{"id":189,"date":"2015-03-01T14:35:04","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T22:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/?p=189"},"modified":"2015-04-16T10:03:05","modified_gmt":"2015-04-16T17:03:05","slug":"last-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/2015\/03\/01\/last-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Caleb\"<\/a>
Caleb with the giant flower of Dracontium gigas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As I find myself again in the proverbial armchair, which disappointingly happens to have no armrests, I\u2019m curious: did my experience change my perspective on biology, or on science more generally? How did my first time out there in the field make me think differently?<\/p>\n

First and foremost, I\u2019ve come to realize how hard it really is to get things done when you\u2019re out there \u2013 especially when you\u2019re not well equipped with a background on your study system or on how to attack your problems in a methodological sense. However, I think that was part of the fun of this trip \u2013 knowing absolutely nothing, figuring out a way to figure it out without an extensive literature on the subject, and coming away with some new knowledge (even if it was less than we\u2019d hoped). The limitations we had \u2013 for example, exhausting all our possible methods for marking flies, only to find out that they\u2019re all lethal or a good method for turning craneflies into spider food, or finding out that your camera traps aren\u2019t keeping proper time after being out at the sites for days – gave some excellent perspective on the challenges faced by all the researchers whose work I read – challenges that you never see in the final product. It\u2019s easy to try to poke holes in someone\u2019s work without seeing how it may be a triumph against many great odds. Although criticism is obviously part of the dialectical process of science and difficulty is not an excuse for poor work, this experience gave me another perspective that I may have been lacking \u2013 to appreciate of the ingenuity and simple elegance of many experiments, rather than just look for flaws as a knee-jerk reaction.<\/p>\n

Secondly, it\u2019s really fun to figure out new things. While out there in the field, I often reminisced on Richard Feynman\u2019s \u201cThe Pleasure of Finding Things Out,\u201d especially with the things that not much was known about, such as cranefly behavior. There was definitely a new joy I hadn\u2019t felt before \u2013 that of having my speculation be bounded by experiment and observation. This, I think, was one of the most well-met expectations for this FBQ. I spent a lot of time simply observing and coming up with ideas, as I have often done before, but it was fascinating to then have to turn around wonder \u2013 well how should I test that? What further quantitative observations should I make? Although time constraints, and to some extent poor planning, kept us from really getting at many of our questions, this was just further motivation for me to improve my research skills (a favorite quote of mine is \u201cthe first step to being good at something is to really suck at it\u201d) and also made me want my own questions \u2013 the ones that I can spend years on in that iterative process of speculation then experimentation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I find myself again in the proverbial armchair, which disappointingly happens to have no armrests, I\u2019m curious: did my experience change my perspective on biology, or on science more generally? How did my first time out there in the field make me think differently? First and foremost, I\u2019ve come to realize how hard it … Continue reading Last Thoughts<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,21,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-caleb","category-final-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.lifesci.ucla.edu\/eeb-fbq-15w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}