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Pre-order The Ecology of Ecologists from University of Chicago Press at the ESA meeting and get a 30% discount and free US shipping! You can do this even if you won’t be at the meeting! Plus, check out the great blurbs from Mark Vellend and Stephen Heard! | Dynamic Ecology
You can pre-order my forthcoming book, The Ecology of Ecologists: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science, from the University of Chicago Press at the upcoming ESA meeting and get a 30% discount and free US shipping. Click that link for a summary of the book, and great blurbs from Stephen Heard and Mark Vellend.…
Science finally retracted that controversial arsenic-based life paper from 15 years ago. Does that really “draw a line” under the controversy? | Dynamic Ecology
Last week, the famous and controversial "arsenic-based life" paper was been retracted, 15 years after it was published. The authors disagree with the decision and continue to stand behind the paper. Link goes to a news article in Science, that summarizes the controversies around both the paper itself and the retraction. Note that the controversies…
Unreplicable results are an open secret | Dynamic Ecology
A couple of new preprints claim that the large majority of results in fruit fly immunology are replicable. Link goes to a news article in Science. The authors of the linked preprints both reviewed the literature to identify published results that were independently verified by subsequent research, and did experiments to replicate some published results…
Generative AI vs. graduate supervisory committees | Dynamic Ecology
Lizzie Wolkovich will no longer chair defenses, or sit on supervision or examining committees, for graduate students who use generative AI as a writing aid. I was interested in this because my own department is planning its own AI use policy for grad students. One proposed policy (which hasn't yet been fully fleshed out, much…
The Friday linkfest sings of love | Dynamic Ecology
This week: remembering Margaret Davis, the academic coalface, paradigms in psychology (or the lack thereof), sluggard waker, human population growth versus climate change, Anonymous 4Chan Poster et al., and more. Including a rare link from Brian! From Jeremy: Writing in the ESA Bulletin, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Sarah Hobbie, and Elizabeth Borer remember pioneering paleoecologist Margaret Davis,…
Most Friday linkfests become Friday linkfests because they want to be Friday linkfests, not because they want to share links | Dynamic Ecology
This week: climbing the magic mountain, condensing the iceberg, replicating the replication crisis, information vs. attention, #appropriatelyhonestmethods, location, location, location (scientific research edition), and more. A new NBER working paper (which I haven't read, just passing news of it along) compares scientists' research outputs before vs. after moving from one institution to another, and finds…
List your job talks on your CV as invited seminars, just like any other invited seminar | Dynamic Ecology
Quick post to address a question that came up on the ecoevojobs.net discussion forum recently: as a faculty job seeker, should you list job talks on your CV, and if so, how? My advice is to do as I did: list your job talks on your CV as invited seminars, along with any other invited…
I milk my ideas for 25% of what they’re worth. I wish it was 100%. (UPDATED) | Dynamic Ecology
One of my weaknesses as a scientist is that I'm bad at following up on my own ideas. I get a research idea, and publish something on it. But rather than taking any of the obvious next steps to pursue the idea further, I drop it and move on to something else. And in the…
Different ecological studies of the “same” thing typically give very different results. What would it look like for ecologists to get serious about explaining that variation? | Dynamic Ecology
Different ecological studies of the "same" thing typically give very different results. In a typical ecological meta-analysis, over 90% of the variance in effect size is due to "heterogeneity", meaning true variance in the mean effect size among studies* (Senior et al. 2016). Further, that 90% is not a big slice of a small pie;…
No, not everyone can be a hunter-gatherer. But should we consider the possibility anyway? | Dynamic Ecology
Back in college, I took a class on "Human Ecology" from an anthropology prof. One of our assignments was to evaluate a manifesto from a small group of US environmental activists in the late 1960s or 1970s (I don't recall exactly). They announced that they were going to live off the land as hunter-gatherers in…
Get to the point | Dynamic Ecology
Over the years, I've found myself getting bored and even impatient with the introduction sections of many of the papers I read and talks I see. I want authors and presenters to get to the point. I don't want to read or hear background information I already know. Nor do I want to read or…
This Friday linkfest is American | Dynamic Ecology
This week: the scientist who wasn't there, an ecological history of religion, preregistrations in psychology aren't improving, can you be daunted retroactively, tortoise vs. Excel, and more. American. An ecological history of religion in what is now the US over the last 11,000 years. Preregistrations in psychology often lack methodological detail, deviations from the preregistered…
Most Friday linkfests aren’t real | Dynamic Ecology
