Surviving ourselves

Survivalism, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “The practising of outdoor survival skills as a sport or hobby”. This somewhat bucolic and innocuous definition provides only a partial view of this phenomenon, which emerged, apparently, more than a century ago. Or, I wonder, is it as old as life itself? Anyway, today, in its most extreme form, survivalism (or preppering) entails the accruing of unconventional skills, bean cans, and deadly weapons, in no particular order of importance. These new flavours find their origin in the atomic hysteria the followed the Second World War and, more recently, in the malthusian idea of a future collapse of our global society, or part of it. But not only. Some of these not so optimistic hypotheses about our future are also nurtured by the supposed collapse of ancient societies, the Rapanui of Easter Island being the most used and misused example.

The phenomenon knocked at my door recently when I was approached by a French journalist, Monsieur Vincent Nouyrugat who, in preparation for a special issue on societal collapse and survivalism for Science et Vie, asked me a couple of questions on the topic. I suspect the interview may be of interest to the readers of this blog, so I report it below.

 

Vincent: Is the concept of catastrophic collapse in ancient societies (Maya, Romans, Angkor, Easter Island) more and more challenged nowadays and disputed? Is there much more resilience than we thought?

Ago: The collapse of ancient societies is a topic that is typically disputed among scholars. These disputes are in most of the cases caused by (1) different interpretations of the scarce and fragmented archeological evidence and (2) different meanings attributed to the concept of ‘collapse’. The concept of ‘resilience’ is affected by the same uncertainties, i.e. lack of clear evidence and the attribution of different meanings. However, as new archeological evidence comes to light, also thanks to more sophisticated archeological techniques and methods, more complex pictures emerge about the decline of ancient societies. For example, it is now well established that to facilitate water permeability, limit evaporation, and create moist conditions, the Rapanui people covered lands with scattered lithic mulch; they most likely collected and stored rainwater, built stone dams across streams to divert water to their fields, and expanded land for agriculture. These could be considered as signs of resilience in relation to a declining forest (due to deforestation, i.e. the exploitation of the primary resource on the island). Nonetheless, the Rapanui society that built enigmatic statues and thrived on Easter Island for some centuries had mostly disappeared by the time first Europeans arrived on the island.

 

Vincent: Do you see this resiliency also in your simulations, for example the case of Easter Island? Or do you see signs of “collapse”?

Ago: Our mathematical simulations about Easter Island suggest that a ‘slow demise’ is the most plausible scenarios for the Rapanui society because this modelling scenario is the one that best fits the evidence of deforestation patterns inferred from the latest compilations of radiocarbon dates on charcoal remains. Thus, our modelling work indicates that the two most common, but also most debated, narratives (collapse and resilience) are unlikely descriptions of Easter Island history. By the way, the fact that scholars come up with such contrasting conclusions (either collapse or resilience) about the history of Easter Island testifies the ambiguity of the existing archaeological evidence.

 

Vincent: Actually, how could we define a “collapse” ? Is it loss of wealth, infrastructure degradations, famines, wars, loss of population, lack of natural resources, loss of complexity of the system? All these things must be brutal, in just one generation?

Ago: The lack of a precise and broadly accepted definition of ‘collapse’ is one of the main reasons for so little agreement and for so many debates around the history of several ancient societies. The problem is that the fall of a society entails always several factors. Rarely, if at all, a society suffered a catastrophic collapse based on one single factor. But scholars keep focusing on single factors. For example, Joseph Tainter (in “The Collapse of Complex Societies”) considers ‘economy’ as the most important determinant of the fall of historical society and defines collapse as a “phenomenon according to which a society displays a rapid and significant loss of an established level of socio-political complexity”. In contrast, Jared Diamond (in “Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed”, 2005) places importance on the population size: “by collapse I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economical/social complexity over a considerable area, for an extended time”. The sources of uncertainties in these definitions are many. How rapid and how significant should the loss mentioned by Tainter be? And what should the established level of socio-political complexity be? There are no direct ways of quantifying such aspects in ancient societies. We have, at best, indirect, scant and, often, even contradictory evidence about these aspects. How can we translate and compare such aspects with our modern society? Also, with such generic and vague definitions of collapse, any ancient society might have suffered a collapse and, in fact, Jared Dimond has come up with a very long (and, to me, quite arbitrary) list of societies that, in his opinion, have suffered a collapse. Given these uncertainties (it is, for example, impossible today to produce reliable estimates of population sizes and their changes over time for the ancient Rapanui people), the term collapse should be used with uttermost cautiousness. The term is too ambiguous.

 

Vincent: According to your simulations, is the “collapse” of a complex prospering (and quite destructive) society, after a certain moment of growth, something unavoidable?

