CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 197

yield management prescriptions that are, at best, mere hypotheses as to how things will
actually turn out. That is why, although we may use computer models to help guide our
management, we never let them run the show, but rather insist on at least rudimentary field
monitoring and periodic surveys of the wildlife-consuming and/or -interested public.
Among Chinese wildlife scientists, there seems little tolerance for the poor predictive
capabilities that wildlife biologists presently have. Instead, animal populations are often
viewed as having fixed and straightforward properties, such that we need only measure
a few parameters, apply some simple models, and then can be confident of the system's
future behavior, much as a computer can be relied upon to perform the same task repeat-
edly once cleverly programmed.
Among Western-trained wildlife biologists, a researcher who attempts to draw more
certainty than is appropriate from available data, or who appears exceedingly uncomfort-
able with the vastly complex, often murky, seemingly endlessly malleable, and, frankly,
inchoate world of natural ecosystems, is said to suffer from “physics envy.” Although
the reference to Freud probably stems more from humor than anything substantive, the
characterization nonetheless seems apt. Biologists who value irrefutable results and
strong, repeatable data are naturally somewhat envious of physicists, who either live in
the world of provable mathematics, or can conduct tightly controlled experiments that
allow little room for uncertainty after their conclusion (or, at least, so biologists' legend
would have it). Even allowing for the fact that, at the microworld of quantum dynamics,
things are not all that certain, it is fair to say that physical laws and properties really do
not change. One really can write equations describing the motions of bodies, and thus
predict pretty accurately just when, and at what speed, your rocket should be blasted off
so that it achieves orbit or gets to the moon. If we wildlife biologists attempted something
similar, armed only with our present state of ecological knowledge (and in the face of
the uncertainty inherent in complex, natural systems), all of our putative rockets would
long since have crashed and landing a man on the moon would be as distant a dream
today as it must have been hundreds of years ago. Most wildlife biologists, if not entirely
content with research results that are necessarily hedged with contingencies, are at least
used to the idea.
But if Western-trained wildlife scientists often suffer from physics envy, the disease
is positively rampant among Chinese-trained wildlife scientists. Most young Chinese
wildlife scientists have, appropriately, moved beyond the descriptive natural history that
characterized what little existed of wildlife science prior to 1949. They have realized
that simple description can only get you so far: ultimately, quantification and abstrac-
tion (through useful, if inexact, mathematical models) are necessary to understand the
nature and dynamics of animal and plant populations. But Chinese wildlife scientists
often sidestep a critical step that lies between old-fashioned natural history (which itself
forms a crucial background 12 ) and sophisticated mathematical models. This step can be
summarized by the single word rigor, by which I mean carefully planned objectives, data
gathered in a manner that maximizes the chance that the question asked will be answered
(as well as that alternative explanations can be rejected), and careful scrutiny given to the
concordance of data gathered and models used. Seemingly dazzled by the ability of their