This week: Meltdown, highbrow climate misinformation, meaningless means, EcoEvoApps, unpacking yourself, and more. Writing in Science, Anna Henderson reviews former ULethbridge hydrologist Sarah Boon's memoir Meltdown. Going on my reading list. This link is from my interview with Rachel Germain earlier this week, but I don't want folks to miss it so here it is…
Demystifying ecological theory: interview with Rachel Germain | Dynamic Ecology
Welcome to our latest author interview post! (click that last link for the previous post in the series) Today, we'll hear from UBC prof Rachel Germain on her work with many others on demystifying ecological theory and making it more accessible to empiricists (Germain and Schreiber 2024, Ou et al. 2022, Grainger et al. 2022).…
This is an award-winning Friday linkfest | Dynamic Ecology
This week: ASN award winners, affirming and also questioning the sixth mass extinction (?), prediction markets vs. futures markets vs. gambling, defensive forecasting, if Jonathan Swift was a university prof today, the long slow death of literary fiction, one two hit wonders, and more. Congratulations to the 2025 ASN award winners! A complicated week in…
Have you received a peer review that appeared to have been written by AI? | Dynamic Ecology
An experienced academic ecologist emailed me last week, reporting that a former student of his just had a paper rejected from Plos One at least in part due to a shoddy negative review that appeared to have been written entirely by AI. Yes, it's of course difficult to tell for sure if any given piece…
Bleg: Sources of long transect data, and/or big grid data, for any ecological variables? Looking for some illustrative examples for an upcoming talk. | Dynamic Ecology
I will be speaking at the CSEE conference in July about estimating and comparing the intrinsic predictability of different ecological variables. I'll be asking questions like: is forecasting hard because nature is intrinsically unpredictable, or because our forecasting models aren't capturing all of the available information about the past that could be used to make…
The Second Science* | Dynamic Ecology
Note from Jeremy: this is a guest post from Mark Vellend. *** When the Covid pandemic sent everyone home in the spring of 2020, Françoise Cardou and I – amidst some guilt about our generally good health and lack of immediate personal emergencies to deal with – formed the two-person online Sherbrooke Critical Reading Society.…
Why Friday linkfests explain more than we think | Dynamic Ecology
This week: Mark Vellend's new book, Queen's University vs. Trump, the incredible shrinking p-value, remembering Brian Wilson, forgetting Pat Benatar, and more. The bully's pulpit comes home. Friend of the blog Mark Vellend has written an ambitious popular science book Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, From Proteins to Politics. It'll be…
You’re probably why it takes so long for your paper to get reviewed and your excuses are bad | Dynamic Ecology
A weird thing happened in scientific publishing during COVID. And it hasn’t gone away. Publications went up 30-50%. And responses to requests to review went down 30-50%. I know the actual statistics for one journal, but I think those numbers are pretty representative for what editors experienced across journals (not just in ecology, but all…
Peer review protip: even if you’re SURE the author made an elementary mistake, hedge your review | Dynamic Ecology
As a peer reviewer, sometimes you'll find that the ms author(s) made an elementary mistake. Possibly, a mistake so elementary that, in your view, it really should not have been made in the first place. If this happens, you will probably be annoyed at the author(s). How dare they make you, the reviewer, do their…
This Friday linkfest is wreaking a tremendous amount of carnage. What it is not doing, however, is winning. | Dynamic Ecology
This week: RIP Jim Estes, Trump vs. Harvard, weaponizing open science, a little statistical knowledge is a dangerous thing, prediction markets vs. Jesus, the history of Flushing, and more. Sad news I just learned: Jim Estes passed away on May 20, after a long decline. He worked for decades for the US Fish & Wildlife…
Where to eat and what to do in Sherbrooke during the CSEE annual meeting | Dynamic Ecology
Sherbrooke prof and friend of the blog Mark Vellend kindly provided some suggestions on where to eat and what to do during the upcoming CSEE annual meeting in Sherbrooke. There's advice both for conference attendees, and families and others who will be accompanying attendees. Thanks Mark!
Do ecologists all study the “same” topic? And if so, is that a problem? | Dynamic Ecology
I just came across this interesting little blog post from a couple of years ago. Sociologist Turgut Keskintürk finds that, to a rough-but-decent first approximation, every paper in every leading sociology journal is about inequality. To the point where sociology could almost be defined as "the study of inequality." Without wanting to deny that inequality…
Feed in data, pull crank, get a Friday linkfest | Dynamic Ecology
This week: ecologists' endless quest for the Holy Grail automatic inference, Francesca Gino fired, RIP Alasdair McIntyre, RIP text-based social media (?), the beatings post-tenure reviews will continue until morale research improves, for Preston North End but against its trains, worst teaser trailer ever, and more. Ecologists' endless, futile quest for a method that will…
Jeremy’s forthcoming book has a cover! | Dynamic Ecology
The Ecology of Ecologists: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science now has a cover! Here it is: Coming Dec. 2025! Order direct from the publisher, or from your preferred seller. In case you missed it, here are 13 ways of looking at a blackbird my book.