Ago: No, definitely not. Our modelling work, and history in general, does not show a tight and clear relationship between growth and collapse. Prosperous and complex societies are not necessarily bound to collapse.

 

Vincent: But is it relevant to compare these ancient civilisations to our current industrialised society? Aren’t there a lot of important differences – one may think that we are much more resilient and able to adapt.

Ago: The endeavour of studying past societies in order to better understand our present and, possibly, even predict our future is valid and important. But, as you guessed, one should look at the details and at the many important differences. Superficial associations between, for example, Easter Island and our modern society are scientifically unacceptable and often very misleading. For example, the concept of ‘collapse’ has been used to describe the end of the Soviet Union. Does the supposed collapse of Easter Island tell us anything about what happened to the Soviet Union? Could have the end of the Soviet Union been predicted based on what we knew about Easter Island? I do not think so. There are many important individual, cultural, geographical, and temporal variations to consider. Often, what we consider as ‘collapse’ may as well be described by the term ‘transformation’. Our past can be seen as a series of major transformations marked by what we can call ‘revolutions’. Such ‘revolutions’ may not necessarily have a catastrophic nature. The discovery of fire by our ancestors around 1 million years ago, for example, created the premises for a social revolution and a step-up towards human cooperation because the regular gathering around an evening camp fire lead to tighter social bonds. And there are many other examples: the cognitive revolution of our early ancestors around 60 to 70 thousand years ago; the agricultural revolution, which saw the rise (and fall) of the so-called hydraulic societies in the valleys of Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, and Indus; the industrial revolution with a transition to new manufacturing processes; and global industrialization (particularly since the Second World War), inducing a transition to what we now call the ‘anthropocene’ which environmental consequences may provoke an even higher form of socio-political organization. Where we are heading, with all this, is difficult to say. But according to the arguments I just presented, the concepts of collapse and resilience are not so essential for interpreting and understanding our history.

 

Vincent: I’ve seen a lot of simulations of ancient societies and also projections about our current socio-ecological system. According to you, what are the most relevant, robust results of this area of research until now? 

Ago: An important aspect to consider here is that mathematical models cannot reproduce reality. Models are, at best, rough approximations of reality. Nature and our society are complex entities, too complex, and models are useful precisely because they simplify this complexity and in doing so they offer us glimpses of how such entities may work under certain conditions. Therefore, one has to be very careful about how to interpret results obtained with model simulations. The problem is that there is no direct and easy way to judge whether one model produces more robust results than another model. Models are very different from one another for example with respect to their assumptions (e.g. the key processes included), their complexity (e.g. the number of processes included), and their architectural structure (e.g. which process is connected with which process and how). Obviously, it is not possible to develop a model that captures all possible processes and in a very accurate way, because (1) such a model would be too complex to handle, it would require a computer power that goes beyond our current technological capacities and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the results it produces and (2) many of the processes included in models would not be well constrained due to lack of observations (e.g. we do not know the functional form for the growth of the palm trees that covered Easter Island when first Polynesians arrived there and so we cannot accurately constrain the process of deforestation). Therefore, the more processes you include in a model, the higher the uncertainties. Models that aim at capturing the history of ancient societies, or future projections of our modern society, are certainly very useful in giving us an idea about what could have happened in the past, or what could happen in the future, but only in relation to specific assumptions or in relation to a narrow set of conditions (i.e. scenarios). What we know for sure is that we are modifying our environment at rates and at scales that are unprecedented in human history. The evidence about climate and environmental change (global warming, resource overexploitation, ocean and land pollution, ocean acidification, etc.) is clear and unquestionable. What will be the exact consequences of such changes to our society no mathematical model can tell us for sure. Between little effects and a catastrophic collapse there are many possibilities that are more or less equally likely because they depend on too many uncertain factors. However, models tell us very clearly that the more we delay actions against overexploitation of resources and environmental change, the closer we get to trajectories entailing the socio-ecological disruption of our planet.

 

Vincent: Last question, about the phenomenon of “survivalism”: do we have examples of ancient complex societies or civilisations that have managed to recover after a “collapse” or severe decline? Is there a need of a minimum number of people to recover, or minimum resources?

