ABSTRACT
Chapter 7, Questions, begins with the assertion that outside of art classes, few students in America’s public schools are ever asked what they would like to study, but instead are told what to study. I have no way of proving this claim to be true, but for the past twenty-eight years I have asked field station students what they would like to study, and from watching their responses, have come to the conclusion that they’ve rarely (if ever) been asked that question. In this case, the “what to study” is a parasitological concept, disguised as a research project of their own choosing-an original exploration of some natural phenomenon. The “study” is actually a test of our assumptions about the way that nature operates. Because students only have about a month (shortened to about two weeks in 2003) to accomplish their research, from idea to presentation, these projects routinely become a search for pattern from which one can infer a process. Most of the time, their final inference could be the basis for a doctoral dissertation. For example, we might easily assume that as fish become older, they continue to acquire, thus accumulate, parasites, so that larger fish would be more heavily infected than smaller ones. This assumption is actually a statement about the way natural
systems work-the mechanism by which apparent order is established. Conversely, we could just as easily assume that as fish age they either die from their parasites or become immune, so that a sample of older fish would have fewer parasites than a sample of younger fish. Either of these predictions could be tested-in this case using the same data set-thus both are, in fact, scientific hypotheses, and they are derived from our sense of what to expect when we observe nature closely. We tend to impose order on nature, however, so it would be a little discomforting to discover that there is no relationship whatsoever between the age of a fish and the abundance of its parasites. But to an scientist, no pattern is a pattern just as zero is a number, and failure to find anticipated order in nature simply means we must look for organizing mechanisms other than those on our current list of possibilities. Or, we must admit that perhaps counter to our very human view of the world, no permanent organizing mechanisms are at work.
