[Coral-List] Science difficult to read
John Ware
jware at erols.com
Mon Sep 21 18:41:59 UTC 2020
Dear List,
The recent mail from Doug Fenner (thanks Doug) mentioned the following
two interesting observations:
*Papers are increasingly impenetrable.
*
*Science is getting harder to read *
Those few that have read my comments on reef science that were published
in Reef Encounter (1991) may recall that basically what I meant is:
*Global warming, bad for reefs but great for coral-reef scientists. *
In RE in 2019 I demonstrated that, between 1988/89 to 2019 there has
been an approximately 4 fold increase in the number of papers appearing
in Coral Reefs and the percentage of papers with more than 5 authors has
increased by a more than a factor of 20.
What I should have predicted back in 1991, and mentioned in 2019, is
that the papers will be increasingly looking at finer and finer elements
of coral ecology. In the 'old days' reef scientists swam over reefs and
counted fish or corals or whatever. Now, there is this finer and finer
tuning on what is going on inside corals and the zoox.
This reminded me of an event from my past. Many years ago I shared an
office with a man who had been the Chief Engineer for the construction
of the Los Angeles class submarines. One of his favorite comments on
'progress' was:
"The scientists have gotten to the point that they can exam a flea and
tell you what hair on the dog the flea came from. But they are not sure
what dog the hair was on."
Are we in danger of losing the 'big picture'?
John
--
John R. Ware, PhD
President
SeaServices, LLC
302 N. Mule Deer Pt.
Payson, AZ 85541, USA
928 478-6358
jware at erols.com
http://www.seaservices.org
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