Ago: It is not easy to find examples of ancient societies that have suffered a severe period of decline that was then followed by a recovery, if with ‘recovery’ we intend the bouncing back into a status (in terms of population size and in terms of cultural and socioeconomic conditions) identical, or very similar, to that antecedent the decline. As I explained above, a severe decline of a society always entails a profound transformation of cultural and socio-economic conditions . The wrong belief that many societies have suffered of a catastrophic collapse fuels the debate over our own future. But what society, over a period of a few hundred years (the typical time scale of many of the supposed collapses of ancient societies), would not experience some process that could be labeled as re-organization? ‘Survivalism’, especially in its excerpt most closely connected (and obsessed) with a catastrophic collapse of our planet, is thus a result of wrong premises. In this respect, I am not sure if this phenomenon can be genuinely justified by history or, rather, by the influence of certain types of movie industries. If our planet will experience a catastrophic collapse in the future, it will not be competition over scarce resources among a few remaining bands of survivalists that will save humanity. If any lesson can be learned from history, then it is that cooperation, and not competition, that may help us to survive a global crisis.

Ago (and Vincent)

Théorie de l’effondrement: notre civilisation peut-elle vraiment disparaître?

 

 

A society that does not read is a society that forgets.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe fell into an era of illiteracy. I do not want to claim that all ancient romans were capable of reading but somehow the knowledge of, for example, how to build aqueducts got lost. The period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance is, in fact, known as the Dark Ages because of the demographic, cultural, and economic decline in western Europe. Only the monks passed on the existing knowledge and the average people were excluded from this intellectual circle. The Church, therefore, had a monopoly on the written knowledge.

With this example I want to emphasize the importance of reading to avoid forgetting the old knowledge. A prerequisite for this is of course that knowledge is written down and stored. But what is this written knowledge worth if nobody has access to it? Which almost brings me to the Open Access Movement in Academia.

In the early days of modern science (since the industrial revolution), a few wealthy people exchanged their ideas and findings with private letters, and every now and then a book was published on a specific topic. With time, the public interest in research grew and the publication of scientific essays became a business model. Dedicated publishers compete with each other for the most interesting pieces of research, which impact is measured in views, downloads, and citations. The publication of research in scientific journals that are not publicly and openly accessible obviously leads to a closed community in which a few highly educated academics talk to themselves. Opening the scientific knowledge to anybody interested can potentially increase and speed up the use of scientific findings in our society and can increase the scientific impact of our research.

However, the scientific success of a scientist is not measured in terms of the number of papers read and the knowledge acquired. It is measured in the number and quality of papers contributed to the pool of knowledge. This leads to an ever increasing pressure to write and scientists become more and more busy with trying to publish even the slightest bit of scientific progress in order to maximize article production. The scientific quality of articles eventually degrades while the number of articles of reduced quality increases, making it more difficult to grasp the useful scientific progress. I therefore wonder: Do we write too much and read too little?

The body of scientific literature is growing so fast that it is impossible to follow up. Even within different disciplines, fields or topics, scientists have to admit that they cannot keep track of all the published items. Is this development diluting our knowledge or is the growing number of papers really an increased value?

If we are not familiar with this growing body of scientific literature, every new idea we have will be felt as a “new discovery”, only to find out in a second moment that the same idea has already been published. Therefore, it seems that Science has become a big pot where the same ideas and insights are stirred all over again. Real scientific progress is rarely made and if made, it may not be sure that it passes the conservative peer review barrier.

As scientists, but also as a literate society in general, we are fighting the natural erosion of knowledge. Babies are born with an empty mind and old people die full of knowledge and experience. The same applies to Academia where old professors retire and thousands of young students enter the system. We are therefore constantly fighting the loss of important knowledge acquired over decades of scientific work and reading. And at the same time we try to expand the knowledge into the scientifically unexplored or unknown. Learning requires time and if scientific staff is exchanged on a too frequent basis then the “unknown” will grow because the relative proportion of scientifically unexperienced scientists will be too high compared to the experienced ones. The question is, for example, if the larger number of PhD student positions available compared to more senior postdoctoral positions can help to sustainably maintain the acquired knowledge and to efficiently allow us to progress towards truly new discoveries instead of having to reinvent the wheel because too many young scientists do not know that the wheel was already invented.

Are we distracting ourselves from the original scientific aims? Consider how was science in the ‘20s and ‘30s, a few brilliant scientists developed the field of quantum mechanics or introduced the relativity theory. Or the the ‘50s and ‘60s with the discoveries of DNA. The ‘80s and ‘90s brought better technological approaches, which improved our insights. But what is left in the new millennium from this academic quality? Where is the space for creativity and scientific freedom? Or has it always been like this and we are only aware of the signal that stands out from the background noise, i.e. the big names?

In the end, why do we write papers? Because, obviously, we expect somebody to read them. So, how many papers do we read per week? Do we read only the most recent papers or do we read old papers too? How old is the oldest paper in our literature database? And what does the publication date mean for the significance of the research? Also, are we reading papers from other disciplines too or do we ignore what is happening outside of our specific field?

