Biodiversity, Single-Source Problems, and Single-Fix Solutions

I've been wondering recently about what it means to be an academic. When I began graduate school, I assumed a perspective that had been given to me, that my objective was to become an expert in a single, focused subject area--my dissertation would be the intersection of my knowledge and skills on one matter that I would understand better than anyone else in the world.

But as I read Berry's book, I'm forced to recognize that if I want to make this thing work, I have to keep developing the broader context for what I'm doing. I could spout off a few critical ideas about why leafcutter ant agriculture is interesting to other academics in this day and age, but this is far from sufficient. I could set down my book and listen to other presentations on myopic matters and try to make my work fit in somehow, but that's also insufficient. A lot of scientists like to pretend that our work contributes to an ever-growing body of knowledge, but somehow I don't think that's true. While perhaps knowledge can grow extensively (especially through information storage and retrieval tools like computers), understanding is limited to human lifespans.

The tug of this book is clearly strong. I don't yet fully know what to make of it.

Good news in small measures

Several good things have happened this week:

-I got second place in a poster competition at the meeting I just attended (the competition wasn't exactly fierce, but still)

-I got a small grant! Yay for my own funding! This is small grant number two for me. Now it's about time to move on to bigger things, like perhaps a certain dissertation proposal...