Despite having stated that I'd posted my last pre-travel entry, I found myself pondering the trip that begins tomorrow morning before sunrise and then started typing. Et voila, one last commentary...
“Why spend time and money on a shoebill field project in Uganda?” The flippant (and not-untruthful) answer is “Because I can,” but that ducks the implied question of “Why would anyone want to?”
That one has a flippant answer also, of course, as indicated by the various friends who’ve volunteered to come along. Yes, it will be glamorous surroundings…yes, the bird itself is a sideshow freak… But there’s more to it than that, something that operates on multiple levels.
Scientifically, I’ve already given the study a low grade in the sense that it is really NOT “theory-driven,” which is the first thing I tell my students their research should be. I tend to define Important Science as the pursuit of mysteries that have the potential “to change the way we think about general principles.” In the current parlance of the National Science Foundation, the Holy Grail is for a study to be “transformative.”
To that end, I studied siblicidal aggression in egret nestlings largely because of the light that it sheds on the upper-limits of kin-selected altruism (or even tolerance). And Trish and I studied biparental care in house sparrows primarily because that work explored the push-pull elements within a relatively simple form of cooperation. Both topics were overloaded with theoretical groundwork that called for serious empirical testing.
By contrast, when Kenneth and I try to figure out some ecological factors likely to have contributed to the evolution of the shoebill’s eponymous facial feature we will not be motivated by any explicit theoretical models in mind. Oh, I’m quite sure such models can be found in the functional anatomy literature (not addressing shoebills, of course), and I would surely be a better scientist if I’d had them in mind when I decided to pursue Kenneth’s invitation to Uganda. But I make no such pretense.
So, wait…what?...am I doing this on a lark? No, not that either. The conceptual framework for this inquiry is Darwinian, but this is not a lofty exercise in testing that theory (i.e., nothing we learn has any potential for falsifying it). Instead, we’re just taking it out for a bit of exercise. I’m motivated partly by the surety that we will find surprises once we take a hard look at how the bill is used for prey capture/handling under field conditions. We have some hunches, as outlined in earlier postings on this blog. The sketch of a hypothesis (“Catcher’s Mitt”) is set out there before you, and God, and King Charles II.
So, here’s the thing. The human brain is arguably the best organ in history at thought processes in which we can rightly take pride: curiosity. Our species is often at their best when we’re being overtly curious. But our collective ignorance remains enormous, which is surely why every culture felt compelled to invent deities with supernatural powers that can be invoked to “explain” the things we find inexplicable (and often terrifying). For example, Q: Why do we all have to die? A: Because that is the will of Fill-In-The-Blank. That’s really not much of an answer.
Personally, I think there is a better answer to such questions, viz. “I have no idea, but let’s consider how we might find out.” I’m a really big fan of acknowledged ignorance.
This is what science addresses. It is a three-legged stool supported by theory, empiricism, and naturalism. As used by science, Theory is our best broad explanation to date for some family of interesting puzzles. It is subject to amendment when better explanations are discovered. Empiricism is the exercise of testing candidate explanations (‘hypotheses’) drawn from the general ones. This is what I do, what most practicing scientists do. And the third leg is a philosophical assumption of Naturalism, which posits that the mysteries of nature must be explained using only other natural processes (it specifically disqualifies super-natural explanations). This third component arose in western civilization as the centerpiece of the European Enlightenment, spawning modern science and affecting various other radical notions (e.g., democracy). Humans don’t have to be passive receptacles into which received wisdom is poured. We all have marvelous brains and can chip away at that immense supply of our collective ignorance.
So why am I particularly curious about shoebills? Let me back up a few decades to when I was a Ph.D. student in Upper Cretaceous (actually, the early ‘70s). The University of Minnesota’s Ecology/ Evolutionary Biology Department hosted a famous ecological physiologist named George Bartholomew (UCLA) for a research talk. He did not bring a standard “data talk,” but offered a freeform essay on a topic he’d been contemplating as he neared retirement. His title was “On Scientific Creativity,” and I probably missed ¾ of its content, but one thing stuck firmly in my mind: he made a case for studying the oddest species in a clade (a “clade” means a cluster of related species). Basically, he noted that it is often the least known and has strayed farthest from the basic body/behavior plan that its cousins use. Find the rebel and try to understand why it opted to break the rules. What’s different about its life (how it forages…who its enemies are…that sort of thing)?
I’ve done this a couple times. My non-thesis predoctoral project on boat-billed herons (1973-74) was probably a direct result of Bartholomew’s talk. My post-doctoral study of Goliath herons, as well. These projects affected how I looked at the other, ‘more normal’ herons in my other studies. Weirdos can be informative. Why are they so weird?
And I generally like looking at things from different angles. Increased familiarity with odd variations reshapes one’s view of what’s normal. Not just science, but all other aspects of life. My two summers in Mexico (boat-billed heron work) taught me things about America that I’d missed in the preceding quarter-century. Good and bad. Later, I lived three months in rural Venezuela and witnessed a truly feudal land system in operation, where most of the local llaneros were landless serfs.
Then I had three months in South Africa during the peak of Apartheid (autumn 1977) made me think about its obvious parallels with the Jim Crow Winston-Salem where my family had moved when I was in third grade: separate drinking fountains, separate movie theaters, separate bathrooms, separate restaurants, etc. One night I saw a boat’s running light way out in the middle of Lake St. Lucia. This was unprecedented (boating at night is scary when you keep hippos in mind), so I asked a ranger about it the next morning. He shushed me quickly, glancing about nervously, then explained that the (White) rangers had smuggled a copy of Playboy Magazine across the lake under the shroud of darkness. I was blown away as I came to realize that minority control of the Black majority had involved capitulation to the ultra-conservative Dutch Reformed Church, such that even the privileged members of society had to give up what Americans would regard as a trivial bit of freedom.
One thing I liked most about my university career was that I was seeing generations of young people as young and naïve as I had once been congregating on a melting pot campus. You may not think of Norman, Oklahoma, as the most cosmopolitan place on the map, but for students fresh off a farm outside Gotebo or Elk River, OU is pretty damned exotic! They may share a dorm room with someone vaguely ‘matched’ for interests, but chances are there’ll be some Petroleum Engineers from Ghana and Nigeria just down the hall.
I chuckle when conservative friends here in Richmond complain that we professors corrupt students with our leftist politics, but the real reason so many students liberalize is their sudden exposure to great variation among their peers. One is exposed to people from many walks of life, some of which you may have been told are toxic (“Eek, a communist!” “Eek, two boys holding hands!” “Eek, an evolutionary biologist!!!), but these new friends turn out to be surprisingly normal.
And, sure, faculty members are a part of that exposure. My Student Teaching Evaluations made it clear that I had been identified as not a native-born Oklahoman (“he talks too fast…yankee accent”) and a few outed me on these anonymous forms for harboring strange views. My favorite was the student who wrote “Dr. Mock is an unrepentant atheist” (which made me wonder To Whom Would an Atheist Repent?). But I did not take class time to discuss politics or theology while teaching Animal Behavior, Intro Statistics, Ornithology or anything else. Only a teensy handful of students came to my office hours and asked about non-course topics that wandered in such directions. Far less than 1%. The great majority who came to office hours at all were hoping to rescue their course grade with minimal effort. They were generally disappointed…
But I digress. The simplest and best answer to why I’m off tomorrow morning to have a look at shoebills is plain old curiosity. It’s there and it’s provocatively different. Full stop.
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