Africa and its enormous creative potential

Only a few weeks ago we were preparing to travel to Dakar, Senegal, to conduct a Winter School for MSc and PhD students on the use of computational tools for investigating complex ecological and socioeconomic systems. Our last days of preparation were full of enthusiasm and excitement. Africa has always exerted a special attraction on me. The simple word ‘Africa’ stimulates an emotional response in me similar to the word ‘home’. As a child and, I imagine, like every child, I was fascinated by stories of Africa and its exotic animals roaming free in a vast landscape of grassland and baobab trees, I fantasized about a maze of rivers and waterfalls constellating intricate jungles and dreamt of adventurous journeys. As an adult and academic, sub-Saharan Africa (and Senegal in particular) has become a focus of my educational and research activities. Visit after visit, I’m starting to grasp some of the complex problems afflicting this enormous continent and its people. Visit after visit, I’m starting to understand the prospects and possibilities of Africa and the potentials of its enormous creative and intellectual capital.

Constructing a mathematical model (photo by Benjamin Post)

Stimulated and supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and wonderful African colleagues, like Moustapha Fall, I organised with Jai and Esteban a Winter School in Mbour, Senegal, and with Jai and Davi a research excursion in the Delta du Saloum National Park. In the Delta, our plan was to investigate the impact of plastics and other marine debris on one of the most amazing seabird colonies of West Africa (but this will be the subject of another post).

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The Winter School was held at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Mbour, Senegal. AIMS is a pan-African network of centres of excellence for postgraduate education and research in mathematical sciences. The first of these institutes was founded in Cape Town by Neil Turok  in 2003, while he was Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, UK. In a TED Talk in 2008, Neil Turok drew the attention of the world to “talented African students starved of opportunities”. He proposed to establish a network between centers of excellence to teach mathematics and expand AIMS across the continent. Turok’s wish was that we could celebrate an African Einstein within our lifetime. This vision became a plan to create 15 AIMS centres across Africa by 2023. Today, six of them are fully operational in South Africa, Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, and Rwanda.

Winter School participants (photo by Benjamin Post)

In the Winter School, we had a total of 26 students, 6 from Germany and 20 from Africa, including Senegal, Mauritania, Cameroon, Togo, Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Rwanda. The School was financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), via DAAD and von Humboldt, and by AIMS-Senegal. The place where AIMS-Senegal is located is very inspiring, immerse in the nature, by the Atlantic Ocean. People’s hospitality is wonderful and you feel always at home. The students were very enthusiastic and extremely committed, perfect conditions for a lecturer. But that was not all. The School was an incredible journey that transformed us all. Teaching in Africa, in the African context, is different than teaching anywhere else. All the African problems, the extreme poverty, the endemic illiteracy, the rampant exploitation of tens of thousands of children, the Talibé, forced to beg and abused in all ways by certain Quranic schools, are there with you all the time, visible, tangible, creating a huge weight in the room, creating a sense of urgency that is overwhelming, almost suffocating. This is the African context, this is the emotional baggage we have been hauling around in that lecture room. Yet, our students were very motivated and fully dedicated to learn.

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During that week of teaching I also reflected a great deal about best teaching practices. With one student, I enjoyed discussing about the convenience of granting the “answers” to students engaged with challenging exercises or questions. He thought that after several attempts and some efforts, students should be guided to the correct solution or to the correct answer. I am not so convinced about the usefulness of this approach. First, because often there is not just one correct solution to a problem or one correct answer to a question. Second, and more importantly, because for many problems there is no such thing as a final answer. Even as researchers, we rarely reach a final solution to a problem but rather we get closer to a solution, which is often multifaceted. Answers to our research quests are in the best case temporary and only represent small steps towards a truth. And who tells us what the real truth is? Who can confirm us that the answer found is the final answer to the question at hand? Especially given the quicksand of the inductive method? In my opinion, it is not the aim of getting an answer that helps students to learn. It is rather the path towards an answer that matters most. Because it is the journey along this path that constitutes the very process of learning. So, teachers should foster students’ sense of curiosity and empower them to engage in the process of discovery, rather than eliciting mechanical memorisation or application of known formulas. This dynamic and interactive teaching style stimulates what experts call active learning.

Similarly, I believe it has been the misconceived idea that the problems of Africa can be fixed with one easy solution, money, that fuelled corruption and prevented the continent from developing. Solving the problems of Africa is a long-term endeavour characterised by multiple pathways and manifold solutions. But ultimately, Africa can flourish only if Africa becomes a fertile ground for highly educated students and if these students have access to the same opportunities as any European student. Africa has an immense intellectual and creative capital and this is the major resource the continent and the rest of the world should nurture in the next years. AIMS and the Next Einstein initiative, which use donations directly for students, are first important steps in this direction.