Friday linkfests are down a long way over the past fifteen years, particularly in Alberta | Dynamic Ecology
This week: no gender bias in Canadian EEB working group participation, LLMs vs. plot twists, science (well, "science") vs. ghosts, how to visit a British pub, Star Wars memes vs. Orioles fans, and more Writing in FACETS, Wei et al. find no gender bias in working group participation among Canadian ecologists and evolutionary biologists, and…
A high-profile fraud in economics research | Dynamic Ecology
Remember Michael LaCour, the political science graduate student who faked a Science paper ten years ago?* (see here, here, and here if you don't) Anyway, a new Michael LaCour just dropped, this time in economics. A very high-profile preprint** about the effects of AI use on innovation in materials science, from an economics PhD student…
Will you be replaced by a Friday linkfest in the near future? (UPDATED) | Dynamic Ecology
This week: 2025 ESA award winners, new CIEE director and host university sought, observed vs. predicted (or vice-versa), meet the new boss paradigm, same as the old boss paradigm, Yoda vs. LLMs, and more. Congratulations to the 2025 ESA award winners! The Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution (the "Canadian NCEAS") is seeking a new…
Commitments vs. meta-commitments, scientific edition | Dynamic Ecology
In which I elaborate a bit on a recent comment... I'm still thinking about Max Dresow's fascinating post on why American geologists resisted the idea of continental drift for so long. There were various intertwined reasons for this, which Dresow's post covers. I want to focus on just one key reason, that I think provides…
The problem with actually existing Friday linkfests is that they have little internal variety | Dynamic Ecology
This week: Brian Eno vs. Adam Przeworski, visualizing PDEs, Dan Bolnick goes to Washington, the next Laurentian (?), American geologists vs. continental drift, vibe coding, and more. Interactive simulations of various abstract models of ecological complexity (e.g., a Prisoner's Dilemma game on a lattice). An interactive website for drawing and illustrating partial differential equation models…
Highlights from recent comment threads | Dynamic Ecology
Our commenters are still the best. :-) Bethann Garramon Merkle argues that graphical abstracts and "plain language" abstracts aren't improving the accessibility of the scientific literature. Thomas Givnish had sensible pushback against my claim that trait-based ecology needs population ecology. Jacob Levine pushed back against the pushback. Mark Westoby has mixed feelings, including guilt, about…
Do ecology grad students need different coursework or training than they used to? | Dynamic Ecology
The ways in which ecologists go about their research is changing. It always is. So it's always worth asking whether the coursework and other training that ecology grad students receive needs to change too. Just off the top of my head, here's a short list of things on which I think many ecology grad students…
Can you use LLMs to improve the accessibility of the scientific literature? | Dynamic Ecology
Ten years ago, Meghan posted on the Up Goer Five challenge: the challenge to explain your scientific research using only the 1000 most common words in English. The challenge is intended as a fun exercise that teaches scientists to de-jargonize their writing for a broad public audience. That post sparked a long and spicy comment…
Older Friday linkfests affected a Latinate style (UPDATED) | Dynamic Ecology
This week: 2025 ESA Fellows, Thomas Crowther latest, the definition of ecology (?), sentences are getting shorter, correlation vs. car insurance, and more. Congratulations to the 2025 cohort of ESA Fellows and Early Career Fellows! ETH Zurich has released its redacted report into the conduct of star ecologist Thomas Crowther, and a Swiss court has…
Horseshoe theory (scientific edition) | Dynamic Ecology
Attention conservation notice: a half-baked post on a quarter-developed thought. Definitely even more likely than usual that I'm either way off base, musing aimlessly, or both. Online discussions of politics sometimes refer to "horseshoe theory", the idea that the political far-left and far-right are actually only a short distance apart in "political belief space." Here's…
Two-year fixed term teaching faculty position at the University of Calgary for intro-level biology courses including ecology. Please apply! | Dynamic Ecology
The Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary (my department) is hiring a two-year fixed term Asst. Professor (Teaching). The successful applicant will help teach our big team-taught intro courses for biology majors, including but not limited to our "ecology, evolution, and the biosphere" course. The link above goes to the ad. Application…