Biodiversity, babies and books

Those of you who have read a few of my posts will know that, in the Venn diagram of my life, the ‘biodiversity and natural history’ set occupies a large space, as does the ‘literature’ set; and the set of a certain small child is expanding rapidly too. At the intersection of these three sets, it is striking just how chock full of animals children’s books are. One wonders, then, just what all these talking elephants and big bad wolves are teaching kids about the biodiversity of our planet. In a nice paper has just come out in PLoS ONE, examining children’s attitudes towards biodiversity, the authors have assessed the abilities of 7-11 year old schoolkids to identify ‘local’ species – those that they might actually see near where they live – and ‘exotic’ species, which are typically charismatic and tend to be over-represented in the many forms of media to which children are exposed, from books to Disney films. Perhaps not surprisingly, the kids are much more familiar with the charismatic exotic species, and what is more, they would prefer to protect these virtual (unseen) animals over those which live locally.

Now of course there is no substitute for getting outside and learning natural history through observation, but books (and other media) can play a part too. And not all books focus on megafauna from far-off lands. Indeed, the author of some of the most iconic of books for young children has championed everyday creepy-crawlies: Eric Carle is best known for a certain peckish Lepidoteran larva, but has also written books featuring crickets, moths, and cicadas as well as ladybirds, fireflies and spiders. And my son is now enjoying a story about a hermit crab, anemone, and bristleworm sharing a shell, by our current children’s laureate, Julia Donaldson.

There are some other great books around with a focus on the wonders of the familiar. Simon James writes and illustrates some lovely stories about the joys of exploring at the seaside (Sally and the Limpet) or in the woods down the road (The Wild Woods). Harris Finds His Feet by Catherine Rayner is a strikingly illustrated story of a young hare and his granddad. And let’s not forget that the classic fairy tales are full of animals that used to be local (wolves, bears), too. So I do think that the less exotic species do get a look in, at least, among the pandas, tigers and hippopotami.

As a scientist reading these books, of course, I tend to pick up on little natural history inaccuracies, and can’t help dwelling on them. I am perfectly happy to accept talking animals and fanciful storylines, but get the number of legs wrong on a caterpillar and it will bug me forever!

My pedantry comes to the fore every time I open Chris Wormell’s One Smart Fish. I actually think it’s a really clever attempt to tell the story of evolution, through the longing of a particularly clever fish to walk on land (he tries it and gets bored; but triggers, over ‘hundreds of millions of years’, as the book nicely points out, the evolution of all four-legged land animals). No problem with that. But what annoys me is the bloody goldfish! Right there in the sea with all the other marine fish, this pretty member of the exclusively freshwater carp family!

As for whether my son grows up enjoying local nature, or pines for something more exotic, well, who knows. But just now he’s rather keen on a certain quangle wangle, and I don’t think we get crumpetty trees in Yorkshire…

Is writing a high impact paper the same as doing good science?

We are under starters’ orders, then, and beginning to feel the pressure as expectation builds for us to achieve success and acclaim. No, not the 2012 Olympics; rather, everything in UK academic research is gearing up for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the mechanism by which the quality of our research over the last few years will be judged, and decisions made on how government money should be shared between institutes in the future.

Much of the focus of this exercise, certainly for those of us in scientific disciplines, is on the production of so-called ‘high impact’ papers. Each of us must submit for assessment our four ‘best’ papers of the last 5 years or so; a panel will then grade each on a scale from 1 to 4 (actually, 1* to 4*, but the stars seem superfluous to me when there is no option of an unstarred number). A 1* paper is ‘quality that is recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour’; 2* replaces ‘nationally’ with ‘internationally’; 3* is ‘internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which falls short of the highest standards of excellence’; and 4* is ‘world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour’. (Work can also be unclassified if it’s crap, but it seems unlikely that many submissions will fall into that category.)

Of course, the £610K / $1M question is, how do you judge the quality of a piece of published research? The REF has devoted thousands of man hours and reams of text to this question, which I won’t rehash here. Suffice it to say that the most simplistic interpretation, which happens to be one that many institutions are assuming will be the major criterion applied in the REF, is, depressingly, that the quality of work is accurately reflected by the impact factor of the journal in which it appears.

I have written before on how misguided that is, but, amazingly, it appears that my blog went unheeded. Again, I don’t really want to go over old ground again, simply to state that it is commonly assumed that a 4* paper means a paper in one of the weekly tabloids; nothing else will do.

Now, I have no intention of denigrating these publications, still less of biting the hand that hosts me – clearly, they are world-leading in their standards of originality, significance, and rigour. Rather, I wanted to point out what I see as a worrying trend, which is conducting research with the objective of ‘writing a Nature paper’.

