Rekindling the fire

After I finished my master's degree, about nine years ago, I was at a loss as to what to do next. A Ph.D. seemed too much of a commitment at that age. I wanted to get a proper job, and see what the real world had to offer and if I could be content there. Problem was, I had no idea what one did in the real world.
I had almost no professional experience. I wrote amateurish, over eager cover letters and sent my woefully short CVs out to scientific publishing houses. I wrote clumsy mock articles for science journalist internships. I was basically directionless. I eventually took a job as a website content editor and translator for a half arsed start up animation and comic book company based in London county hall. I learnt a lot on that job, mostly that anything that looks too good to be true on paper probably is, and that throwing everything  at the wall to see what sticks can work great for management, but is a great way to fuck over enthusiastic young people.
The job offered no guidance. I had no idea what I was doing, how well I was doing, and what was expected of me. I felt out of my depth, frustrated, and unhappy. That's when I found the web forum fo a popular webcomic dedicated to graduate students. I leapt in. I checked threads at all hours of the day, and late into the night. Within a few months, my posting was through the roof. I have a lot to thank that forum for. It gave me a community when I felt isolated professionally, encouraged me to overcome my fear of graduate school, and taught me a lot about passionate and intelligent people. It was also an emotional minefield, that would at roughly three to six month interludes erupt into belligerent arguing. Those forum fights were emotionally exhausting to those involved, and seemed difficult to contextualise to those outside the forums. Sound familiar? The forum became a crutch to escape my dissatisfaction with my professional life. The six month I spent unemployed, and the nine months I spent in that job with no clear direction and no idea what was going to happen the next day, let alone in a month, destroyed what had up to then been a pretty solid work ethic and discipline that had successfully carried me through high school, college and my master's degree.
Eventually, I realised that the job was bad for me, so I didn't even wait to hear whether or not I got into graduate school. I found another job, one that was more focused and more serious, with a much better boss. I rediscovered some (though not all) my work ethic. And eventually, I was accepted into graduate school in the US and left. The forum faded and was eventually disbanded, though I found I had lost interest sometime shortly after starting my PhD. During my PhD, I was stressd, but overall happy. I almost never had trouble motivating myself to do what needed to be done. I was an independent adult for the first time, and it felt great. Seriously, balancing my own budget at the end of every month made me feel like a kid imagines being a grown up feels like.
Five years later, I was back where I had been after my masters. I had finished the PhD, and was looking into a gaping unknown. My visa had expired and in focusing on finishing my dissertation I found myself without publications and without a job. I had to move back to the UK, leaving behind a life I had spent five years building, including a four year relationship. My partner and I agreed to go long distance, but it was terrifying to do that with no set end date, and no idea under what circumstances we could be back together.
So, at 29, I moved back in to my mother's house in London. After five heavily goal directed years, in which I had grown as a person and a scientist, in which I had begun to achieve some degree of professional recognition, suddenly nothing. The result was a return to that feeling I had had in my first job of frustrated aimlessness, combined with a fair dose of humiliation. Amid that frustration and isolation, a good friend and fellow scientist introduced me to science twitter. It was great. I found colleagues and scientists I could chat to in almost real time. I kept abreast of developments in my field. I found out about job opportunities. I commiserated about the job market. And I got involved in many large twitter spats that were emotionally draining. I found a voice yes, but man I used it a lot.
That year of my life was not, in many ways, a good one for me. It contained many good things (the birth of my nephews and niece, time with my family, time to rediscover my home town), but professionally, despite submitting my first two papers (and getting one accepted), giving several invited seminars and getting four postdoc interviews, it felt like stagnation, if not regression. And, as before, my work ethic went to pot. I was listless and unmotivated. I drank too much. And I spent a lot of time on twitter. It was clear to me that I was angry, and burned out. Yet I couldn't muster the willpower to change my slew of bad behaviors. I was in licking my wounds mode. This scared me: I've always prided myself on my willpower. Yet suddenly, I couldn't stop myself from tweeting when I should be working, from not wasting my days playing Skyrim, and from not engaging in alarmingly regular drinking. Don't get me wrong, I love twitter, love video games and enjoy a good beer, but even I could tell this was no longer quite healthy.
Eventually, through networking, good luck and some people willing to go to bat for me in a big way, I landed my current postdoc. And as soon as I started, things started to change. The first three  months, I was in the office at 8 every day and staying til six. I probably achieved more in those first few months than I had in the entire previous year. In January, my now fiance came to join me out here. Suddenly we had our life back.
But my bad habits hadn't left. I had the energy for work again, but everything else was still off kilter. I'm one of those people who's always on top of his paper work (taxes filed a month before the deadline, paperwork submitted with weeks to spare), but things were still slipping through my fingers. I missed bills (something I NEVER do). I also had almost zero energy to do anything outside of work. I've always been a voracious reader, but I suspect this year I've read fewer books that at any other time in my life. And limiting my drinking has proved harder than I had wanted.
And then there's twitter. Its use as a crutch in that year in the wilderness made it difficult to shake the habit, but there's no denying that I tweet more than is sensible, given all the other things I need to do.
A year in I finally feel myself returning to a better version of me. As the winter is settling in, I'm looking forward to making my way through a backlog of books. I'm exercising regularly again. I'm making a concerted effort to be more disciplined about non work tasks, and the drinking is finally getting under control. And then last week, after the turmoil of shirstorm, and the wonderful response to my post, I realised I was also ready to reboot my relationship with twitter. So I'm taking a twitter break (I'm still lurking, so no saying mean things about me thinking I won't find out). I need to devote this new energy to tasks closer to hand: my research, my papers, my impending wedding.
A friend of mine told me, as I was entering my final year of graduate school, that six months to a year of unemployment was getting increasingly common between completing a PhD and starting a postdoc in palaeontology. Even if we disregard the economic lunacy and unsustainability of this arrangement, the psychological and emotional toll it takes on young researchers is huge. If you are in this situation, be honest with yourself about how exhausted you are, and be aware of any bad behaviors you may have accumulated as coping mechanism. Give yourself time, and be gentle, and you will find your way back to a version of you you prefer. It's taken me a year. And that means next year can only be better.

