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Recently I polled current and former ecology faculty job seekers in North America, asking some questions about whether, and how, their searches were geographically restricted. The results were very interesting! Here they are. Sample size and demographics: We got 134 respondents--thanks to everyone who responded! Obviously not a perfectly random or totally representative sample of…
This week: the beatings cattle prods will continue until morale theoretical physics improves, LLMs vs. reproducibility, good annoyance, the past degrowth is never dead; it's not even past; accidental inventions, and more. How common is accidental invention? I was surprised that there seem to be some patterns here. Accidents are (somewhat) predictable! An important part…
Last year I used data from ecoevojobs.net to do an admittedly crude analysis asking whether the pandemic reduced the number of EEB faculty job seekers and/or the number of jobs the typical job seeker applies for in a year. I've now updated the post with an additional year's worth of data, from the 2024-25 ecoevojobs.net…
My recent poll didn't get many responses, but among the respondents so far it seems like there's some interest in data on the geographic mobility of ecology faculty job seekers. So let's start to compile a bit of data on that. If you're currently on, or have ever been on, the market for tenure-track ecology…
As most readers will know, I spent several years collecting a lot of data on the ecology faculty job market in North America. I stopped because it got boring. The data came out the same every year. Even the pandemic didn't change things, except for the number of positions on offer and possibly the number…
Forgot to include this in yesterday's linkfest. We go from They Might Be Giants last week, to a band most famous for being covered by They Might Be Giants this week. But although "New York City" is a good pop song, it's not perfect. This is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ZJ1xp2zzQ
This week: scientific fraudster sued, despair signalling, grue jay, whale vs. squid, paleontology fail, and more. Experiments are performance art, not a source of generalizable knowledge. This is good trolling. Uses social science examples, but the argument generalizes to ecology. Population and disease ecologist John M. Drake, writing in Science on why the human case…
Over the years, this blog often has been praised by readers for making the unwritten "rules of the game" (aka "hidden curriculum") of academia explicit and transparent. Especially, but not exclusively, the unwritten "rules" of the academic job market for ecologists in North America (for instance). And over the years, my own research, teaching, and…
I'm going to start with an anecdote, but I don't really care about the anecdote per se--it just happened to get me thinking about a broader topic. Here's the anecdote, along with some background information: Recently I attended a grant-writing workshop put on by my university for applicants to the NSERC Discovery Grant (DG) program.…
This week: magical systems thinking, useful AI and who uses it, modeling scientific risk-taking, con man vs. molecular biology, Islamic law vs. a 1989 Honda Civic, the need for explainable AI humans, an idea from theoretical physics that ecologists should either definitely copy or definitely not copy, and more. Lizzie Wolkovich on the desperation of…
What's the core of ecology as a scholarly field? What's the "heart" of the field? What defines the discipline and distinguishes it (at least fuzzily) from other disciplines? Back in the Pleistocene grad school, I thought I knew, because I thought my own research topic (joint effects of competition and predation on community structure) was…
For many years, I had a side project in which I tried to identify every ecologist newly hired into a tenure-track (TT) assistant professor position in North America. You can find summaries of the results, links to the posts, and a paper summarizing much of the data here. I think and hope that the data…
This week: best math video ever, ecology book blogging, against averaging, how everything everywhere is going, and more. This is the greatest math (and abstract art) explainer video I've ever seen. I know it's an hour long, but drop whatever you're doing and watch it. So well done in terms the script, the narrative flow,…
Way back in 2021, I asked who or what is the "public face" of ecology. What defines "ecology" in the minds of the largest mass of people? University courses that cover ecology aren't the right answer. Most people don't take them, because most people either don't go to university, or go but don't take any…
Our commenters are still the best! If you haven't been reading our comment threads recently, you missed: Rich Lenski on why his famous Long-Term Evolution Experiment hasn't inspired many imitators (although it has inspired a few). Erik Pedersen on how to run a lab exercise in which you have lab members read and discuss a…