Ago

PS: Do you want to know more about our Winter Schools in Senegal? See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZa3J7OG9I&amp=&feature=youtu.be

 

Are we all chickens?

Inductive reasoning is often the method we scientists apply in our everyday work. We appeal to evidence — observations obtained, in the best case, under various conditions — for supporting our theories. This approach, however, bears unpleasant surprises.

Most of our knowledge, whether related to our everyday life or to our scientific activities, appears to accumulate by induction. Does the method of induction lead to relevant knowledge? Bertrand Russell in Problems of Philosophy warned us about the validity of this method. He illustrated the problem with the story of a chicken.

Once upon a time there was a chicken in a farm. This was a good and honest, empiricist chicken. He absorbed facts from around himself and learned about the nature of reality that he was exposed to. The chicken noticed an interesting thing, every day in the morning the farmer showed up and fed him. He did not really understand why that was happening but hey he got fed every day. The farmer showed up, the chicken got fed. Every single day, under all sorts of conditions, hot days, cold days, rainy days, windy days, the farmer showed up and the chicken got fed. What kind of conclusion could the chicken draw about the relationship between the farmer showing up and him getting fed? Well, being a good empiricist, allowing himself to make inferences about the laws of nature, the chicken concluded that there must be a law of nature saying: every time the farmer shows up a chicken gets fed. A different chicken, a sceptical one, asked: How do you know? How do you know that there is a law of nature that connects us being fed with the farmer showing up? The first chicken replied testily that all evidence pointed to this law of nature, that every single day of their life when the farmer showed up they were fed, that there was absolutely no evidence to contradict this.

The good, empiricist chicken

One morning the farmer showed up and wrung the neck of the chicken. What? The chicken relied on good inductive reasoning, all evidence supported his theory, none of the evidence contradicted it and nonetheless he ended up being wrong!

It appears that the experience we make about the past produces in us strong expectations about what should happen in the future. Food that has a certain appearance generally has a certain taste, and it is a shock to our expectations when food with a familiar appearance turns out to have an unusual taste. These expectations are very strong and not limited to humans. Horses that have been driven always along a certain road will follow that path even when they are by themselves. Dogs expect to go out when they see the leash. Despite being so misleading — David Hume put it nicely by saying that the future is under no obligation to mimic the past — all these expectations exist.

In science, the attitude to judge new observations according to expectations produces at least two kinds of problems, which pose some sort of dilemma. The first kind of problem is that too often new, unexpected results are rejected simply because they are not expected. I am sure we all have some personal experience with this but one of the most striking case is probably the one of Lynn Margulis. In the ‘60s, Lynn Margulis wrote a paper on symbiogenesis, in which she proposed endosymbiosis as the evolutionary force that led to the emergence of eukaryotic cells. The paper was rejected by about fifteen scientific journals possibly because her theory did not fit with the expectations of the time about evolution. Eventually, the paper was published in Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1967, the theory was experimentally demonstrated for the first time in 1978, and it is currently supported by genome data and molecular phylogeny. Her work is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. The second kind of problem is specular to the first. Too many studies, generally based on some observations, which are often very limited in time (the typical duration of a scientific project is, in fact, only three years), are considered to constitute relevant knowledge by induction, simply because they fit with our expectations, and they are published. Now the dilemma is: should we accept the expected or the unexpected? Should we accept both? And if so, in which proportion? Of course, the most immediate answer here is: it depends. But there is another aspect that adds on top of all this: the publish-or-perish culture. Obviously, we all (scientists, scientific institutions, and funding agencies) want to make the right judgments and be able to accept and value unexpected as well as expected results, when they constitute true knowledge. But the publish-or-perish culture leads us to shortcut decisions with respect to the scientific questions we ask, the approaches we use, and the results we accept and value. The pressure to increase the number of publications exacerbates the problem of induction and creates knowledge based on unfounded expectations more often than not. This has led to wasteful research and unethical practices with the risk that good research gets buried by the increasing volume of poor work.

Not long ago, Nature asked Thomson Reuters to list the 100 most highly cited papers of all time. Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science includes databases covering the social sciences, arts and humanities, conference proceedings and some books. It lists papers published since more than a century ago. If you printed out the first page of every item in this index, the stack of papers would almost reach to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, Nature discovered. What I find particularly worrying about this study is the staggering amount of published work that has gone completely unnoticed: more than half has been cited only once or not at all. Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science holds some 58 million items. What kind of conclusions should we draw from these numbers? That millions of publications and hence millions of scientists and their respective institutions are completely useless?

