Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ecology, Evolution, and Development: The Conceptual Foundations of Adaptive Phenotypic Plasticity in Evolutionary Ecology

IntroductionThis博士论文改进补助金支持进化生态学的历史研究。具体来说，它将调查试图整合适应性表型可塑性模型到物种分布的生态模型。该项目将重点关注20世纪60年代至80年代期间出现的可塑性模型的特定社会，智力和物质环境如何塑造其基本假设和承诺。该基金将支持前往多个地点检索口述历史，并咨询特定的档案材料，这些材料对于重建有影响力的概念和理论方法以调查适应性表型可塑性至关重要。智力价值该项目将阐明科学与社会之间的重要界面，通过将进化生态学的发展置于环境连通性，脆弱性，和人为的改变它将通过展示环境变化的不同愿景如何与生态和进化过程中的遗传机制有关的想法联系起来，在生态学，环境史以及遗传学和分子生物学的历史之间建立新的桥梁。它还将有助于我们的跨学科知识转移的理解，通过描述努力整合生态学和进化生物学的理论和方法的后果。更广泛的影响通过分析理论模型和实证研究之间的复杂关系，在情境化的调查设置，这个项目可以产生的见解是高度转移到模型在其他科学领域的作用和地位的研究。此外，该项目有可能改变科学家对他们研究的更广泛的社会和知识背景的思考方式;研究人员计划通过在科学会议上的演讲，在科学期刊上的出版物和跨学科研讨会来吸引生态学家和政策制定者。最后，该项目的结果将用于创建教育材料，说明科学作为一种实践。

IntroductionThis doctoral dissertation improvement grant supports research in the history of evolutionary ecology. Specifically, it will investigate attempts to integrate models of adaptive phenotypic plasticity into ecological models of species distribution. The project will focus on how specific social, intellectual, and material contexts in which models of plasticity emerged during the 1960s through 1980s shaped their underlying assumptions and commitments. The grant will support travel to multiple sites to retrieve oral histories and to consult specific archival materials that are essential for reconstructing the influential conceptual and theoretical approaches to investigating adaptive phenotypic plasticity.Intellectual MeritThis project will illuminate an important interface between science and society by placing developments in evolutionary ecology in the context of shifting societal visions of environmental connectivity, vulnerability, and anthropogenic change. It will create new bridges between the history of ecology, environmental history, and the history of genetics and molecular biology, by showing how different visions of environmental change are linked to ideas about genetic mechanisms in ecological and evolutionary processes. It will also contribute to our understanding of trans-disciplinary knowledge transfer by describing the consequences of efforts to integrate theoretical and methodological approaches from ecology and evolutionary biology. Broader ImpactsBy analyzing the complex relationships between theoretical models and empirical research in contextualized investigative settings, this project can generate insights that are highly transferrable to studies of the role and status of models in other scientific fields. In addition, this project has potential to transform the way that scientists think about the broader social and intellectual contexts of their research; the researcher plans to engage ecologists and policy-makers via presentations at scientific meetings, publications in scientific journals, and transdisciplinary workshops. Finally, the results of this project will be used to create educational materials that illustrate science as a practice.