This doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports research in the history of evolutionary ecology. Specifically, it will investigate attempts to integrate models of adaptive phenotypic plasticity into ecological models of species distribution. The project will focus on how specific social, intellectual, and material contexts in which models of plasticity emerged during the 1960s through 1980s shaped their underlying assumptions and commitments. The grant will support travel to multiple sites to retrieve oral histories and to consult specific archival materials that are essential for reconstructing the influential conceptual and theoretical approaches to investigating adaptive phenotypic plasticity.
Intellectual Merit
This project will illuminate an important interface between science and society by placing developments in evolutionary ecology in the context of shifting societal visions of environmental connectivity, vulnerability, and anthropogenic change. It will create new bridges between the history of ecology, environmental history, and the history of genetics and molecular biology, by showing how different visions of environmental change are linked to ideas about genetic mechanisms in ecological and evolutionary processes. It will also contribute to our understanding of trans-disciplinary knowledge transfer by describing the consequences of efforts to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches from ecology and evolutionary biology.
Broader Impacts
By analyzing the complex relationships between theoretical models and empirical research in contextualized investigative settings, this project can generate insights that are highly transferrable to studies of the role and status of models in other scientific fields. In addition, this project has potential to transform the way that scientists think about the broader social and intellectual contexts of their research; the researcher plans to engage ecologists and policy-makers via presentations at scientific meetings, publications in scientific journals, and transdisciplinary workshops. Finally, the results of this project will be used to create educational materials that illustrate science as a practice.
The way that scientists have studied organic evolution has changed in many ways since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection in the mid-19th century. A major problem for scientists in the 20th century has been how to incorporate what we know about heredity and development with Darwin's ideas. This project contributes to a historical understanding of evolutionary biology by showing how some scientists tried to incorporate heredity, development, and evolution in studies of wild populations of organisms during the 1950s and 1960s. This project involved reading and analyzing materials in archives, including scientists' notebooks, correspondence, and unpublished data. It also involved interviewing many working and retired scientists to piece together past events, and to better understand how they think about the questions that they investigate. This research shows how the agricultural and economic contexts in which some scientists worked in the 1950s and 1960s shaped their ideas. For example, scientists working at agricultural research stations in Wales and Scotland tended to study different species of plants than their academic counterparts, which ultimately led them to use different methods and to arrive at different conclusions about evolution. This dissertation also shows how those ideas from the 1950s and 1960s continue to influence how scientists think about evolution, heredity, and development. Some recent controveries about how developmental processes influence evolution were driven by the intellectual heritage of the scientists involved in those debates than by the scientific problems that they were arguing about. Old hidden assumptions about how organisms develop can still influence how scientists think today.
