Bruce M. Beehler, Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, Conservation International
Wiley InterScience
Thanks to N. Sivasothi for the alert.
The foundations of modern science trace back to natural philosophers who sought to explain the workings of nature as worldly processes decipherable through rational analysis. Gilbert White, Carl Linné, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and Alfred R. Wallace, among others, looked to nature as the motivating force on earth and sought to better understand how the components of nature operated in a worldly setting, distinct from the mystical interventions of a deity.
Many of these men were enthralled by the wonders of nature and were practicing naturalists. Certainly it was the physical beauty of birdlife and bird song that helped draw humankind into the study of nature then as it does today.
Today, most practicing biologists grew up with a love of nature and, in many instances, it was this predilection that led them ultimately to the pursuit of science. I can trace my conversion from young citizen to novice naturalist in the late 1950s, when I saw, for the first time, a resplendent adult male Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) high on a dead limb in a park in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. It was a warm summer's evening and my family was enjoying an evening picnic. Hearing the sound of the male's call, I looked up to see the striking red, black, and white of its plumage—and was transported. My passion for woodpeckers was further fueled by the words and images in Arthur Cleveland Bent's Life Histories of North American Woodpeckers, which I repeatedly borrowed from the Enoch Pratt Free Library in downtown Baltimore. It is safe to say that had I not enjoyed that natural epiphany I would not be an ornithologist today.
But the reductionist demands of a 1970s college biology department nearly drove me from the roles of ornithological aspirants. I matriculated at a college where the study of biology was definitely dominated by the white-lab-coat view of science. The department's students were predominately aggressive young premedical scholars. As a starting college student, I longed for a field of study that led in a different direction—the wild places and pristine nature. This was back in 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, and the scientific establishment was slow to adjust to the call from the earth's citizens for a greater devotion to nature. As a sophomore, I took an environmental science class, but in that course it was "the environment" that was stressed, not nature. My college established a cutting-edge environmental studies program, but again, nature seemed to take a back seat to more serious fields of study such as urban planning, pollution control, water management, and the like. Science and the study of natural history were not always so segregated.
In fact, science began as the study of nature. The historical advancement of the natural sciences began with curious European naturalists with time on their hands, money in their pockets, and a fascination with nature. And it began with one of those peculiar life forces—the urge to collect. The English, French, and German aristocracies produced a suite of men who created cabinets of curiosities and menageries. They were moved by the love of nature then as we are today. They collected, organized, and exhibited their precious collections. Therein we can see the nascent intellectual ferment that led to the rise of natural history surveys, taxonomy and systematics, and natural history museums. There remained three important threads in organismic biology for more than a century—documenting what lives on earth, naming and categorizing it, and exhibiting it to a curious public as well as archiving it for further study.
The Victorian Era saw the rise of the great natural history museums in Europe, followed shortly thereafter by those in the New World. The museums in Paris, Leiden, London, New York, and Washington, D.C., even today, retain some of the Victorian quaintness and mustiness of a bygone era. In some ways, the great natural history museums became antiquated in the late 1930s when the last of the huge collecting expeditions returned home from the tropics with crates bursting with specimens (e.g., Archbold et al. 1942). Of course, field collecting still exists today, but only as a shadow of its former, grander self. And the taxonomy and systematic work being done today has one foot in the molecular laboratory and one foot in the museum collections.
Thus, the study of biology has gradually shifted from the field to the molecular lab, and the role of the naturalist has steadily diminished over the last century. While university biology departments grow and diversify and then divide into more specialized units, the pure study of nature languishes or is relegated to short courses at university field stations or local nature organizations.
This has led to an intellectual split, separating natural history's descriptive mode versus science's embrace of the hypothetico-deductive method. The latter achieved dominant market share in the university because that was where science belonged—in the rational world of hypothesis-testing and experimentation. Nature, on the other hand, has always begged to be described, illustrated, appreciated, conserved—not tested.
So, today, the great cutting-edge science is mainly done in the universities and research institutes. Much of the study of evolution, systematics, and biogeography is led by curators in natural history museums. And the appreciation and conservation of nature resides largely with the not-for-profits, such as the Audubon Societies, the Conservation Internationals, and the World Wildlife Funds.
So, what's wrong with this picture? What's missing is that in that historical division of roles, the comprehensive pursuit of natural history study as an academic pursuit has been largely discarded as superfluous. What has been deemed irrelevant by the universities because of its descriptive aspect is now needed—urgently—to guide the management of the resources of planet earth. Knowledge of natural history is equivalent to knowledge of how the earth works. We need to know how the earth works so we can better manage the earth's resources and conserve all life on earth, for the ultimate benefit of humankind. It is the study of natural history that will provide the solutions to saving the earth. In other words, our future and the future of the earth depend on more and better study of natural history. We cannot afford to relegate the science of natural history to the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and field stations. We need to expand greatly the study of natural history and we need to raise up natural history to again stand among the leading pursuits honored by universities and research institutes, as well as museums and NGOs.
Today, we do not have the luxury of time to test every hypothesis related to nature's hidden mechanisms. We need enough information—in this case descriptive information—to provide us with the blueprint for the complex workings of our earth's ecosystems. Natural history is exactly the pursuit to capture the essence of the complexity of life on earth. Whereas most science is reductive and seeks to test hypotheses in much-simplified systems, natural history revels in complexity—describing the richness of nature. It is through this descriptive process that important ecological and evolutionary relationships are revealed, results that might not be readily revealed through hypothesis-driven experimentation. Naturalists following their noses can produce natural history discoveries that can lead to important scientific advances on issues important to global conservation. I discuss three examples of how natural history studies have contributed to science below.