Of course, every research project probably starts with the thought that, if all goes well, if the results are unusually stunning, unambiguous, and free of messy nuance; if the stars align just so, and the editor is having a good day when I submit; then maybe, just maybe, this might get into a top journal. But the focus is on doing the science as well as possible, and deciding on an outlet for it once the results are in.

Now, however, it seems that every workshop I am invited to has the objective (very likely a condition of funding the thing) of producing a ‘high impact paper’. In other words, the template for reporting the results is decided before any analysis is begun. Ambition is no bad thing, of course, and one might as well aim high. But, if you set by writing the headline, what happens if the story doesn’t quite pan out how you hoped?

The right option is to re-assess, and perhaps take a few more pages to thoroughly explore your more complex results for a good, but CV-wise non-stellar paper in a less high-profile journal. The temptation though, is to plough on regardless, to try to squeeze that pint into a quart pot; not, in almost all cases, to fabricate anything; but perhaps to emphasise here to draw attention away from here.

Of course, playing this game is no guarantee of success: we can usually rely on the review process to sift the wheat from the chaff, even in cases where the drive and strength of personality of the group leader has managed to bring the work to the submission stage. But the wider question is, Is this a good way to do science? And the corallary: What implications does this have for assessing research quality?

Can't scientists be intellectuals too?

Is it conceited of me to fancy myself as a bit of an intellectual? I have after all, like most practising scientists, obtained a doctorate in philosophy (and my PhD certainly included a good amount of ‘Ph’). Now I am paid, essentially, to sit and think, and to write about what I have thought. And I read pretty widely, and pretty critically, fact and fiction. If nothing else, the range of posts on this blog show that I’m certainly prepared (am perhaps too keen, if anything) to pontificate on subjects well outside my nominal area of expertise. I don’t think I am in any way unusual in this. Plenty of professional scientists would also count themselves as thinkers, perhaps even philosophers, and certainly intellectuals. Yet scientific voices remain very scarce in public intellectual debate in the UK. Sure, we’ll wheel out an ‘expert’ to comment on something on which they are, indeed, expert. But the thinkers considered suitable contributors to more general discussions on the human condition, public policy, and the like, remain overwhelmingly drawn from the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.

This is all to give a little context, then, to my rather chippy reaction to finding out that the Arts & Humanities Research Council, together with the BBC, have identified 10 new public intellectuals through their New Generation Thinkers scheme. Said reaction being: ‘So ’intelligent discussion’ programmes on TV and radio will welcome yet more Oxbridge humanities graduates with a double first in self aggrandisement and a keen interest in the sounds of their own voices, yet no concept of the distinction between fact and opinion? Whoopie-doo.’

As it happens, this is unfair. Although at least 6 of the 10 have come through Oxbridge at some point (generally as undergrads), only one of them currently works at Cambridge, and none at Oxford. And they all look to be very high-achieving, worthy winners – several have already published well-received books, and all their ‘specialist subjects’ sound interesting, from Britain in the 1790s to the Rwandan Genocide.

But the broader point, and the source of my frustration, holds: why aren’t the scientific research councils doing something similar? Listen to what the scheme offers its winners, and turn green with envy:

BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) today announce the 10 winners of the inaugural New Generation Thinkers Scheme – the culmination of a nationwide search for the brightest academic minds with the potential to turn their ideas into fascinating broadcasts… The New Generation Thinkers for 2011 will now work closely with dedicated mentors from the production team of Radio 3’s arts and ideas programme Night Waves (Mondays to Thursdays 10-10.45pm). And each night from Tuesday 28 June, and for nine subsequent editions of Night Waves, a New Generation Thinker will talk about an idea inspired by their research.

Sounds pretty good, eh? And when you consider that it will surely be a fast track to regular appearances on the myriad cultural comment programmes on TV and radio, all in all a pretty good gig.

The science research councils seem to still be operating on assumption that what scientists really want is instruction from communications professionals, that we are all clamouring for the opportunity to be offered a walk-on part in Horizon, rather than actually to shape public intellectual discourse.

Even the Royal Society, who fund me, have betrayed something of this attitude in the new secondment opportunity that they have introduced for research fellows, which appears to be a kind of ‘advanced work experience’ at the BBC – getting to play with editing software and the like. It does look fun, I admit (providing you already live in London, as it comes with no living expenses; interestingly, 5/10 of the New Generation Thinkers are also London-based), but it does rather stand in contrast to the AHRC scheme: work experience, as opposed to a leg-up into public intellectual life.

I’m not suggesting that we scientists are offered anything on a plate, nor that we have any special privilege to contribute to public discourse. But rather, that public discourse would be enriched by more contributions of working scientists, applying their hard-won analytical and critical skills to fields outside their area of expertise. This would be both a complement and a balance to the views expressed (often in the absence of data) by the various think-tanks, pressure groups, and assembled ‘thinkers’ that tend to dominate discussions of social policy options.