This week: the self-handicap principle, COPE vs. retractions, terrible activism and terrible science in one convenient package, separation theorems, one album wonders (?), and more. Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle's new book on teaching and mentoring scientific writing now has a cover and blurbs. New Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for journal retraction…
At some point (not sure when), some ecology journals began asking authors to submit revised mss with changes tracked. I wish they wouldn't. As a reviewer, editor, and author, I find this useless at best, and often worse than useless. As a reviewer and editor, I don't see what's wrong with the old-fashioned practice of…
Way back in 2011, one of my first posts for Oikos Blog (my OG blogging home) was about bandwagons in ecology.* Specifically, what gets them going. My not-especially-original thought was that bandwagons get going when somebody invents a promising research approach that's easy for others to apply themselves. You just have to follow the template,…
This week: leaving evolutionary biology, economics vs. LLMs, current events vs. John Adams, llama vs. Napoleon Dynamite, and more. I'm a bit late to this. Writing in the March 2025 issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Avarez-Ponce and Vesper compiled data on over 49,000 papers from eleven leading evolution journals, and found that the peer-review…
I'm currently writing an application to renew my NSERC Discovery Grant, the federal grant that funds 100% of my research program. As part of the application, I need to describe my most significant research impacts over the past six years. NSERC Discovery Grants are meant to fund high-quality long-term research programs, and so in order…
Years ago, I polled readers on the most controversial ideas in ecology. Or at least, ideas I thought would be controversial among our readers. A few of them turned out not to be controversial at all. The least controversial idea in the entire poll was that the Earth is "currently undergoing" a sixth mass extinction.…
This week: revisiting sociobiology, what can a cell remember, LLMs vs. the Kelly criterion, questioning the friendship recession, how and why air travel is getting worse, the Diet Coke test, and more. Also: Jeremy is traveling today so comment moderation will be slow. Revisiting the sociobiology debate 50 years on. What can a cell remember?…
This week: ecology faculty job market advice, beyond graphical abstracts, The New Yorker vs. Mark Vellend, against prediction markets, weird obsessions, going long, ultimate frisbee > korfball, sheepdogs vs. sheep, visual anagrams, and more. Lots of links this week, strap in. This ESA Bulletin piece by Clarkson University's Tom Langen is a couple of years…
As I was walking towards the ESA meeting registration desk on Sunday to pick up my badge, a staff member recognized me and got my badge out for me before I even got to the desk, much less said my name! That is the first time I've ever had that experience, but I assume it's…
Well, the first copy of the uncorrected page proofs. Which were still exciting to finally hold! If you are at the ESA meeting in Baltimore, you too should head over to the University of Chicago Press booth and hold my book. As a prelude to ordering a copy, of course. :-)
Back in 2015, we ran a couple of guest posts from Baltimore locals on where to eat and drink during the ESA meeting in Baltimore. They're here and here. I can't promise they're still totally up to date, but just offhand I think most of the suggestions are still good.
I am at the ESA meeting in Baltimore. I'll be here all week. Feel free to ask me about my book*, or just come say hi. *An uncorrected proof of which will be on display at the University of Chicago Press booth! I'm very excited. :-)
The Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary (my dept.) is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of freshwater ecology. Link goes to the ad. Below are a few key details, plus a bit of information and perspective from someone (me) who's been in the department for over 20 years and…
This week: Geekologist, arguments about geology, arguments about arguments about anthropology, a good null hypothesis test, and more. Also, note that I'm traveling today, so comment moderation will be slow. Geekologist is the blog of Bruno Silva, Frederico Mestre, and Vinicius Bastazini. I applaud their attempt to get blog-reading ecologists today (already an old fashioned…
On the ESA 2025 meeting website (which I'm accessing via my laptop), I can't figure out how to add individual presentations to my schedule, only entire sessions. Is there a way to schedule individual presentations? If not, that's super-annoying (to put it mildly). Also, every time I visit the meeting website to look at my…
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.…
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…
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,…
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;…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…