Welcome to the last Daily Bucket of 2013. I've been a bit remiss in bucketeering of late so here is my offering for today. Don't forget to post your own observations.
The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...all are worthy additions to the Bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment, and do include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located.
In my last bucket (all too long ago) I introduced some of the skills of a scientist, backyard, front yard, parking lot, or otherwise. One of the most fundamental skills of a scientist, one that unites fields as disparate as psychology and physics, geology and sociology, is asking good questions.
We'll come back to the concept of good questions in a little bit.
Do All Scientists Ask Questions?
I'm going to answer yes to this question although I realize there might be some dispute about this. I'm going to make the case that the way we teach science focuses a bit too narrowly on one type of question and one type of science. Every humble technician, plugging away in a lab and every backyard birder who IDs an unusual species at her feeder is asking questions.
Good Questions
I realize that this might be a bit off-putting so I want to start out by saying that there are two fairly simple criteria for a good question in science. 1) Can it be answered? 2) Is the answer interesting? Both are relatively straightforward but do seem to trip people up from time to time so I'll give a bit of a run down of what I mean below.
Can It Be Answered? The process of science is really at its best when it addresses very specific, restricted, questions. Questions like: how is DNA replicated in a cell?, what is the diet of the red crossbill?, how do the mass and distance of objects affect the attraction between them?. Questions that start with the word 'why' are generally more difficult to answer. For example, the question, what is the preferred food of alligators in the winter?, is readily addressed (barring technical difficulties such a permits, equipment, etc). You can give alligators food preference tests. You can look at the gut contents of alligators and see what they have eaten. However, the question, why do alligators prefer to eat rabbits in the winter?, is a much more challenging one (I threw rabbits in randomly, I really have no idea about the seasonal diet preferences of alligators). Really general broad 'why' questions are even harder to answer. A classic example is - why are there more species in the tropics than in the temperate zones? I'm not at all suggesting that these kinds of questions shouldn't be addressed. It is just important to recognize that they are more challenging.
Some amazing questions have no answers (although Sandy's first question in the song is something a scientist could address).
Is the Answer Interesting? In my insect ecology class students are required to come up with a project that addresses some question. Frequently I have had students propose a study testing the preference of ants for artificial sweetener vs natural sugars. It turns out that this project is on the internet but that's a side issue. They often propose very nice choice experiments but my critique is that it is difficult to make a compelling case why this is an interesting question, at least in the context of insect ecology. There might be a reason based on ant sensory physiology that makes this a fascinating question. However, without this information, looking at preference between something ants never experience and something they experience regularly is pretty hard to interpret.
In the context of the Daily Bucket I think questions related to the natural history of organisms, rocks, stars, etc. are always going to be interesting. So are questions about the possible influence of human activity on the same thing.
Below is an example (eventually) of a question without an interesting answer
Types of Questions
Over the past year I've been thinking a bit more carefully about the different types of thinking that go into science. Teaching the process of science tends to emphasize hypothesis testing but I think that is rather narrow view. To start out I would encourage everyone to frame their question in sentence. What word is starting your sentence? Is it why? Is how? Is it what, where, or when? Knowing that is a big part of understanding questioning. Many, if not most studies, involve more than one type of question.
Hypothesis Testing Hypothesis testing is typically presented as the process of science. A general question is made specific and then rephrased as a testable hypothesis. A test for the hypothesis is designed and carried out and the hypothesis is rejected or (provisionally) accepted.
This way of thinking and questioning is vital for asking 'why' and 'how' questions. However it is not the only way to ask questions in science.
Diagnostic This is probably the most common type of scientific questioning. Every time you identify something using a field guide or your doctor asks for your symptoms and then proposes an illness and a treatment, diagnostic reasoning is being used. Using diagnostic reasoning to ask and answer questions is important. It requires a certain amount of background knowledge. Without the ability to ask and answer questions using diagnostic reasoning it is impossible to gather data or to formulate hypotheses and design experiments.
A lot of what does on the Daily Bucket involves asking these types of questions. What is that bug? What is the name of that part of the flower? How do you tell stars and planets apart?
Natural History The principle underlying the physical phenomena we observe are vastly less numerous and variable than the phenomena themselves. A good knowledge of ecological and evolutionary principles might aid in our understanding of the interactions between species in a rain forest and the functioning of the forest as whole. However these principles alone can't predict the specific details of Darwin's tangled bank
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that the these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Darwin's ideas provided immense explanatory power to the tangled bank but the specific details are the result of history. We can't predict the species and their interactions in the Amazon forest from theory alone. We need to go and see what is there.
What? Where? When? These are the fundamental questions of natural history. In order to ask how or why things happen in the rainforest we first need to know what, where and when those things are.
Natural History is not just the domain of the field biologist. It is found in geology, in astronomy, and, increasingly, in the biology lab. Much of genomics is the modern equivalent of the collecting trips made by 19th century naturalists.
Other - Parameter Estimation, Modeling, Synthesis
I'm just going to mention that scientists ask questions in other ways, involving mathematical models, careful quantitative measurement of important factors in nature, and so on. Most of these are beyond the scope of this group as far as I can tell.
Coming Up With Questions - Some Examples
One of the biggest problems for many of my students is just coming up with questions. More complex questions usually require some background knowledge before they can even be asked. However many questions just require curiosity, a careful eye, and some patience. I'm going to illustrate this with some simple questions about Lake Jackson, near my home in Tallahassee.
I've observed that the number of coots on the lake in the winter varies greatly from year to year and also within years. Although I haven't kept careful records my impression is that there are fewer coots when the water level is higher, perhaps because the aquatic plants are more deeply submerged when the level goes up.
There are two questions here: are there fewer coots when the water is deeper AND if there is a pattern then is a lack of food due to greater plant submergence the cause. The first is a WHEN question and the second is a WHY question. The first is easily addressed by keeping track of water depth and periodically making coot surveys. The second is more difficult but could be addressed by making behavioral observations of coots when the water is at different depths. How long does a coot stay under on average. How much time do they spend on feeding compared to other activites?
I've also observed an explosion in apple snail reproduction and a great increase in limpkin activity on the lake. How do the limpkins affect snail population sizes? How do the snails affect limpkin population sizes? How do both limpkins and snails affect the abundance and diversity of aquatic plants. Some of these questions are technically a bit difficult because the snails and plants are largely underwater but they are not insurmountable.
Caddisflies (3 or 4 common species) are the most abundant aquatic insects to visit my black light. Presumably most of them spent their larval existence in the lake. How does water level and snail presence correlate to the abundance of caddisflies?
The examples I've given are all simple cases of hypothesis testing. Related diagnostic questions are simply the identity of species present. Natural history would include things like when species were seen and in what numbers.
The beautiful song below is a worthy candidate for the anthem for citizen science. Although the accents may be a bit difficult at times it, IMHO, speaks movingly of the quiet joy of puzzling out a piece of nature and making the beauty speak even more clearly.
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