Also this week: should you care what the studies say, does wildlife rehabilitation work, and more.
From Jeremy:
Stephen Heard reveals how many copies his book on scientific names has sold, and asks if it’s “many” or “few”. If I ever finish my own book, and it sells even half as many copies as his book on scientific names, I will be very pleased.
Writing in Science, Vijaysree Venkatraman reviews the new memoir of independent shark scientist Jasmin Graham, a co-founder of Minorities in Shark Science.
Should you care what “studies say”? At least when it comes to big complicated questions about human behavior, such as the effect of social media on mental health? Psychologist Ben Recht and social scientist Kevin Munger both say no. Here’s a good bit from Munger’s post. It’s a gloss on Dan Davies’ point that ‘following the science’ can be a way for decision makers to avoid having to take responsibility for their decisions:
“Evidence-based policymaking” at the scale of responding to social media is simply the fantasy of policy without politics…Technocratic politicians love it: they don’t have to be leaders, merely followers of the evidence—if things turn out poorly, well, that’s just how science works, it never claims to be perfect, merely self-correcting. It certainly wasn’t my fault—what do you want me to do, ignore the evidence?
The history of osteopathic medicine. Fascinating story of how a fringey, quack idea entered the mainstream. Namely, by becoming non-quacky. The piece did leave me with a few questions, and I would’ve preferred it without the advocacy framing. But still, fascinating. Now I want to read a comparative history of fringe scientific movements that went mainstream and fringe scientific movements that didn’t.
Nobody knows if wildlife rehabilitation works.
Functional Ecology is switching to author-pays open access.
Googly-eyed trains. 🙂
Coming up:
Our post queue is once again sufficiently full that we can re-introduce a list of coming attractions.
July 8: Ask us anything: laws of succession, and the weather in Calgary (Jeremy and Brian)
July 9: Are you changing anything about your fall teaching in response to Generative AI? (Meghan)
July 11: Ask us anything: are ecological systems random, or deterministic, or what? (Jeremy and Brian)