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Non-zombie ideas in ecology: Gause's The Struggle for Existence

drupaladmin
9 July 2011
I've been pretty rough on the 'zombie' ideas of famous ecologists lately. So I decided to balance things a bit by highlighting a famous ecologist with some very modern, and very non-zombie, ideas: G. F. Gause . He's famous for the competitive exclusion principle, of...

What's your best paper?

drupaladmin
9 July 2011
This is a common job interview question in academia, but it's also fun just to think about, at least once you've published more than a couple of papers. Often, the papers of which we're proudest aren't the ones that are most cited, because our pride reflects features...

Zombie ideas in ecology: r and K selection

drupaladmin
29 June 2011
In a previous post, I suggested that mathematics is a powerful weapon against zombie ideas, ideas that should be dead, but aren't. But mathematics is a double-edged sword. Unless it's used carefully, math can create zombies as well as slay them. Just as our choice of...

37 ways choice of words can mislead scientists

drupaladmin
28 June 2011
In a previous post , I said that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is one of the works that most influenced me, because of the attention Wittgenstein pays to the ways in which the very words we use can mislead us. I think this is a particularly important...

But we don't FEEL old...

drupaladmin
28 June 2011
Wordpress tells you what search engine terms people have used to find your blog. Earlier today someone found the Oikos blog by searching for "an old blog". Wow, from brand new to "old" in less than four months! This makes folks like Jeremy Yoder , Marc Cadotte , Ethan...

Evidence that granting agencies should fund people, not projects

drupaladmin
28 June 2011
At least, they should if they want to maximize their chances of funding truly groundbreaking research, and are willing to accept an increased risk of failure. That's the conclusion of what seems to be a quite rigorous and detailed study of the work of HHMI...

Free idea for a provocative review paper

drupaladmin
24 June 2011
In the spirit of advancing contrarian ecology , here’s an idea for a provocative review paper which I think a lot of people would find really interesting and useful, but that I don’t have time to write myself. Someone should review the theoretical literature and...

Why do theoreticians and empiricists often talk past one another?

drupaladmin
23 June 2011
This post is inspired by an honest and good-humored comment by Robin Svensson on my post on zombie ideas in ecology . Robin, by his own admission, is a zombie—he stills sees value in classical theoretical ideas about the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH)...

What publications have most influenced you as an ecologist?

drupaladmin
21 June 2011
What papers and books have most influenced you as an ecologist? This isn’t the same as asking about the best papers and books you’ve ever read. I’ve read lots of brilliant papers which haven’t influenced me, for instance because they merely reinforced, rather than...

Zombie ideas in ecology

drupaladmin
17 June 2011
Ideas, once they take root, are hard to kill. Thomas Henry Huxley famously referred to "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" as "[t]he great tragedy of Science". But like Hamlet , it's a fictional tragedy—it doesn’t actually happen that way. Ideas,...

Dr. Seuss: community ecologist

drupaladmin
16 June 2011
Probably a lot of you already know about this (I first saw it quoted in an old paper of Simon Levin's ), but for those of you who don't, the following passage is from Dr. Seuss ' On Beyond Zebra : And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches Who live in small caves,...

Bob Holt has an old-school 'blog'

drupaladmin
14 June 2011
It's so old-school, it's in print form. Bob has been doing a series of informal essays for the Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution. He's using as way to get down on paper all the ideas he has that, for whatever reason, aren't a good fit for a standard scientific...

May 2011 Editor's Choice: Dioecy, hermaphrodites and pathogen load in plants.

drupaladmin
13 June 2011
Right on time as always! Over the month of May, I read a digital stack of Oikos papers, but since they are all published already, I get to pick one that I like best here to promote it a bit. My favourite was 'Dioecy, hermaphrodites and pathogen load in plants' by...

Objections to microcosms in ecology, and their answers

drupaladmin
10 June 2011
I work in protist microcosms. A typical experimental unit is a glass jar with 80 ml of nutrient medium, which I inoculate with bacteria, protists, and perhaps other microbes. Then I (actually my research assistants) follow the resulting population dynamics. Several...

Advice: tips for talks and stats

drupaladmin
8 June 2011
Here is a document I wrote up for the ecology grad students at my university, with tips on giving a good talk, and on some common statistical mistakes to avoid. As with all the advice I offer, it is far from comprehensive. For more comprehensive advice, see the...

Oikos blog post used as course material

drupaladmin
7 June 2011
Here . I'm flattered! Wonder if it's going to be on the exam?

My first publication: revisiting an Oikos non-classic

drupaladmin
7 June 2011
I published my very first paper in Oikos ( Fox and Smith 1997 ). It was part of my undergraduate honors thesis. I spent the summer before my senior year working with David Smith , Josh Van Buskirk , and another undergraduate at David's field site off of Isle Royale in...

Advice: weak reasons for choosing a research project

drupaladmin
3 June 2011
This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series of posts on ‘random advice for graduate students’. I will make no attempt to be comprehensive; if you want comprehensive, have a look at How to do ecology and the excellent set of resources compiled by...

Why ecologists should refight the 'null model wars' (UPDATED)

drupaladmin
1 June 2011
Sometimes, scientific debates get resolved in favor of one side or the other. Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, and those who thought otherwise were incorrect. Sometimes, debates get resolved in favor of some intermediate or synthetic position. The neutralist-...

Novel perspectives on MaxEnt (UPDATEDx2)

drupaladmin
27 May 2011
Over the past couple of years Oikos has published a bunch of really thoughtful and interesting papers on the use of maximum entropy ('MaxEnt') in ecology; see the special feature in the April 2010 issue and references therein. The debate over MaxEnt, both in Oikos and...

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