Field Notes on Science & Nature – NO IMAGES

314 Pages·2011·3.78 MB·English

by  Michael R. Canfield (ed.)

field note s on science & nature
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f i e l d n o t e s
on Science & Nature

e d i t e d b y
m i c h a e l r . c a n f i e l d
f o r e w o r d b y e . o . w i l s o n

harvard university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England
2011
Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
all rights reserved
Printed in Canada
Chapter 5 was prepared by Anna K. Behrensmeyer as part of official duties as an
employee of the Federal Government/Smithsonian Institution. The copyright in
Field Notes on Science & Nature does not extend to this chapter.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their
products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and
Harvard University Press was aware of a trademark claim, then the designations have
been printed in initial capital letters.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Field notes on science and nature / edited by Michael R. Canfield.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-674-05757-9 (alk. paper)
1. Biology—Fieldwork. 2. Natural history—Fieldwork. 3. Note-taking.
I. Canfield, Michael R.
QH318.5.F54 2011
570.72—dc22 2011005780
frontispiece: A hand-drawn map of collecting localities in the Trans-Busu Timber
Reserve near Lae, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, which was inserted in
the back of a field notebook from E. O. Wilson’s collecting expedition to the South
Pacific from 1954 to 1955.
To Jen
Foreword ix
edward o. wilson
Introduction 1
michael r. canfield
1 The Pleasure of Observing 19
george b. schaller
2 Untangling the Bank 33
bernd heinrich
3 One and a Half Cheers for List-Keeping 49
kenn kaufman
4 A Reflection of the Truth 67
roger kitching
5 Linking Researchers across Generations 89
anna k. behrensmeyer
6 The Spoken and the Unspoken 109
karen l. kramer
c o n t e n t s
7 In the Eye of the Beholder 129
jonathan kingdon
8 Why Sketch? 161
jenny keller
9 The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books 187
james l. reveal
10 Note-Taking for Pencilophobes 201
piotr naskrecki
11 Letters to the Future 211
john d. perrine and james l. patton
12 Why Keep a Field Notebook? 251
erick greene
Notes 277
Acknowledgments 285
Contributors 289
Index 293
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Sketches and behavioral notes on Pyramica gundlachi, an ant species
distributed throughout the Caribbean. August 16, 1953, Edward O. Wilson.
f o r e wo r d
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edward o wilson
the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise
of molecular and cellular biology, one of the greatest achievements in
the history of science. The study of living things at the molecular level
established what may be fairly called the First Law of Biology, that all
the entities and processes of life are obedient to the laws of physics and
chemistry. This research succeeded in part because it focused on several
dozen species of “model organisms” to explore particular basic prob-
lems, for example, the colon bacterium E. coli for molecular genetics,
the roundworm C. elegans for the molecular underpinnings of nerve cell
development, and honeybees for the molecular basis of advanced so-
cial organization. Molecular biologists remained relatively unconcerned
about the higher levels of biological organization, from organism to
population, ecosystem, and society. They were also nonhistorical. As a
consequence, relatively little attention was paid in the twentieth century
to the Second Law of Biology, that all entities and processes of life were
created by evolution through natural selection.
Biologists in the present century are beginning to shift toward more
of a balance in attention to these two great divisions. Even at the level of
the molecule and cell, a trend toward synthesis—how the entities and
processes fit together to make a cell, then an organism—is rapidly grow-
ing stronger. Biology as a whole is turning to the comparison of species.
The new goal is to understand the full diversity of life from molecule
to ecosystem. It comes not a moment too soon. Humanity desperately
needs a more extensive and integrated biology—for personal and public
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