Spark, Scaffold, Substrate: The Multiple Hidden Roles of Natural History in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

AbstractOver the last 30 years, as ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) has become more theoretical, experimental, and data driven, there has been a growing worry that the space for natural history (i.e., the direct observation of organisms in their environments) has shrunk. The jury is still out on whether such a worry is well founded. On the one hand, quantitative evidence for natural history's decline is equivocal, and numerous journals continue to publish natural history. On the other hand, the recent introduction of separate sections for natural history by many prominent EEB journals does suggest an ongoing separation between natural history and mainstream EEB. This debate, however, has so far focused mainly on the fate of natural history in the foreground, that is, intentionally and systematically collected natural history information that is made visible in scientific articles. In this article, we draw attention to hidden natural history in EEB research, that is, that which works in the background and remains hidden from view because it is written out of scientific articles. Here, by leveraging a collection of backstory oral history interviews anchored around famous scientific articles in EEB, we make visible and describe three roles for background natural history in EEB: (1) as spark (motivating research questions and hypothesis), (2) as scaffold (supporting the conduct of studies), and (3) as substrate (serving as raw material for new research). We examine how accounting for hidden natural history shifts the conversation around natural history's decline and explore the potential epistemic implications that arise from such natural history being hidden.