Archetype West: Edward F. Ricketts, Intertidal Ecology, and the Unity of Nature; University of Washington Marine Bio. Lab, San Juan Island; September 21-24, 2006

项目概述：本提案是为SGER考察海洋生物学家和生态学家爱德华F.里基茨的生活和工作。PI计划与六位学者举行为期三天的研讨会，重新审视里基茨的生活和工作。其中三位学者是文化和环境历史学家，他们强调了里基茨与小说家朋友约翰·斯坦贝克（John Steinbeck）的关系，以及里基茨鼓舞人心的文学角色。其余三位是对进化、海洋生物学和生态学历史感兴趣的科学史家。这次会议的目的是重新审视文学、哲学和科学工作的融合，这是里基茨和他的圈子在20世纪30年代和40年代在加州蒙特雷地区的特点。讲习班将包括一系列关于各种主题的工作会议，但不通过准备好的文件。这些工作会议的结果将作为一篇共同撰写的专著发表在《生物学史杂志》上。知识价值：里基茨在潮间带生态学方面的开创性和极具影响力的工作，他称之为“海洋社会学”，是他在20世纪30年代努力的一部分，他把生物适应、环境进化、人口爆炸和崩溃的研究，联合起来研究海洋种群，以及利用它们的人类种群。此外，里基茨在他的生物系统学研究中创造性地引入了哲学和文学思想。里基茨将这些材料汇集并组合成一个单一的知识企业，今天被各种不同的学科研究和追求，这些学科很少相互交流。将历史学家、环境科学家、文学学者和社会学家聚集在一起，研讨会将为里基茨的工作提供新的和重要的见解，并试图弥合今天科学家和其他学科的学者看待环境问题的尖锐分歧。这不仅是可取的，而且是实际需要，是今后工作的模板。会议的形式避免了准备好的论文，正是为了鼓励创新和合作思维，并避免了各学科对其成员强制执行的文学习惯和风格。科学早就认识到，知识的专业化需要协作工作和合作作者。人文和社会科学在这种模式中有很多值得学习和受益的地方。另一方面，科学专业化几乎要求在特殊情况之外避免广泛的主题，然而这种广泛的思考正是当今环境科学所需要的。更广泛的影响：该项目有潜力表明，为了理解当前环境和问题的复杂性，不仅需要跨学科的合作工作，而且需要跨越人文/科学边界的“跨部门合作”。它将证明，我们现在认为的“不同的声音”曾经是一个单一的声音，而不是一个不可能的和理想主义的提议，尝试一些从未做过的事情，这一努力有一个可敬的历史血统。这种合作在历史上被里基茨的职业生涯很好地证实了，它在人文科学和自然科学领域的创造性和实践潜力也是如此。

Project Summary: this proposal is for a SGER to examine the life and work of the marine biologist and ecologist Edward F. Ricketts. PI plans a workshop lasting three days with half a dozen scholars to re-examine Ricketts life and work. Three of the scholars are cultural and environmental historians who have emphasized Ricketts' relationship with his friend the novelist John Steinbeck, and Ricketts' inspirational literary role. The remaining three are historians of science with an interest in evolution, marine biology, and the history of ecology. The point of the conference is to re-examine the integration of literary, philosophical, and scientific work, characteristic of Ricketts and his circle in the 1930s and 40s in the Monterey, California area. The workshop will consist of a series of working sessions on a variety of themes, but not via prepared papers. The results of these working sessions will appear as a jointly authored monograph in the Journal of the History of Biology.Intellectual merit: Ricketts pioneering and extraordinarily influential work on inter-tidal ecology, which he called" marine sociology", was part of his effort in the 1930s to bring the study of biological adaptation, environmental evolution, population explosion and collapse, to bear jointly on marine populations, and the human populations that exploited them. Further, Ricketts brought to bear philosophical and literary ideas creatively within the context of his work in biological systematics. The materials brought together and combined by Ricketts into a single intellectual enterprise, are today studied and pursued by a variety of different disciplines that rarely talk to one other. Bringing together historians, environmental scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists, the workshop will provide new and significant insight into Ricketts work, and attempt to bridge a sharp divide in the way that environmental questions are viewed today by scientists on the one hand, and by scholars from other disciplines on the other. This is not merely desirable, but a practical necessity, and a template for future work. The format of the conference avoids prepared papers precisely to encourage innovative and cooperative thinking, and to sidestep the literary habits and styles enforced by the disciplines severally on their members.The sciences have long recognized that the specialization of knowledge requires collaborative work and cooperative authorship. The humanities and social sciences have much to learn and much to benefit from in this model. On the other hand, scientific specialization almost requires avoidance of broad themes outside of exceptional circumstances, and yet such broad thinking is precisely what is required in environmental science today. Broader impacts: the project has the potential to show the absolute necessity of not merely cross-disciplinary collaborative work, but "interdivisional cooperation" across the humanistic/scientific boundary, in order to understand the complexity of current environment of problems. It will demonstrate that what we now think of as "different voices" were once a single voice, and that rather than an improbable and idealistic proposal to try something that has never been done, this effort has a venerable historical pedigree. This sort of collaboration is historically well verified by Ricketts career, as is its creative and practical potential both within the humanities and the natural sciences.