My Year of Darwin 6/9/2014: Darwin begins the real struggle: writing

"I am just now beginning to discover the difficulty of expressing one's ideas on paper. As long as it consists solely of description it is pretty easy; but where reasoning comes into play, to make a proper connection, a clearness & a moderate fluency, is to me, as I have said, a difficulty of which I had no idea." Charles Darwin, letter to sister Caroline, April 29th 1836

Well Darwin, welcome to my world. Darwin had been dealing with an immense collection from the American tropics and much less seems to be collected (or even noted) from the Pacific Islands so he is going through his geology notes and creating a narrative. Swearing ensues. 

I wonder if Darwin felt this struggle his whole life. Certainly I do. Even with practice writing science just moves slowly and tortuously. An accepted manuscript is more a relief than anything else. 

Creating terrible and great titles for articles

I don't think problems with titles are as big of an issue for biological sciences as they are social sciences but I found some useful tidbits in this article by Patrick Dunleavy. Although it might be considered poor taste, but I wish that some published examples were given - otherwise we might be arguing a strawman.   

Personally, I like titles that are essentially a statement of the primary result, even if negative results. Vagueness is never a positive attribute in science - unless, of course, results are vague. 

Should scientific results be treated like your naughty bits to be hidden within the results so that only a faithful reader that has stuck with you from your vague abstract to your hypothesis-lacking introduction can finally be enlightened in the final part of your discussion? 

No.

The title should be informative and the results should be up front with accessory information in the end.

"Dynamite causes death in songbirds of northern Wales"
"Periodic outbursts increases parental care in southern chickadees"
"Novel stimuli fails to elicit a response in frozen waterfowl in southern Uganda" 

My Year of Darwin (1/30/2014)

"Whenever I enjoy anything I always either look forward to writing it down either in my log Book (which increases in bulk) or in a letter. -So you must excuse raptures & those raptures badly expressed" -Charles Darwin, letter to his father, 1 March 1832

Many of us that teach ecology or a related course ask our students to keep a field notebook or journal and I think this is a great exercise. It always helps writing to practice writing (why I have this blog) and our memories are always faulty. 

Writing reinforces memory and helps us organize thoughts systematically and helps us avoid pareidolia - seeing random patterns as being significant.

As somebody that writes poorly I appreciate Darwin's sentiment here and gives me some solace. Difference being that he was a well published author soon after returning from the Voyage. 

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Two intro bio labs today and WEBS tonight. We're looking at owl pellets. Should be fun.  

My Year of Darwin (1/28/2014)

"Another of my occupation was collecting animals of all classes, briefly describing and roughly dissecting many of the marine ones; but from not being able to draw, and from not having sufficient anatomical knowledge, a great pile of MS. which I made during the voyage has proved almost useless" -Charles Darwin, autobiography 

"A great pile of MS." - this sentiment I get. I have a number projects that went no where. Some made it submitted manuscripts only to be crushed by reviewers. What I found though, that works, is collaboration with peers. I'm surprised that Darwin did not have a camera lucida with him. 

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Working on the Biological Conservation special issue. Editing is not, I'm finding, particularly enjoyable though it is interesting. Expecting bitter cold and the birds told us this was coming; flocks of Ring-billed Gulls and two Bald Eagles flew by campus yesterday indicating the freezing over of lakes north of us. May also work on the food web manuscript... speaking of piles of MS. 

On a brighter note, ended a section of lectures exactly at the end of class (that never happens), and ecology labs went really well. We used GenBank to download mitochondrial protein sequence data and used this to construct phylogenies. On top of this we're mapping ecological traits or distribution information. It's really nice when labs come together and students don't walk away frustrated or their intelligence insulted - that, I really hate.