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assessing the degree of tooth wear is one method that can yield a useful, if approximate,
guide to age at death.
One of the biologists on the scene took on the grueling task of examining, in excruciat-
ing detail, the tooth wear characteristics on the jaws of 415 dead chiru. Unsurprisingly,
tooth wear is a continual process; even animals of identical ages will not necessarily
have identical-looking teeth, so some subjective grouping and categorization is needed
to classify animals to their most likely age in years. But so focused was the biologist on
the minutiae of chiru dentistry that he evidently neglected to ensure that his resultant
categorization made biological sense. His final categorization included a set of tooth char-
acteristics, seemingly intermediate between newborns and yearlings, that grouped these
animals as six-month-olds, and another set, intermediate between those of yearlings and
two-year-olds, which delineated eighteen-month-olds. But all these animals were poached
in early summer, just as chiru—which give birth at a pronounced seasonal peak—are
calving. Any animal that was six or eighteen months old at that time would have to have
been born in mid-winter, an almost certainly lethal season for a newborn chiru on the
Tibetan Plateau. But so focused was the biologist on the subtle differences among teeth
that he never took a breath, looked up, and realized that his elegant categorization system
must be incorrect (or alternatively, that he had discovered an amazing and unprecedented
biological phenomenon!).
Skepticism in Science
If scientists are the experts, who can question them? If a famous and established author
of a manuscript describing a field study claims that his or her data support a particular
interpretation, how is a mere editor (to say nothing of a student) to ask probing questions
of that work? In a society still steeped in Confucian values, how does one distinguish
scientific skepticism on the one hand from youthful arrogance on the other?
Field biology differs importantly from experimental chemistry or molecular biology:
field observations are inherently nonreplicable and experiments are rarely amenable to
control. As a relatively young discipline, wildlife biology, both in the field and on the
computer, employs methods that are constantly in flux, and often the choice of method
determines the meaning one can infer from data collected. For these reasons, clear and
thorough exposition of methods is crucial in documenting wildlife science. The choice of
a method for sampling and analyzing data is almost never obvious, and there are rarely
situations in which the methods chosen can easily be ignored in assessing the usefulness
of a study's results and conclusions. (The casual reader, wishing only to gain a superficial
sense of what was done, might skip a paper's Methods section entirely; even a well-written
one usually makes for tedious reading. But for anybody interested in placing a study's
findings into proper context, a thorough and accurate Methods section might be the most
studiously examined portion of the entire paper. Ideally, the reader should be able to track
each newly reported datum and every original finding back to a description of how it was
produced via careful reading of the Methods.)
But Methods sections in Chinese technical wildlife papers are invariably brief and
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