Ecology suffers from a surfeit or people who feel that if you don't do
things their way it isn't right.
One of the greatest events in marine ecology in my opinion was the discovery
of abyssal vent communities fuelled by chemosynthesis. I have no idea what
the funding proposal for this research was, but the key factor was that an
ROV went to a new kind of location and just looked around. Some of the
greatest discoveries in all fields af science involved stumbling across
something totally unexpected, and certainly not hypothesized.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Meiss" <mme...@gmail.com>
To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU>
Sent: terça-feira, 8 de Março de 2011 13:49
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Hypothesis Testing in Ecology
I am amazed by Pat Swain's statements implying that unless a program of
work
includes formal hypothesis testing, it's not even research. ("...I think
that pure survey of a property for species (making a list of all the
species
of some taxonomic group) encountered isn't research...", "...some of the
projects that I rejected as not being research might well have been
fundable
...")This appears to be defining the word research in a way I have never
seen or heard before. Does this mean that none of the scientific work
that
was done before the rise of modern statistics was not research? Where the
people doing that work also not really scientists? And whatever happened
to
library research?
Martin