Most readers are familiar with the essentials of the story of the discovery of the world's first known poisonous bird—the Hooded Pitohui (Pitohui dichrous; Dumbacher et al. 1992). The backstory is quite colorful. A masters' student (J. Dumbacher) and high school student (N. Wahlberg), both interested in birds, were participating in a field study of birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea under my guidance. In handling a wide range of mist-netted birds, both had been inadvertently poisoned by the pitohui. After some discussion and analysis, they narrowed down the possible sources of the toxin. In the absence of their project advisor (me), they licked the next pitohui they netted, were "zapped" by the toxin, and lived to report their remarkable discovery. Their informal biochemical assay led to the discovery that Hooded Pitohuis are chemically defended by the steroidal alkaloid homobatrachotoxin, which is found in lethal concentrations of the poison dart frog Phyllobates terribilis. It was lucky that they were licking a bird and not the frog.
This pure natural history discovery helped explain an evolutionary conundrum in New Guinea ornithology—why the Hooded Pitohui exhibited no plumage variation across New Guinea, whereas the closely related Variable Pitohui (P. kirhocephalus) had some 20 subspecies (Mayr 1941), some of which were nearly identical in color pattern to that of the nonvarying Hooded Pitohui. Natural history knowledge of the toxicity of the Hooded Pitohui allowed us to explain the evolution of extreme variability of the Variable Pitohui as a product of a complex mimicry system like one finds in Neotropical butterflies (Dumbacher and Fleischer 2001). Score one for natural history.
In a doctoral study of the behavior and ecology of birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea, my pursuit of natural history led to a natural-history-based field investigation of fruit eaten by birds in the upland forests of New Guinea. Among the food plants used by these birds, fruit morphology fell into three rather distinct types. One type, with a protective woody capsule and a large seed, exhibited remarkable color-signaling as well as striking structural complexity and high nutritional content (Beehler 1983, 1988). These fruits were a far cry from the little berries consumed by American Robins (Turdus migratorius) in the fall in the eastern United States. A naturalist's eye for the natural "beauty" of this group of complex fruits led to the discovery that these morphologically remarkable reproductive structures were evidence of a special relationship between certain foodplants and seed-dispersing birds of paradise. The complex and specialized fruits of these particular plants allowed only a restricted subset of species to access, consume, and disperse their seeds. In many instances, only species of birds of paradise were found to feed on the fruit and disperse the seeds (Beehler and Dumbacher 1996). It was a natural history observation of the fruit syndrome that led to this discovery of extreme specialization by food plants of a single lineage of birds that are remarkably adept dispersers in a rainforest setting. Score another for natural history.
One of the oldest practices in natural history is the field survey expedition. Conservation International still practices this ancient art, in the form of its CI-RAPs ("Rapid Assessments" of biodiversity). In 2005, I led a CI-RAP to the uplands of the Foja Mountains, where Jared Diamond had rediscovered the Golden-fronted Bowerbird (Amblyornis flavifrons) in 1979 (Diamond 1982). Our CI-RAP was little more than a collection of field botanists, zoologists, and tropical ecologists from Indonesia, Australia, and the United States, all of whom were interested in tropical nature and species. We came back from this pristine and isolated tract of montane rainforest with a hoard of species new to science (more than 70 as of the most recent count; Beehler et al. 2007, Beehler 2007). We told this story to the international press and it created a huge response—far greater than we could have imagined, even leading to stories on the Lehrer News Hour and 60 Minutes. It turns out that the world is still interested in new species and natural history discovery. A lot of excitement was created in Indonesia, with calls to establish the Foja Mountains as a national park. A special stamp series was issued that featured the biodiversity of the Foja Mountains. Score another for natural history!
The mandate of natural history is to tell nature's story. This can be in the form of a paper in a scientific journal, a popular book for general readers, a website, or a global database. Natural history's mandate includes biodiversity surveys, studies of the life histories of wild species, descriptions of habitats, and explanations of why the natural world is the way it is. It is very broad mandate, and the unlimited scope of its audience and form of its products make natural history the most powerful tool we have for engaging society, fostering the conservation of wild lands and species, and conserving and being wise stewards of the earth's natural resources.
In the same way that conservation biology arose and split from the field of ecology, and the way environmental science evolved out of chemistry and biology, I suggest that natural history as a field of study again merits taking its place as a formal and recognized field of academic study. It would be heartening to see departments of natural history, with tenured faculty, distributed in universities and research institutes around the world. The mandates of these departments would be the study, enumeration, and comprehensive description of nature and of the earth's species, ecosystems, and resources, and the research conducted in these departments would encompass taxonomy, systematics, and biogeography. Every university with a natural history museum would rightfully have an allied department of natural history and the museum would no longer be an orphan (as so many are today). A department of natural history would attract a certain type of professor and certain types of students that would make for a cohesive culture with the mission being the understanding of the natural world around us and the fostering of its preservation for generations to come. If this were to come to pass, then my granddaughter, upon arriving at college, would be able to enter a department where there is no battle being waged between those students that aspire to medical school and those who aspire to study nature. Let's hear it for the study of natural history!
This commentary is based on a Plenary Address presented by the author at the joint Association of Field Ornithologists/Wilson Ornithological Society meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, in April 2009.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1557-9263.2009.00253.x