And I am not so sure if the new breed of open access journals can cure these problems. Typically, the claim is that the work published by open access journals should only be technically sound, novelty and hence scientific value is judged by the readership. But who is this reader that can read and judge the staggering body of literature being produced every year, especially when all potential readers seem to be busy only with writing?

Among the most influential views on the problem of induction are those of Karl Popper, presented in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Popper sustained that induction should have no place in science. Science, in his view, is a deductive process in which scientists should formulate hypotheses and theories that are tested by deriving particular observable consequences. Theories cannot be confirmed or verified, he argued. They may be falsified and rejected or tentatively accepted if corroborated in the absence of falsification by the proper kinds of tests.

And yet, we are all chickens and scientific institutions (we again), being unable to see scientists differently than chickens in battery cages, are our henhouses.

Ago

Parallels between the Contrasting Approaches within Ecology and Economics, respectively

 

Ecology

Macro-scale Approach

Even years ago this was certainly not the only approach to ecology. However, for considering the regional and global scales, it has dominated. Partly this is because it has not been possible to get sufficient observations and information about biodiversity over large areas (continents, oceans, or the whole Earth).

Even though such observations and information are beginning to become available, the macro-scale approach is still applied when considering the global scale cycles of elements such as major nutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus) and carbon as they relate to life. That field of study has come to be called biogeochemistry (with more emphasis on the chemistry) or biogeoscience (for a broader emphasis).

Biogeochemistry and Biogeoscience

These terms refer to the combination of biological (including ecological), geological, and chemical processes and their interactions. Many people consider these topics to be quite important and interesting, and so many journals and conferences now specialise on them. There’s a very good journal called Global Biogeochemical Cycles, another called called Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences, and the open access journal Biogeosciences. There are many others that publish research on this topic.

Newer Diversity-centric Approach

Both in observational and theoretical modeling studies, this approach has been applied much more in recent years. Biodiversity is a hot topic, for good reason. Recently developed sensors and instruments are cheaper, smaller, and more automated, allowing the collection of much more data from observations.

Of course this approach is centered in ecology. However, it’s also very important for understanding the cycles of nutrients and carbon on our planet. Such biogeochemical cycles are largely mediated by a great diversity living organisms, and of course the nutrients and carbon are vital to sustaining life as we know it. It was from my studies of biogeochemical cycles that I got interested in ecology.

Economics

 

Macro-economics and the Keynesian school

The ‘macro-economic’ view emphasizes the large-scale dynamics of the economy and focuses attention on large-scale metrics such as total money supply and the ‘velocity of money’. This directly parallels, and mostly predates, the large-scale biogeochemical approach introduced above, in which nutrient supply would be the analogue of money supply.

The economic approach and views of [John Maynard Keynes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes) and derivatives thereof today dominate among academics and central bankers. That’s not coincidental, because the central banks, either directly or indirectly, fund many economic studies and provide many jobs for economists. Keynes was brilliant, but he also provided intellectual justification for massive money printing by central banks. That has greatly enhanced the power of those who own and control the central banks, while simultaneously impoverishing many ordinary folks. To be fair, Keynes himself might arguably not condone much of what is being done today with justifications supposedly based on his work. I’m thinking of the ever-faster money printing, massive bailouts, and negative interest rate policies (NIRP).

Austrian School

This quite different school of economic thought began in the late 1800s with Carl Menger. He came to study economics because as a journalist he found that the ways that prices were actually determined did not agree with the economic theories of his day. Mark Spitznagel gives a good and relatively brief introduction to the history of the Austrian school in a few chapters of his book, The Dao of Capital.

Briefly, this school came to emphasize the motivations of and the subjective value perceived by individual human beings, rather than the macroscopic view typical of Keynesian and other macro-economic approaches. Thus is very much parallels, and predates by over a century, the recent emphasis on biodiversity in ecology and biogeochemistry.

In this video Hans-Hermann Hoppe introduces Praxeology, the study of human action, which is central to the Austrian school of economics and discusses the nature of economics as a science.

Parallels

Here I’ll share three slides that I originally presented at a Workshop focusing on plankton biodiversity late in 2014. I updated them a bit for this post. At that time I had recently read The Dao of Capital, which provoked me to think more about unifying what I knew of ecology from my day job with what I knew from my hobby of reading and following podcasts about economics.

First, an introduction to the idea of Spontaneous Order, which is essentially the same as that of Emergent Properties in Complex Adaptive Systems.

Then, comparing the ideas of two influential Austrian economists with the most famous result from an influential pioneer of biogeochemistry.

 

 

I find it quite interesting the extent of the parallels between the two contrasting approaches within economics and ecology, respectively.

