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able and which have been fruitful, which have contributed to solving practical
problems and which have been interesting but of limited utility.
Recommendation 7: Address significant problems. Do not waste your thesis
research or your career on trivial issues.
What is trivial to one ecologist is the major problem of ecology to another.
What can we do about this unsatisfactory state of affairs? In the long run, his-
tory sorts out these issues, but for ecologists facing biodiversity issues now, his-
tory will take too long. We cannot escape these judgments and more discus-
sion ought to be devoted to them in ecological journals. If medical research
councils devoted equal amounts of money to acupuncture and schizophrenia
research, we would be alarmed at the poor judgment. We should not hesitate
to make similar value judgments for ecological research. No person or group is
infallible in their judgments, and this call for discussion of the relative impor-
tance of ecological questions must not be misinterpreted as a call for the regi-
mentation of research ideas.
In this chapter I have concentrated on the role of hypothesis testing in ecol-
ogy, and one may ask whether any of this applies to ethology as well. I am not
a professional ethologist, so my judgment on this matter can be questioned. In
my experience the problems I have outlined do indeed apply to ethology as
well as ecology. I suspect that much of organismal biology could profit from a
more rigorous approach to hypothesis testing.
In our haste to become scientists (with a capital S ), we should be careful to
focus on what we desire to achieve as ethologists and as ecologists. This debate,
more about values than about scientific facts, is important for you to join. By
your decisions you will affect the future developments of these sciences.
Acknowledgments
I thank Alice Kenney, Rudy Boonstra, and Dennis Chitty for their comments
on the manuscript, and the Canada Council for a Killam Fellowship that pro-
vided time to write. Joe Elkinton helped me at the Erice meeting by summa-
rizing questions and comments on this chapter.
Literature Cited
Bart, J. and E. D. Forsman. 1992. Dependence of northern spotted owls Strix occidentalis
caurina on old-growth forests in the western USA. Biological Conservation 62: 95-
100.
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