Beginning science books tend to make everything sound so simple. You do an experiment by having two groups, one called a control and the other the experimental group. You treat the two groups exactly alike except for one condition, called the variable. Any differences between the control and experimental groups obviously is due to that variable, and voila! You've solved it and advanced the knowledge of mankind.
In real life, though, it's hard enough to do that in the simple
sciences like chemistry and physics. Keeping conditions the same isn't anywhere as
easy as it might seem. Worse, difficulties magnify many times over when you're
dealing with organisms in the laboratory, because animals and plants are confoundingly
complex. And studying them in the wild? You not only have the intricacies of the
organism to worry about, you also have the thousands of interrelationships between
organisms and between organisms and the non-living environment to worry about. It's
probably just as well that beginning science books tend to ignore ecology; just maybe
beginners need a bit more seasoning before facing real life.
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.