 

 

Contrast in the Dominance of the two Approaches

It’s also interesting to consider the sharp contrast in the dominance of these contrasting approaches within each field of study today. In the natural sciences of ecology and biogeochemistry, almost no one opposes the view that biodiversity should be considered because it plays such an important role. Even those who adopt the older-style macro-scale view for certain biogeochemical studies acknowledge that they cannot resolve important details using that approach.

By contrast, in economics many still reject and strongly object to the Austrian view, in favor of the Keynesian macro-economic approach. I strongly suspect that a major reason for this difference is that ecologists and scientists don’t get rewarded for holding a particular view nearly so much as economists do. I’ve heard that it can be quite difficult for Austrian school economists to find jobs in academia. Of course given that Austrian school economists tend to condemn the central planning typical of central banks, it’s no wonder that the central bankers and intellectuals in their pay do not want to fund or support Austrian school economists.

Lan

This article was originally posted on Steemit, here. If you liked this one, you can see more of my posts at on Steemit.

Thanks to those who provided the images, all of which were labeled for free reuse.

OGUMI a new real-time common pool resource experiment tool

OGUMI is an Android-based open source application for conducting common-pool resource experiments, choice experiments, and questionnaires in the field, in the laboratory, and online. It is simple, stable, and flexible with regards to the user-resource model running in the background.

OGUMI was developed with the help of Nymspace from a cooperation between Dr. Gunnar Brandt (Systems Ecology Group) and Dr. Micaela Kulesz (Institutional & Behavioural Economics Group) and applied for the first time within the project HARVEST for studying human harvest behaviour in real-time in Bremen (Germany) and Mbour (Senegal).

Our research in Mbour has been covered by the Deutsche Welle (a German-based international broadcaster).

We provide OGUMI as free software under the Apache License 2.0. The source code and documentation is available on GitHUB, a web repository for software development projects.

A compiled, ready-to-use version of OGUMI with documentation is available here for free download and use.

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Hierarchy and respect

Ideas for Sustainability

By Joern Fischer

Every now and then, I’m given reasons by the German university system to seriously doubt if I can handle it in the long term. Overly complicated administrative processes aside, my biggest issue with the German university system is the explicit and implicit reinforcement of unhelpful hierarchies, particularly with respect to early career researchers.

Early career researchers (ECRs) — especially postdocs, but often also PhD students — are the future of academia. They are the powerhouses of productivity, the social backbone of departments, and the people who rescue students who have been neglected by their professors. Depending on where you look, their treatment in the German system varies from unhelpful to disgraceful.

Here are some of my “favourite” things that are wrong in the German system:

• Many funding agencies do not allow ECRs to independently apply for money. Rather the grant needs to be submitted by a professor. As a result, every year…

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Academic freedom

“When the intellectual curiosity inherited in academic freedom is sacrifice for the institutional conformity required by managerial functionaries, then an academic mediocrity rather than merit is the most likely outcome.” [Prof. Terence Karran, in a conference talk on Academic Freedom, 18 November 2011].

The German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (the older brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt) is recognized for having conceived Lehrfreiheit, Lernfreiheit, Freiheit der Wissenschaft and Einheit von Lehre und Forschung; four fundamental principles that shaped universities and research in Germany and worldwide. Since the early 19^th Century, these principles provide the basis for professors, researchers and students to explore and satisfy their intellectual curiosity independently without any institution, state or church impositions.

Academic freedom is presently recognized as an important aspect to fully enjoy the right of education, teaching and research in our society (UNESCO), but paradoxically this aspect is still an alien concept to many academics, students and managerial functionaries.

Academic institutions that embrace academic freedom obtain clear advantages. Typically, by providing a flexile and unrestricted environment that satisfies the curiosity of many minds, these institutions tend to occupy the top of national and international rakings and generate cutting-edge research.

But have you ever wondered how much intellectual freedom do modern academic institutions allow or tolerate? Or, more importantly, what do academics know about academic freedom? For example, why is academic freedom important?

These are aspects that a team of researchers led by Terence Karran (a Professor in Higher Education at the University of Lincoln, UK) is currently investigating. They are trying to understand academic freedom in European and African institutions.

Interested? Then support the on-going research on academic freedom! Just follow this link.

Esteban

Embrace your productive stupidity and ban the barplot!

An important and appealing aspect of being a researcher is that one never stops learning, even when making mistakes. Martin A. Schwarz called this essential trait productive stupidity. Some experts might find it difficult to admit their own ignorance, but I think science will open the eyes of those who embrace their own stupidity.

One of these eyes opening moment happened to me a couple of days ago, when I read the interesting perspective article of Weissgerber et al. in PLOS. They provide us with a critical insight into the (ab)use of barplots in scientific publications, highlighting how this wide-spread graphical representation hinders patterns in the data, especially in studies with small sample sizes. This is problematic because different data could show the same patterns in a barplot, particularly when one is plotting means and standard errors or means and standard deviations (See Figure 1 of Weissgerber et al.).

