CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 198

physicist counterparts to build nuclear weapons and put a man into space (or perhaps
simply required to publish), Chinese wildlife scientists often seem to rush directly from
the drawing board to the computer, stopping only briefly in the field to collect a few tidbits
of data. The formidable difficulties of doing high-quality wildlife research in western
China provide ample justification for obtaining small sample sizes and for gathering data
capable of only limited inference. They provide no justification for ignoring fundamental
tenets of logical inference or denying basic laws of mathematics.
Tendency to Assign Categories and Properties
Rather Than to Explore Relationships
Pick up almost any technical article or topic on the natural sciences in China and you
first have to wade through a thicket of categorization systems. Before the research ob-
jectives are stated, before methods are laid out, before any new data at all are presented,
the object of the research (e.g., plant, animal, ecosystem) must first be slotted into some
preexisting category, shoe-horned into its box so that limitations are imposed from the
get-go. Often, the result of the research is simply to investigate details of this categoriza-
tion (and unsurprisingly, this usually results in its confirmation). Rather than begin with
empirical data and later, if useful, compare what is found with abstract categorizations,
such an approach limits the space of available inference by beginning with the boundaries
imposed by previously developed categorization systems. 13
Taxonomy is a much more popular subdiscipline of biology today in China than in the
West. In part, this may reflect the natural development of biological knowledge: one can't
explore ecological relationships before one knows which plants and animals are present.
But there remains a fascination with categorization that appears to transcend cataloguing
China's natural world. When so many fundamental questions bearing on conservation
and management are begging for data, splitting taxonomic hairs over subspecies—still a
common occupation among many Chinese zoologists—seems to reflect not so much any
practical requirement as simply a desire to create more categories and boundary lines.
Even when modern, molecular methods are used (as they are in China with increasing
technical sophistication), they are often oriented not so much toward understanding evo-
lutionary history (as is currently popular in Western science) as toward lending finality
and certainty to an ambiguous situation (a task at which a single study, regardless of how
well done, rarely succeeds).
Much Chinese wildlife research is focused on finding simple differences rather than
elucidating functional relationships among habitats, populations, groups, individuals, and
genes. Are animals in one province larger than in another? Are the horns of a particular
ungulate species living in one mountain range shaped slightly differently than those
living in another? Do the plants eaten in one season differ from those eaten in another?
Does group size differ by gender or perhaps by season? It is striking that, although dif-
ferences are often found, they often have no ecological meaning, and even less often any
consequences for conservation. Yet more fundamentally, searching for such differences
seems to presuppose a baseline situation in which all individual animals are identical.