Confessions of a teenage dirtbag: Thoughts on shirtstorm

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I went through a bit of a skater boy/snow bum phase. It was the closest thing I ever got to a teenage rebellion: wearing baggy jeans, big graphic T shirts, skater boy trainers. I went to a rather prim French school in central London, and then to university at Cambridge - a place that for all its charms is the definition of stuffy englishness - so in those middle class settings, my look was enough to raise a few eyebrows.

Picture 1: Snow Bum PaleoGould

Part of my collection,some of my favorite shirts, had 'classic' fifties and sixties pin ups on them. One of them, my favorite T shirt for many years, was a red Von Dutch number with a girl in an 8-ball bra holding a monkey wrench on the back. I still have it. It's faded with the years, and has now been relegated to a gym shirt. And maybe, after today, it won't even be worn as that.
The purpose of this post is not to whine that Matt Taylor of the European Space Agency has ruined forever my ability to wear pin up shirts. It is rather to ask the question about why he, and I, would choose to wear such a garment. Irrespective of your stance on the artistic value of Pin Up art, questions can fairly be asked about wearing what amounts to mild erotica to work.
The truth of the matter is, I always wore those shirts to provoke.  As I mentioned, I went to stuffy environments. And wearing these shirts that skirted lines of decency (and make no mistake, I knew they did), was a form of provocation. I distinctly remember there were times and places I would not were them. Is it not odd that these commercially available garments of mild provocation should use as their weapons women's bodies? Isn't it odd that I would never go to lecture wearing a T shirt with a Tom of Finland image on it? No, it isn't actually odd at all.
When Matt Taylor put on that shirt today, it was not, as has been suggested, that he doesn't care about clothes. It is clear that he has given his aesthetic great thought. He put on that shirt to provoke the stuffy media perceptions of scientist. He put on that shirt to loudly proclaim that he wasn't part of the Establishment. He put on that shirt for the same reason I used to put on my graphic Ts of pin up girls to lectures at Cambridge university. And, in doing so, he abused and belittled women. He probably didn't even realise it. He probably just thought he was being cheeky.
Our aesthetic choices are not free. That applies to subcultures like Rockabilly as much as it does to mainstream preppy campus outfits. The imagery of rockabilly and classic sci-fi, by reaching into the past, necessarily dredges up sexism with it. These images and styles cannot be worn uncritically. You have to interrogate your aesthetic choices. Otherwise you end up wearing a sexist shirt on a world platform, and casting a shadow over a great scientific achievement.

There's another issue I want to address, which I think resonates more in the UK than it does to American audiences. Because there is a class aspect to this too. Americans looking and listening to Matt Taylor hear a white dude with a British accent. Brits hear someone who's from a social background that doesn't normally get to speak for British science. People who got to speak for British Science when I was growing looked like this.


