Heliophage

I’m very happy to have worked for Nature. I’m proud of some of the stuff I did in my time as Chief News and Features Editor there and — even more so — of the stuff I helped my excellent colleagues there to do. I have huge affection for many of the people who work there, and I think it is a great magazine and journal. I think that by and large it navigates the difficult territory that comes from being a profit-making organisation providing a public good and a cultural necessity reasonably well. I think it has served science faithfully for 143 years, and that the world would be a much worse place without it it.

However the fact that a personal subscription to Nature does not allow you access to its archive is simply crappy.

Yes, you get access to articles back to 1997, which is better than nothing. But science didn’t start in 1997. Nature didn’t start in 1997. Ideas that are important today are not all rooted in the very shallow post-1997 horizon of intellectual history. The random selection of articles I just looked at  in a recent issue all had references to pre-1997 work, some of it published in Nature.

Sometimes pre-1997 observations are as current as they come. Today I was looking into various aspects of the Pinatubo eruption of 1991. Around the world scientists looked into the eruption and sent their observations and ideas to Nature. The best of them got published. Have there been any better observations since? No – there haven’t been any comparable eruptions to observe since. So I can’t read the most recent relevant observations on a topic of current interest  in a journal to which I have paid to subscribe.

Not an isolated instance. A friend recently asked me about the origin of a fundamental concept in molecular biology. With a little work, I tracked it down to a Nature paper from the 1960s. That was helpful to him — but I couldn’t get the full context because I couldn’t get the bloody paper. (The friend could – irony of ironies, he works for Nature.)

I admit that I’m probably unusual in the amount of pre-1997 stuff that I want to read.  I have a greater interest in the roots of scientific discussions than most. I am interested in the continuities and lack of same between science now and science in its past. I like the day before yesterday.

But a) I think, all other things being equal, it would be better if more people moved a little way towards my approach to these things. Too many people read only the most recent publications in their field, and lack a long perspective.

And b) I BOUGHT A SUBSCRIPTION. I should be able to read the archive.

Now, I should note that this policy, while stupid, is not sneaky. The subscription page makes it clear that you don’t get the archive. And I should also note that the subscription is worth it anyway for a beautifully produced magazine that never fails to inform and fascinate.

But it is still a bad policy. And not just because it inconveniences me and leaves me feeling ripped off by an institution I esteem so highly. Because Nature should be about all of Nature. It should be about making you a part of the process of which it is, and has been, a great exemplar. And it shouldn’t salami slice that process in search of a quick buck.

I remember speaking with quite fierce pride at my leaving party about the experience of being at the head of a spear  with a haft centuries long behind it. But if you want to appreciate the haft, it will cost you £22 quid a glimpse, even if you’re a paid up member of the spearhead. That’s wrong. If you’re part of Nature‘s wonderful ongoing conversation you should be part of all of Nature‘s wonderful ongoing conversation.

In honour of MSL/Curiosity, which descends towards the surface of Mars at breakneck speed tomorrow morning with about a five in seven chance of ending up in one functional piece, I’ve put a couple of relevant pieces up at the mostly defunct MainlyMartian. If you want to try and hold your breath through the “seven minutes of terror” they start at 05.31 UT Sunday Monday morning.

I’ve been reading a bit of ecological history for a column, and I was struck by some dichotomies. Here’s Ron Doel, in 2003

By the 1960s, two distinct ‘environmental sciences’ had emerged: one biology-centered, focused on the problems in ecology and population studies, and funded in part on the problems in ecology and population studies, and funded in part by agencies and managers concerned about human threats to the environment; the other geophysics-centered, focused on the physical environment, and responsive to the operational needs of the military services that support it.

I can see that, and I can see how it would map in part on to a distinction between critical and industrialised science of the sort that Ravetz discusses.

But here’s a different dichotomy, in a different context, as ascribed to G. Evelyn Hutchinson by Joel Hagen in “An Entangled Bank”

Population biologists tended to take a merological perspective, focusing upon independent individuals and assuming that population phenomena determined higher level community properties. In contrast to this bottom up approach, other ecologists, particularly those who later studied ecosystems, took a holological approach by studying the flow of materials and energy through food webs without considering the individuals that made up the web. Hutchinson, an eclectic biologist, seemed capable of making the transition from one perspective to the other effortlessly. Most other ecologists have not been so adept.

And this, it seems to me, also bears on the Clements/Tansley dispute, as to whether there was a sort of teleological holism in ecology (the notion of the climax ecosystem), or simply sets of relations between populations and their physical environments which could be studied rather as those in physics could be.

Now it’s pretty clear to me that these aren’t all the same cut and dried dichotomy. You can be a military-linked energy-flow kind of guy and believe in climax systems (I think the Odums did this). But elements of it do seem to be consistent. I wonder if anyone can guide me to deeper thought on this?

It’s not saying much to say that there might be more blogging here this year than there was last year. It may also have more film stuff than was its original intention, though I might get some planetary anthropoceney geoengineeringish photosynthetic stuff up too. Let’s just see how it goes, shall we?