mobilis in mobili

I have been traveling over the past several days to the 8th International Congress for Neuroethology in Vancouver, BC.  Aside from the weather being absolutely terrible (cold, rainy, evidentially the most consecutive days of rain in July for the region), I have been having a great time learning about some really cool neurobiological systems, as well as the intellectual history of the society and our greater field of Neuroethology.  One of the things that has really stricken me was a talk given last night about our field’s founder Ted Bullock, who a defender of comparative methods in neurobiology on many fronts. In reflecting on the somewhat ridiculous variation in animal systems  our society actively investigates, (and very few fields can boast), I thought about this project to some extent.  It would appear that one value in the connection between what I would call ‘biological values’ and public research funding seem to intertwine through Ted’s philosophy.  My advisor often tells me that Ted’s big influence on the field came from his encouragement of many scientists to go into nature and find ‘animal specialists’ for a problem, and study their natural behaviors to illuminate paths of research.  While Bullock and the ISN have taken this in a sensory regard, I think this philosophy encompasses a much broader approach to the way biology is done.  Avoiding institutionalized reductionism  seems to be a very good  way forward for american science to proceed forward without being able to predict directions ahead of time.  A great example of this has been some of the work done by electric fish biologists who have begun to look at how grades of natural stimuli are encoded by sensory affarents- this is inherently interesting work to many fields and disciplines (Information Theory, Computational Biology, Cellular Neuroscience to name a few), but would have not been considered were it not for understanding the behavior of a seemingly esoteric group of fishes.

This is an essential crux of a problem that I have (and the problem for which I’ve launched this blog), though, because it justifies the work of scientists.  A retiree from the electric fish community, Curtis Bell, remarked a few nights ago that he used his science to express himself.  To me, there is a a lot of merit in this statement, but a feeling and a thought that I think bears further reflection.  Can one ‘express themselves’ through science in the same way they ‘express themselves’ through art?

Wonder what other countries think about evolution? For the curious, the US is just above Turkey in percent respondents beleiving evolution was true (blue) false (red) or unsure (orange).

from Miller et al. Public Acceptance of Evolution Science 11 August 2006, pp 765-766

And, an interesting article which essentially presents evidence that the majority of 42 undergraduates at Harvard surveyed by Andrew Shtulman revealed that they in fact misunderstood evolution… though he comments this has little bearing on the leanings of these subjects toward ID or evolution!

From Shtulman (2006):

Devout atheists like Dawkins (1987)
speculate that disbelief in evolution stems from a misunderstanding of
Darwin’s theory, for anyone who grasps the explanatory power of natural
selection cannot help but affirm its validity. However, studies that
have measured both participants’ belief in natural selection and
participants’ understanding of natural selection (e.g., Demastes et al., 1995, Lawson and Worsnop, 1992 and Sinatra et al., 2003)
have found no significant correlation between the two. Consistent with
these studies, participants in the present study were no more likely to
endorse the statement “natural selection is the best explanation for
how a species adapts to its environment” if they understood natural
selection than if they did not.

For full reference, see: Shtulman, A. (2006). Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution. Cognitive Psychology, 52, 170-194.

Welcome to mobilis in mobili.org.  I started this blog in order to journal my investigation of U.S. science funding.  I find the system to be incredibly confusing, and I am curious to find a way to simplify matters for myself and for others.  As a graduate student, I am often hearing about ‘the funding situation’ for public science, but I rarely hear complimentary statistics, if I hear statistics at all.

A second interest of mine is to explore science education and values surrounding research.  For example, I study electric fish biology, my interests are somewhat far removed from the public interest, at least in terms of health care improvement, but I still feel like it is important research.   Why is this?

At any rate- I’m new to the blogosphere, so I hope to learn a lot with this little venture… here goes!