The most conspicuous form of agricultural experiment is the field trial, and within the history of such trials, the arrival of the randomised control trial is considered revolutionary. Originating with R.A. Fisher within British agricultural science in the 1920s and 30s, the RCT has since become one of the most prodigiously used experimental techniques throughout the natural and social sciences. Philosophers of science have already scrutinised the epistemological uniqueness of RCTs, undermining their status as the ‘gold standard’ in experimental design. (...) The present paper introduces a historical case study from the origins of the RCT, uncovering the initially cool reception given to this method by agricultural scientists at the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. Rather than giving further attention to the RCT, the paper focuses instead on a competitor method – the half-drill strip – which both predated the RCT and remained in wide use for at least a decade beyond the latter’s arrival. In telling this history, John Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing is adopted, as the most flexible, and productive way to write the history of science, particularly when sciences and scientists have to work across a number of different kinds of place. It is shown that those who resisted the RCT did so in order to preserve epistemic and social goals that randomisation would have otherwise run a tractor through. (shrink)

. Reproducible results and repeatable measurements at the same location are fundamental to science, yet of grave concern to scientists. Involvement in biological re-surveys under MVZ-Berkeley, Harvard-LTER and Hamaarag elucidated “replication” and “location” and untangled “incommensurability” from “no fact of the matter” and “indeterminacy.” All cases revealed incommensurability without indeterminacy on the smallest scale and indeterminacy without incommensurability on higher scales, with communication failure in the former and successful workarounds in the latter. I argue that an involved philosophy helps clarify (...) fundamental concepts in this case, and since it could also help other cases it therefore should be examined in every case before being ruled out. (shrink)

Reproducing empirical results and repeating experimental processes is fundamental to science, but is of grave concern to scientists. Revisiting the same location is necessary for tracking biological processes, yet I argue that ‘location’ and ‘replication’ contain a basic ambiguity. The analysis of the practical meanings of ‘replication’ and ‘location’ will strip of incommensurability from its common conflation with empirical equivalence, underdetermination and indeterminacy of reference. In particular, I argue that three biodiversity re-surveys, conducted by the research institutions of Harvard, Berkeley, (...) and Hamaarag, all reveal incommensurability without indeterminacy in the smallest spatial scale, and indeterminacy without incommensurability in higher scales. (shrink)

Mentorship and collaboration necessarily shaped opportunities for women in science, especially in the late nineteenth century at rapidly expanding public co-educational universities. A few male faculty made space for women to establish their own research programs and professional identities. At the University of Minnesota, botanist Conway MacMillan, an ambitious young department chair, provided a qualified mentorship to Josephine Tilden. He encouraged her research on algae and relied on her to do departmental support tasks even as he persuaded the administration to (...) move her from instructor to assistant professor in 1903. Resulting publications on Minnesota algae led her to look further west, first at Yellowstone National Park and then along the Pacific Northwest coast. After visiting a particularly productive littoral site on Vancouver Island, she suggested that they establish a Minnesota Seaside Station there. Over its seven years in operation under the Midwestern leaders, that location proved remarkably productive. At the remote site, the two operated within their typical but not inevitable gendered roles and deliberately defined their seaside station as unconventional. They expected participants to study productively and, at the same time, find imaginative ways to enjoy nature at a place far from urban amenities. Gendered expectations remained casual as participants moved both within and against them. This study investigates how, in the early twentieth century, the role and expectations of mentorship shifted as Tilden established her own independent research agenda. The Minnesota Seaside Station, in particular, proved significant in developing the leadership skills essential for her to pursue research in the Pacific region at a time when American expansionism and indigenous cooperation made sites accessible to academic researchers. (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)

ArgumentTemporal issues appear to be crucial to the relationship between life scientists and their field sites and to the making of science in the field. We elaborate on the notion of practices of time to describe the ways life scientists cope with multiple and potentially conflicting temporal aspects that influence how they become engaged and remain engaged in a field-site, such as pleasure, long-term security, scientific productivity, and timeliness. With this notion, we seek to bring enhanced visibility and coherence to (...) the extensive but rather scattered and limited treatments of temporal practices in field sciences that already exist. (shrink)