to, got it all written up and published; even then, you’ve got to come into work the next day, face that blank page, and think what to do next. All the while well aware that the most productive researchers in your field have maintained an average publication rate of a paper every two weeks for over 10 years…

This is when the doubts creep in. Are you up to this after all? What if your last good idea really was just that: your last good idea. What’s next on the list? And after that? Where are your next 6 papers coming from? Your next big grant application?

It’s easy, on such occasions, to feel swamped, to feel the sheer enormity of the amount of stuff you need to know, to read and absorb and understand in order to make progress in any one of the disparate areas that interest you; to wish, sometimes, that you could be happy making steady, incremental progress in one tiny area, rather than constantly to seek an exciting new challenge in a discipline whose history and literature remain (to you) as yet unknown. Even the most meticulously-ordered hierarchical to-do list can struggle to cope with this.

Two things can help here. Dripping taps. And walking.

I can’t remember where I picked up the dripping tap analogy, but the idea when feeling flooded is to imagine this flood emanating from a vast array of dripping taps, each one representing something that you should be doing. And then you simply walk methodically through this landscape, concentrating on a tap at a time, turning each off in turn. You won’t stem the tide, of course, but you may keep your head above water.

And walking. Nietzsche said that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”, but the quote I cling to more is one half remembered, I’m pretty sure from Roger Deakin’s lovely Wildwood, about “working it out while walking”. The rhythm of walking seems to coax disparate thoughts out into the open, encouraging them to coalesce into something more tangible. (In passing, you can crowbar this into theories of creativity if you like, for instance James Webb Young’s classic A Technique for Producing Ideas involves thinking very very hard about something, then removing yourself from the work environment – by going for a walk, say – to let the doughy information you’ve absorbed prove into a nice elastic idea.)

So if you see me marching around Weston Park in Sheffield, chances are I’m tackling my thinker’s block. And incidentally, this walk home seems to have done the trick of unclogging my blogger’s block, too.

Battling for the right name: thinking about climate 'sceptics'

Getting the name of your movement right is crucial. Can you imagine waking up one morning, as a campaigner for the right of women to have abortions, to realise that the other side had just called their campaign Pro-Life? How can you counter that, without seeming somehow ‘anti life’? So Pro-Choice was born. It’s a good attempt, but can’t help but sound like a compromise, like second best. Fairtrade is another example, which shows that sometimes the liberals get in first. By labelling ethically traded goods as ‘fair’, the strong implication is that everything that is not so labelled is (by definition, indeed) unfair. (There was even a suggestion, which I rather like, on Mark Thomas’s Radio 4 political comedy The Manifesto that all goods which do not carry the ‘FairTrade’ logo should be labelled ‘Unfair Trade’…) Of course, what some of the big importers of coffee, chocolate, tropical fruit and so on have done is to introduce their own brand of fair trade (without actually signing up to the binding conditions that the fair trade label requires; ‘not-quite-as-unfair-as-usual-trade’, if you like), but again, it feels like they’ve been caught on the hop.

The reason I bring this up is because of the shameless commandeering of the word ‘sceptic’ by those who refuse to accept the evidence that Earth’s climate is changing as a consequence of human actions.

Now, I happen to think that the term ‘sceptic’ is a very complimentary one. As a child in Sunday School, I was always kind of proud to share a name with the only sceptical disciple (an early sign, perhaps, that I was bound for the scientific rather than the clerical life…) And I certainly believe that one has to earn the title ‘sceptic’ (although there might be exceptions: I remember a report in the local press when I was a kid, of a star rugby player forced to miss a game with a ‘sceptic toe’…).

By all reasonable definitions of the term, all of us scientists should aspire to be sceptics. But even the most fervent sceptic should be swayed by the weight of evidence (my biblical namesake, after all, was finally convinced by the evidence of his eyes and fingers). So, I would like to think of myself as a climate change sceptic: I have critically considered the evidence, and the most parsimonious (i.e. sceptical) position is that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are having a profound effect on the Earth’s climate, biogeochemistry, and ecology.

But, us proper sceptics have been gazumped: the term ‘climate sceptic’ is now irreversibly associated with a different kind of sceptical approach. One which cherry picks facts to match an argument, and ignores all evidence to the contrary – even when this contrary evidence far outweighs the favourable evidence in terms of both quality and quantity. One which gives more credence to internet rumours than to peer-reviewed (i.e., quality controlled) scientific research. A definition of ‘sceptical’ which is, in fact, indistinguishable from ‘credulous’.

What can we do? We need a name that encompasses proper scientific scepticism, to counter this false-sceptic meme. To date, the argument has usually been framed as between climate scientists and climate sceptics, but this is misleading – it suggests that the ‘sceptics’ are some kind of independent scrutinising body, overseeing the scientific process. To return to the example I started with, it’s kind of like pitting ‘pro-life’ against ‘the medical establishment’; there’s a non-equivalence there.

My suggestion? Well, it’s tricky, because most candidates have already been snapped up by the brand-savvy ‘sceptics’. I’d originally thought of ‘climate realist’ as an umbrella term which suggests scepticism, pragmatism, and a certain down-to-earthness; but it turns out there’s a different kind of realist (read: fantasist) already… So what about ‘climate thinkers’?

I would love to see a news programme pitting a ‘renowned climate sceptic’ (Nigel Lawson, say) against a ‘respected climate thinker’ – perhaps Nicholas Stern, or David King, or Paul Nurse, or any other true sceptic.

