A pair of great tits

Parnus major

(You pervert...)

Photo:http://www.nundafoto.net/gallery/photo/479-mesange-charbonniere-parus-major

The quest for flawless science

As a junior scientist studying living organisms I am constantly in pursuit of the holy grail of our field.

A perfect study!

The one where you’ve considered all the factors, taken every precaution, sifted out all the nonsense and analyzed every ounce of information from your precious data. All of your hard work and effort pay off after you handed in that manuscript and it returned just as clean. Finding out that your best effort was not good enough is quite possibly the scariest thing that can happen to our kind. We’d sooner give up entirely and become bartenders in the UK (or pack fish in Alaska…that’s quite a popular one) than continue down a path where we were certain we’d be dishonoured.

Why all the talk of uncertainty you ask? Well today I read through some old text books and realised something. It seemed little at the time but after some thought the significance of what I had come to realise seemed quite epic. In my pursuit of perfection I had forgotten about one of our most sacred rules in biology.

Don’t be an idiot!

Let me explain. I started thinking about how flawed my motives and study could potentially be after reading this sentence “If one attempted to study adaptation simply by measuring survival and reproductive success, one would reach the vacuous conclusion that those that survive and reproduce are those that survive and reproduce” (Scriven, 1959). GASP! I was so obsessed about eliminating external factors to find out about sugar preferences in avian frugivores that I had inadvertently shot myself in the foot. My theoretical approach to the question I had asked had focused solely on isolating and studying a single factor. It would have been more appropriate for me to try mimicking my test subject’s natural environment to learn something more useful and applicable to the real world. Now (3 years on) all I can do is predict vague trends, much too shallow and universally applicable to actually be meaningful and contribute significantly to my field of study.

Oh, FishSTicks!