Sir Patrick Moore, late astronomer royal

Sir David Attenborough

 Matt Taylor was being presented as a working class hero, and that's important. With Britain the most unequal society in Europe, we need to encourage people from non traditional backgrounds into science, and we need to break the snobbery that makes people think that scientists look and sound, well, like me. But that doesn't mean we get to give Matt Taylor a pass. Today he failed as an ambassador for science. In doing so, he failed not only young women, but young working class children too. The solution is not to gloss over Matt Taylor' mistake. The solution is to find more working class people, men and women, to speak for science in the public eye. The solution is to expect more.

When you stick it to the man, be careful that you don't throw women, or anyone else under the bus in the process. And when you become the head of a major international space project, remember that you are no longer quite the underdog you once were. In fact you have power, and visibility, and a platform. You will be judged on how you make use of them.

Spell. It. Out.

Last night, a twitter fight erupted on where one should encourage trainees to publish. Specifically, whether it was appropriate to encourage trainees to publish in a trendy but untested open access journal, given that publication venues counts in hiring and promotions. Proflikesubstance wrote a thoughtful response (read the comments, for once).
I am very invested in this conversation. I am a postdoc in neurophysiology with two publications. Not two publications from my postdoc. Two publications period. One is in PLoS ONE, one is a decent society journal from my old field, vertebrate palaeontology. Here's the thing, my old field doesn't have high impact journals. I'm trying to get a third paper in what vertebrate palaeontology considers a high impact journal. The IF is less than five. My decent society journal is less than 2. In my new field, that shit don't fly. Compared to the neuroscientist I share a department with, my publication record is a joke.
Now, here's where I get annoyed. There are people in my field who would, and have told me, that I am already at a huge disadvantage compared to my peers. People who would tell me to seriously look at alternative careers. People I respect who've tweeted such advice. I am aware of this. I am not playing games anymore. I need to know what I need to do to restack the deck in my favour. So I am tired of people, well intentioned people whose advice on many things I trust, pussy footing around the issue of where I should publish.
Whenever the topic of open access comes up, proponents argue that they have placed postdocs into faculty positions without glam pubs. Detractors then darkly mutter about the selection committees' expectations and promotions and tenure requirements. Yet when it comes to specifics, nada. No one is willing to say HOW they whittle down those three hundred applications to a shortlist of five. I've yet to see anyone go on the record and say "yup, I chucked everyone who didn't have a CNS paper" or conversely "I looked up the candidates' H index and ranked them that way". Or, "our process is opaque, and I'm not sure how I came up with shortlist, but looking back on it, yes most had a CNS paper". Or "actually, it was the K99/R00 that did it".
Our department has NSF type comparative primatology people as well as neuroscientists in it. Recently, we had a seminar speaker meet the postdocs. He was a neuroscientist. The anthropology postdocs on NSF money talked about how, after two years, they were heading onto the job market. The neuro postdocs, and the speaker, all did a double take, as for them, no one was job market ready with less than five years of postdoc and at least a dozen papers, not even considering journal impact. This is the complex quagmire of tacit expectations a postdoc is supposed to navigate as they gauge where to publish and how much.
I'm currently awkwardly straddling paleontology, physiology and neurology, and I'm competitive for anatomy teaching positions. I know what the standards in many different fields are, and they change a lot. As I mentioned, in my old field, it's almost impossible to reach the kind of impact that neuroscientists get. And NIH money is out of the question. So I know for a fact that paleontologists have very different publication profiles to neuroscientists. As a trainee, I need you, as senior people who have been on hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees to level with me. Tell me what I need, what you expect in terms of publication. Spell it out by field, by university, by department. Tell me how you deal with people from radically different background when you do broad searches (like a ecology and evolutionary biology position, for example). Stop it with the dark hints.

Even on Anarres

There are few greater pleasures in life than chancing upon in the stacks of a second hand bookshop something hard to find  you'd forgotten you wanted. And so it was that few months ago I got half a dozen books by Ursula LeGuin. Among them was The Dispossessed. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend you track down a copy.
The Dispossessed is difficult to classify. Perhaps the best description of it is a science fiction socio political fable, but that doesn't do it justice. As an author of science fiction and fantasy, LeGuin stands out for her world building. The Dispossessed is admirable in this regard. It presents us with two societies based on a planet and its moon. The planet, Urras, is a complex, rich, highly unequal society of property ownership, and elaborate social hierarchy. It is place that is presented as both attractive and appalling, and very, very familiar. It is a society of plenty, but where access to that plenty is unequal. The moon Anares, on the other hand, is a political experiment, an anarcho-socialist society founded by idealist refugees from Urras, who follow the teachings of the political philosopher Odo. Urras is an almost barren world, the population low, and cooperation both a virtue and a necessity for survival. There is no ownership on Urras, and no hierarchy or state or economic compulsion. All actions are undertaken voluntarily, and the only accepted form of punishment is social exclusion by the immediate group. 

