Linking Big: The Continuing Promise of Evolutionary Synthesis

Abstract

Synthetic science promises an unparalleled ability to find new meaning in old data, extant results, or previously unconnected methods and concepts, but pursuing synthesis can be a difficult and risky endeavor. Our experience as biologists, informaticians, and educators at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center has affirmed that synthesis can yield major insights, but also revealed that technological hurdles, prevailing academic culture, and general confusion about the nature of synthesis can hamper its progress. By presenting our view of what synthesis is, why it will continue to drive progress in evolutionary biology, and how to remove barriers to its progress, we provide a map to a future in which all scientists can engage productively in synthetic research. G.G. Simpson (1944) As articulated eloquently by Simpson more than 60-years ago, any attempt to elucidate the history and nature of life from a grand perspective must link clues from different scientific fields and disparate geographic, temporal, and physical scales. ple, Darwin's (1859) fundamental insights came from the union of Malthusian population dynamics, careful observation of artificial selection and natural variation, Smith's economic principles, and geological evidence of the immense age of the Earth. Similarly, the 20th century transformation of biology and the unification of microevolution and macroevolution during the Modern Synthesis resulted from discourse and collaboration between researchers working on heritability, paleontology, development, speciation, Mendelian genetics, natural selection, and systematics (Fisher

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A promising future for integrative biodiversity research: an increased role of scale-dependency and functional biology

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Making an Issue out of a Standard

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“…First, the understanding of scientific field data is closely bound to the local venue or data-collector (e.g., Goodwin 1995). Second, the production of history and context for scientific data is increasingly erased as it moves away from the site of its production, eventually becoming almost invisible as a story completes with frame, interpretation, and limitations upon publication of an article (what Latour and Woolgar 1986 have called the deletion of modalities).The context within which issues of standardization play out has been described from the perspective of the ecological sciences as a growing awareness of the social and technical dynamics associated with synthetic efforts in both basic and applied science (Sidlauskas et al 2010;Carpenter et al 2009;Hackett et al 2008) as well as an expression of the continuing movement from ''wet'' to ''dry'' ecology of the same type that occurred in molecular biology (Penders, Horstman, and Vos 2008). Ecological data specifically involves highly complex tasks of collection and categorization that are inherent to the domain of environmental sciences (Roth andBowen 1999, 2001;Zimmerman 2007 Zimmerman , 2008.…”