As in many other disciplines, this representation is a common practice in my field, marine ecology. Typically, it is used to compare differences among groups or treatments, even when the concerned variables are continuous and better representations would be dispersion plots, boxplots or histograms. This poor selection of a suitable graphical representation can easily mislead the incautious reviewer and reader.

Paradoxically, in my training as a scientist in the field of marine ecology I was encouraged to use such graphs over more informative options. Even worse, I followed what I was thought and I suggested others to use barplots for continuous data and to leave the more informative plotting options for the exploratory data analysis… but not anymore!

We have all used barplots, at least once in our scientific lives, and we did it because we learned it in a classroom, we saw it in a publication, or it was suggested to us by a colleague. Whatever your reason was, it is time keep the path clear and do not let others stumble on the same stone. Lets embrace our productive stupidity and ban the barplot for representing continuous data!

Esteban

The value of dissent

“It is never worth a first class man’s time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that”. [G.H. Hardy].

As a scientist, I often find myself wondering about how great ideas come to life. Invariably, the most classical of the cases pops up into my mind. Archimedes happily bathing, Newton contemplating apple trees, Einstein playing the violin, and Darwin staring at an “entangled bank” of bushes, earthworms and singing birds.

Well, apparently, peace and loneliness are not the only conditions for breeding great ideas. A considerable body of research suggests that dissent, criticism and constructive conflict are crucially important to produce outstanding creative work. It seems that a chaotic environment where people with different backgrounds can have stimulating clashes and disagreements is essential for selecting, shaping and refining valuable ideas. Steven Johnson calls this environment “liquid network”, a fluid milieu—something like a primordial soup—of different ideas bouncing off each other that produces innovations.

Yet, and very often, leaders value consensus so much that they feel they need complete agreement on everything and, as a result, dissent is stigmatised.

But conflict—if structured and constructive—is essential for generating novelty because by definition it engages people. People that do not care typically express no opinion, no objections, and no emotions. More than two decades of research on the topic have persuaded Charlan Nemeth (a professor in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley) that dissent stimulates thoughts that are broader, that include more information and that, on balance, lead to better decisions and more creative solutions. In one particular study, Nemeth and colleagues found that the liberty or permission to criticise creates an atmosphere of freedom that enhances the generation of creative ideas. They even put forward the case that emphasis on politeness and non-evaluation may actually be counter-productive in a context of finding creative solutions.

But why is the encouragement of criticism effective in stimulating ideas? Criticism is typically seen as undesirable and even impolite, but when it is framed as an actual contribution to the discussion process—explain Nemeth and colleague—it frees individuals from the apprehension of judging the views of others and stimulates them to express their own ideas more freely. Obviously, dissenting for the sake of dissenting is not useful. It is also not useful if dissent is motivated by considerations different than searching for the best solution. But when dissent is authentic and honest, it can be highly valuable.

This debating process reminds me a lot of Complex Adaptive Systems and suggests that when the composition of a group is right—enough people with different perspectives and backgrounds clashing into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will lead to the emergence of a best solution.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a tendency to resentment against dissenting views and the supposedly lack of harmony they may create, even in academia, a place where this should be least expected. In Nemeth’s own words: “Thus we continually find attempts to denigrate it [dissent] or contain it. People are encouraged to ‘role-play’ their ideas instead of stating them clearly; they are asked to ‘fit-in’, to be on the same page, to not make waves and to be in line with the leader’s views or the company vision. They are made to fear repercussions, including being marginalised by gossip or ridicule. I often think that it is our differences that make us interesting as human beings and it is in our differences and our willingness to embrace them that we learn and grow”.

“Among the waves” by Ivan Aivazosky

When eagerness for harmony and conformity in a group overrides people’s desire to present alternatives or express an unpopular opinion, decision-making produces dysfunctional outcomes: a phenomenon called Groupthink. Groupthink has produced big disasters in the past and many group activities in different fields are constantly afflicted by it. Research shows that groupthink can arise when the group is composed of members with similar backgrounds, is highly cohesive, has no clear rules or defined processes for decision-making, and is isolated from outsiders. Suppressing dissenting views to preserve group harmony leads to submission. This, in turn, creates an atmosphere of dominance rather than mutual accountability and induces feelings of worthlessness and apathy toward team goals.

Recently, Jonah Lehrer put it very nicely in The New Yorker writing that the most creative spaces are those that hurl us together and it is the human friction that makes the sparks. The challenge, I think, is to avoid the blaze.

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