CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 204

community, a scientist is conceived of not necessarily as someone with knowledge, but
rather as someone with a method to obtain knowledge. Too often, wildlife scientists in
China are given credibility not by their methodological approach but by their age, posi-
tion, and number of papers published.
I should emphasize that skepticism should not be equated with cynicism. A reader
adopting a skeptical eye looks for ways in which the author might have been misled
but is happy to find none (or few), and thus concludes that the author's interpretation is
persuasive. A scientific skeptic reads original scientific literature not as a grade-school
student looks at a textbook, but rather as an independent scientist who is fully capable of
doing similar work him/herself but simply lacked the time, inclination, or funding to do
so. Such a reader is interested in learning what the authors did, happy to learn something
new, perhaps even change some long-standing assumptions about the way the world works,
but also fully capable of seeing flaws in the paper, and even, in extreme cases, rejecting
the paper as valueless or just plain wrong.
To read in this way, however, the scientific skeptic needs to know, rather precisely, how the
study was done. It does no good to evaluate new research, either as new and valuable or flawed
and worthless, based simply on the reported results. That would not be a scientific reading,
but merely an expression of existing prejudices. Instead, the reader must consider critically
the methods used, the sample sizes available, possible undisclosed biases or confounding
factors, and decide for him- or herself how much credence the reported results deserve.
INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES TO CHINESE
WILDLIFE SCIENCE
It is also worthwhile to consider the treatment that academic and governmental institu-
tions accord wildlife biology as a discipline. Wildlife biology is not only relatively new
(with distinct recognition in North American universities having begun only in the mid-
1930s), but it is also cross-disciplinary by nature. A good wildlife biologist must be able
to conduct physically demanding field work but also analyze resulting data using appro-
priate statistics. A wildlifer must be conversant in the latest advances in evolutionary and
molecular biology but also be able to fix a flat tire. Wildlife is an applied discipline, so a
good biologist must also understand social and political issues and be adept at interpreting
and presenting findings to foresters, miners, and farmers as well as to other academics.
Having to be good at so many things usually requires that a wildlife biologist cannot be
truly expert in any.
This straddling of disciplinary boundaries and jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none char-
acteristic is one of two principal reasons that wildlife biology has failed to emerge as a
distinct field in China (the other, of course, is simply that it is considered a low priority).
As of mid-2006, there were 106 universities in the United States that formally recognized
terrestrial wildlife biology as an academic discipline (either as a named academic unit,
or by offering graduate degrees in wildlife). 19 In Canada, there were an additional ten.
In China, there was one. 20
True enough, many Chinese who work in wildlife agencies or conduct research for
academies of science have obtained training elsewhere. Zoology and biology departments