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

本博士论文改进基金支持进化生态学的历史研究。具体地说，它将调查将适应性表型可塑性模型整合到物种分布的生态模型中的尝试。该项目将专注于20世纪60年代至80年代出现的可塑性模型所处的特定社会、智力和物质背景如何塑造他们的基本假设和承诺。这笔赠款将支持前往多个地点检索口述历史并查阅特定的档案材料，这些材料对于重建研究适应性表型可塑性的有影响力的概念和理论方法至关重要。智力价值该项目将通过将进化生态学的发展置于不断变化的社会对环境连通性、脆弱性和人为变化的看法的背景下，阐明科学和社会之间的重要接口。它将在生态史、环境史和遗传学和分子生物学史之间建立新的桥梁，通过展示不同的环境变化愿景如何与关于生态和进化过程中遗传机制的想法相联系。它还将通过描述整合生态学和进化生物学的理论和方法方法的努力的结果，帮助我们理解跨学科的知识转移。更广泛的影响通过分析理论模型和实际研究之间的复杂关系，这个项目可以产生非常有价值的见解，这些见解可以转移到其他科学领域对模型的作用和地位的研究。此外，该项目有可能改变科学家对其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发表演讲、在科学期刊上发表文章和跨学科研讨会来吸引生态学家和政策制定者的参与。最后，这个项目的成果将被用来制作说明科学是一种实践的教育材料。

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.