• Question: Are there any scientific aspects or facts that you don't believe or follow?

    Asked by mommy123 to Edd, Jess, Zara on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      I definitely have different opinons to other scientists about certain things. Often these are very very subtle ways to interpret some data or observation. For example, I am interested in how animals forage and search for food – one recent idea was that they might follow a theoretically optimal strategy based on a random type of search. Some scientists thought they had data proving this to be true for certain animals but I (and other people) have done some work showing why we think they are wrong – we believe the animals are not moving entirely at random but are using their senses and adapting their behaviour to the environment they are in.

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi mommy123!

      In the world of crayfish research, I haven’t come across anything that I’ve strongly disagreed with. I went to a conference in France last year though, and two scientists started a big argument! One of them believed that it is impossible to remove a crayfish population from a lake using traps and so there’s no point even trying; the other scientist disagreed and said trapping can be very effective.

      It’s important to question peoples’ results…. because in the past, scientists have made up their results! This is called ‘fabrication’. A good example is the Schön scandal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal in which a physicist published work (and won awards for it!) which was later found to be untrue! :-O If you don’t believe something, you should ask for proof.

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