Transcript
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
Hi. My name is Richard Holliman and I’m one of the Block 1 authors on S350 Evaluating contemporary science.
I’m here today with Phil Wheeler, who also works on S350. Phil works in the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems Sciences, at The Open University.
We’re here to discuss how science progresses.
So Phil – what is your current topic of enquiry?
PHIL WHEELER
I’m an applied ecologist and conservation biologist and that means that I’m interested in animals and plants mostly, and how they interact with their environment. That’s the ecology bit.
The applied bit is about how those interactions relate to things that go on in the real world and how they affect people and human systems.
And the conservation biology bit is what happens when particular animals and plants or particular ecosystems become rare or threatened and usually that’s to do with people as well.
So I sort of work in science, but in areas of science that really relate to what people do.
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
So what do you see is the characteristic, or key characteristics, of a successful scientist?
PHIL WHEELER
I think first and foremost it’s creativity. You’ve got to have ideas and that is at the beginning of the scientific process; thinking about questions that you are going to ask. And then it goes through that whole process thinking how you’re going to answer the questions.
In the real world, nothing happens without money, without resources so – so partly what you’ve got to do as a scientist is to figure out how you’re gonna convince somebody to give you the money or the resources to answer the questions that you’ve come up with.
So creativity goes across the piece there, and different scientists are good at different bits of that. Some are brilliant at all three and they’re the people who really get ahead. Most of us humans are good at one or two bits of that whole process.
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
So what scientific evidence would you argue is currently agreed knowledge in your discipline?
PHIL WHEELER
It’s a difficult question for me Rick, because I’m an applied ecologist so what I do is very practical and it’s very difficult to go back to theoretical fundamentals that relate to lots of different practical scenarios.
So I would take it – run it back to the theory of evolution by natural selection. That’s the fundamental thing that underpins our understanding of all biological and ecological systems.
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
Okay. And how did that scientific evidence become agreed knowledge in your discipline?
PHIL WHEELER
It’s a long story, you’re going back over 150 years, but I suppose natural selection was an idea that was at its time, one that explained lots of things that didn’t have adequate explanations, and so it was very widely adopted but not uncontroversial and really the process over the fifty years following the publication of The Origin of the Species, which was the main kind of description of that, was about exploring the implications, testing the idea.
It was going back and saying right, if this is correct we should see this in nature. If this is correct then our experiments should generate these results.
Do the experiment – does it? By and large yes, and then incorporating other ideas that sort of developed out of that and other ideas that weren’t very familiar: genetics, understanding DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic code and affects natural selection.
They were all things that happened after that and were fundamental to fleshing out bits of the original theory that didn’t necessarily make sense or had little gaps in.
And for an ecologist it’s about exploring what the implications of natural selection are for how organisms interact with their environment and then how that relates to populations, abundances, distribution of organisms – all those sorts of things.
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
That’s a really interesting explanation. What you’re saying to me is, if you like, there is a bedrock and on top of that bedrock all these kind of interesting ideas which are slightly modified or extended that kind of initial understanding.
I’m kind of curious about how did that new knowledge, if you like, come in to adapt the original one?
PHIL WHEELER
In different sorts of ways. I think there will always be people who think that they’ve undermined existing, established knowledge and you often see scientific debate framed as being sort of scientists going head-to-head and there are situations where people have so fundamentally disagreed about very fundamental questions in biology including in evolution – how evolution happens. Then they do go head-to-head.
So Darwin’s original theory suggested that species evolve very gradually over time. Palaeontologists looking at the fossil record through the 1980s and 1990s had the idea that actually things evolve slowly over long periods of time and then go through these rapid jumps and the people who disagreed with them described that as ‘evolution by jerks’.
And they hated each other and I think to a certain extent they still do but actually most science is much more consensual than that.
It’s people agreeing that fundamental ideas, that the more fundamental ideas probably aren’t going to change substantially, but still leaving the door open for the potential that they might do.
So exploring things that build gradually and build our knowledge gradually. The idea of standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s that evolution not revolution, isn’t it?
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
Fundamentally what you’re saying to me is, ‘There’s a scientific method, evidence tested over time, and then the good ideas stick and the other ones don’t.’
PHIL WHEELER
That’s right, yeah, and so an important thing there is as a scientist to be open to challenge. Obviously to challenge other people’s ideas, but also to be humble enough to have your ideas challenged and to put your hand up and say, ‘Yeah, you know, I got it wrong. Not that I got it wrong, but the evidence that I had led me to one conclusion. We’ve now got more evidence, so I’m gonna change my mind and conclude that things happen differently.’
RICHARD HOLLIMAN
Thanks very much, Phil.
PHIL WHEELER
Okay. Pleasure.