On seeing the big picture

Nice post from Joan Strassman at Sociobiology on the art of seeing the big picture, the forest for the trees. The way to do that is to have "blurry vision", so that you can't see individual trees at all. Read the whole thing.

Joan's thoughts were prompted by attending a philosophy seminar. For a while now I've been meaning to do a post on a sort of implicit, running theme of this blog, the ways in which thinking philosophically can help you be a better ecologist. Must get around to writing that post at some point...