Ecological experiments: Between a rock and a hard place (Editorial)
Author(s)
Frid, CLJ
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2020
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
When I ask my first-year marine science students what they think science is, apart from some blank looks, I get a range of answers. One of the most common themes that emerges is that science is not a thing, but a way of doing things and that way of doing centres on experiments. Brought up in a western culture, for them science has become synonymous with a ‘Popparian philosophy’ (Popper, 1962), focused on the experimental falsification of hypotheses. This is difficult to do in the marine environment. In the dynamic offshore environment, the concept of replication becomes challenging, conditions are never matched exactly in ...
View more >When I ask my first-year marine science students what they think science is, apart from some blank looks, I get a range of answers. One of the most common themes that emerges is that science is not a thing, but a way of doing things and that way of doing centres on experiments. Brought up in a western culture, for them science has become synonymous with a ‘Popparian philosophy’ (Popper, 1962), focused on the experimental falsification of hypotheses. This is difficult to do in the marine environment. In the dynamic offshore environment, the concept of replication becomes challenging, conditions are never matched exactly in space or time; while constraining organisms such as plankton or fish that live in intimate contact with the medium and travel large distances likely brings with it the potential for experimental artefacts. It is, perhaps, therefore surprising that marine rocky shores have been a major site for ecological experiments that have been fundamental to our understanding of the ecological workings of the world and underpin a significant amount of ecological theory. Hawkins et al. (2020) describes the evolution of our knowledge of rocky shore ecology and in particular how experimental studies on rocky shores have been used to develop theoretical frameworks and to test ecological hypotheses
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View more >When I ask my first-year marine science students what they think science is, apart from some blank looks, I get a range of answers. One of the most common themes that emerges is that science is not a thing, but a way of doing things and that way of doing centres on experiments. Brought up in a western culture, for them science has become synonymous with a ‘Popparian philosophy’ (Popper, 1962), focused on the experimental falsification of hypotheses. This is difficult to do in the marine environment. In the dynamic offshore environment, the concept of replication becomes challenging, conditions are never matched exactly in space or time; while constraining organisms such as plankton or fish that live in intimate contact with the medium and travel large distances likely brings with it the potential for experimental artefacts. It is, perhaps, therefore surprising that marine rocky shores have been a major site for ecological experiments that have been fundamental to our understanding of the ecological workings of the world and underpin a significant amount of ecological theory. Hawkins et al. (2020) describes the evolution of our knowledge of rocky shore ecology and in particular how experimental studies on rocky shores have been used to develop theoretical frameworks and to test ecological hypotheses
View less >
Journal Title
Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom
Volume
100
Issue
7
Subject
Ecology
Plant biology
Zoology