Foundation Papers

I was musing recently on the papers that have had made the biggest impression on me at various points in my career. Although we might all agree on a selection of ‘classic’ papers in any one discipline, those which have been most formative for me constitute a very personal selection. Timing, I realised, was everything: some papers just hit my desk at a very opportune moment. I’ve published this list in the British Ecological Society’s Bulletin, but invite you to add comments and suggestions here. I’ll pass suitable ecological ones over to the Bulletin editor. Kunin, W.E. & K.J. Gaston 1993. The biology of rarity: patterns, causes and consequences. TREE 8: 298-301
As a fresh-faced ecology graduate from UEA, I found my first gainful employment as a research assistant to John Reynolds, collating data on life history correlates of rarity and extinction risk in European freshwater fish. One day, John passed me Bill and Kevin’s book on The Biology of Rarity, which seemed particularly relevant to the task, containing as it did a series of papers on the biological differences between rare and common species. When I saw advertised a PhD, with Kevin and Bill, on Evolutionary Causes and Consequences of Rarity, well – it seemed almost rude not to apply. I did, I got it, and a mere dozen years later here I am. The book was spawned from this earlier review article, so you could say this started it all.

Jablonski, D. 1987. Heritability at the species level: analysis of geographic ranges of Cretaceous mollusks. Science 238: 360-363
This had a profound influence on me, despite – or more accurately, because – of the fact that I disagree with it in several key respects. Jablonski uses data on the distribution of fossil molluscs to show that having a large geographic range size influences the lifespan of a species, in terms of its duration in the fossil record. More contentiously, he also claims that geographic range is, in effect, heritable at the species level, based on what looked to me like very dubious relationships between the range sizes of ancestor and descendant species. Exploring this scepticism vastly expanded my understanding of both statistics and geographic ranges. It also added the ‘Ph’ into my PhD, as I delved into the philosophy of hierarchical theories of natural selection. I still think he was wrong about range size heritability, but am grateful that this paper pushed me to find out why.

Freckleton, R.P., J.A. Gill, D. Noble & A.R. Watkinson 2005. Large-scale population dynamics, abundance-occupancy relationships and the scaling from local to regional population size. J Animal Ecology 74: 353-364.
The impact of this paper on me is two-fold. First, after the first decade or so of macroecology had proved so successful at identifying patterns and relationships emergent at large spatial scales, there was a risk of the field stagnating into a series of scatter plots with straight lines forced through great clouds of points. The BES symposium organised in 2002 by Kevin Gaston and Tim Blackburn provided the impetus for a flurry of new thinking, epitomised I think by Rob’s paper. It is difficult to say whether it is downscaling macroecology, by delving into the population-dynamic mechanisms driving the abundance-occupancy relationship; or upscaling population biology, by depicting its large-scale consequences. Either way, the theoretical basis presented here opens the door to a more predictive macroecology. The second, more prosaic reason for including this paper: Rob’s thinking about these issues coincided with me looking for a job; the ideas presented here led to an important post-doctoral position for me.

Pauly, D. 1995. Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. TREE 10: 430.
At just a single page, this is the shortest paper in my selection; but it seems to me more important with every passing year. There are two key messages: first, that if we judge the ‘natural’ state of an ecosystem as that which we remember from our youth, then the ‘baseline’ of what, collectively, we think of as ‘pristine’ will shift over the generations. Jared Diamond later coined the term ‘creeping normalcy’ to describe the same phenomenon, but Pauly was there first (and with a more elegant term!). Pauly’s second insight was that, in the absence of very long time series of ecological data, one way around the shifting baseline problem is to use anecdotal evidence. He quotes, for instance, the example of his colleague’s grandfather, who in the 1920s was irritated by the (then worthless) bluefin tuna tangling his mackerel nets set in the Kattegat – a situation that seems remarkable when, in January this year, a 342kg bluefin sold for £250,000 in Tokyo. Pauly states that “this observation is as factual as a temperature record”, which raises profound questions about the meaning of ‘data’ in historical ecology.

Jackson, J.B.C. 2001. What was natural in the coastal oceans? PNAS 98: 5411-5418.
Several people have taken Pauly’s idea and run with it, for instance Callum Roberts in his recent book, The Unnatural History of the Sea. Jeremy Jackson is one such. I’ve been fortunate to see Jackson talk on several occasions now, and he has the knack – apparent in this paper – of being both profoundly depressing and inspiring at the same time. How can one not be inspired by his evocation of the vast herds of green turtles and manatees in Central America? And yet depressed by the processes that have led to their current parlous state. In this paper, Jackson uses the kinds of anecdotes championed by Pauly, including things such as ships’ logbooks and archaeological records, and combines them with a deal of ecological understanding, some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and not inconsiderable chutzpah to tell a story of the lost riches of our coastal ecosystems. The inspiration comes from the thought that it’s not too late to recapture some of this; the marine megafauna are largely still with us.

Jennings, S. & J.L. Blanchard 2004. Fish abundance with no fishing: predictions based on macroecological theory. J Animal Ecology 73: 632-642.
Uniting the macroecology with the marine ecology covered in the previous papers, where Pauly and Jackson used anecdotes, Simon Jennings and Julia Blanchard apply some more quantitative rigour to reconstructing an idealised, unexploited North Sea fish community. By using a theoretically derived, empirically verified relationship between abundance and body mass, they are able to estimate the expected biomass of fishes of different sizes in the North Sea, in the absence of exploitation by fisheries. The statistical results are no less striking than the vivid pictures painted by Jackson: fish weighing over 4kg are well over 95% less abundant than theory predicts that they ‘should’ be, a difference entirely due to our propensity to extract, batter and eat such big fish. I really like the application of something so apparently theoretical (analysis of size spectra) to such a tangible real-world example.

So there we go: my academic life in half a dozen papers. I actually feel quite exposed, and doubtless am leaving myself open to various unfavourable judgements. Not an experiment among them, for instance – which I think just means that it tends to be the more polemical pieces that stick with me. I suspect there is little overlap between my selection, and any that you might make, but that’s kind of the point.