At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes (...) tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell’s practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political “biases” of biodiversity research and its problem of “reproducibility.”. (shrink)

The article investigates how national and international measures to protect wolves turned the whole of Norway into a field of study for wildlife biologists, and how the extensiveness of this “field” prompted a transformation in the methods employed to count and monitor wolves. As it was not possible to conduct traditional field studies throughout the whole of Norway, the biologists constructed an extensive infrastructure, which I have termed a “counting complex,” in order to count wolves from a distance. The article (...) identifies three decisive periods in the construction of this complex: the 1960s, the 1980s, and the first decade of the new millennium. During the first two periods, biologists used the infrastructure to mobilize ordinary people’s observations; they did this by first searching through newspaper notes, then enrolling people more directly through local committees of game management. However, the public’s observations often turned out to be unreliable, and, in the 2000s, molecular biologists helped to incorporate genetic techniques into the counting complex. By using the infrastructure to mobilize wolf scat, rather than observations, and by constructing DNA profiles for individual wolves, the molecular biologists enabled research that I have termed “nationwide field studies in absentia.” The article argues that the biologists’ main motive for constructing and refining the counting complex was to make wolves amenable to government, as they considered this a vital premise for the successful practice of protecting wolves. The increased intensity in monitoring in the last period, however, was also driven by international conventions and detailed regulations. (shrink)