Our guide through the worlds and culture of Urras and Anares is an Anaresti called Shevek, who ultimately becomes the first of his people in 200 years to travel back to Urras. What is interesting is that Shevek is a theoretical physicist, and it is precisely because he is a physicist that he is able to communicate with the Urrasti, as physics is a shared universal interest between the two societies.Yet, as Shevek discovers, the political ideas, values and organisation of the two societies lead them to conceive of fundamental problems in physics differently. Thus he travels between the two worlds to synthesise their views. 

What is interesting to me as a scientist is that Le Guin uses the organisations and institutions of academic pursuit as our main way of understanding Urras and Anares. I don't think this is an accident. The university world of Urras is familiar to anyone who has visited a prestigious American or British university. It is opulent, high minded, cloistered and deeply steeped in hierarchy and social prestige. It is, in essence, indistinguishable from what we have here on Earth. There are prizes with large sums of money attached; there are prestigious publications; there are junior academics bowing the pressures of senior academics and administrators, and there are senior academics unused to being contradicted. 

Anarres is more interesting. The Anaresti philosophy is that each individual should seek of their own accord to fulfill his or her organic function, that is that role they feel is most useful to Anaresti society as a whole. Thus, people become scientists because they are drawn to it. There is no career structure, no hierarchy,  no expectation of work. Indeed, people drift in and out of science, as they drift in and out of all the possible jobs that one can do in Anaresti society. And yet, it is in Science that we first experience the corruption of the Anaresti ideal. Shevek goes to work with a great physicist in the capital, only to find that he is secretly communicating with Urras, and that all his great works are in fact Urrasti ideas that he plagiarised and passed off as his own because he alone could read Urrasti. Shevek suddenly finds that he cannot get access to the facilities that he needs without playing along with his new collaborator. Suddenly, Shevek is confronted with what is not supposed to exist on Anarres: ambition to dominate and control, institutional forces, the desire to own. It is in physics, what the Urrasti and Anaresti call the Noble Science, that the idealistic vision of  a society free of control, coercion and covetousness is found.

Thinking about Anarres has made me think that the problems of career incentives we face in science are far more deeply rooted than we often like to think. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I feel that a certain naivety attaches to the open access movement, or the post pub peer review movement. They pursue the idea that the pernicious incentives of prestige, status, hierarchy in academic pursuits can be defeated by these technical fixes. But expensive journals, the pursuit of glam, the addiction to personal and institutional status are not causes, they are symptoms of the fact that science is an exclusive, competitive pursuit existing in highly hierarchical, status obsessed societies.As Shevek comes to realise, the Urrasti university is completely anathema to Anaresti ideals.Yet Le Guin warns us that even on Anarres, personal ambition and institutional inertia can create an embryonic version of the academic system we are all fighting. 

Fat Lesbians need more NIH funding

The usual suspects are going after NIH funding in light of Francis Collins' political own goal on ebola research. As a non US citizen, despite being paid out of an R01 NIH grant, I often feel like my voice is not the most useful in these debates. But as a gay man living in rural Ohio, I can tell you this. Contrary to what fair and balanced news coverage may have you believe, fat lesbians need more NIH funding, not less.
LBGT people are an understudied population in all aspects of clinical intervention, yet what research we have clearly indicates that, as a group, gay and lesbian people have worse health then straight people when you control for income and socio-economic group. Compared to straight men in their thirties, I am more likely to smoke, binge drink, and show signs of psychological distress. Although I am less likely to be overweight, lesbian women are more likely to be so than their straight counterparts. (data from CDC survey of health differences among gay and lesbians).
Crucially, that survey was conducted in 2013, and its results only published this year. It was the first of its kind. We have almost no population wide, systematic data on differences in the health of gay and lesbian individuals. What is more, we know they are less likely to have medical coverage (in part owing to problems with spousal coverage), less likely to have a regular healthcare provider, less likely to seek out medical help regularly and less likely to discuss LBGT specific issues with their healthcare providers.
Conversely, we know that most physicians receive almost no education in LBGT specific healthcare issues in four years od med school. I have a couple of gay doctor friends, and I have watched them advocate tirelessly for years to get LBGT health issues on the medical school radar. It is tough going and change is slow. The medical profession in the US is surprisingly conservative on these matters. LBGT men and women have long known that they have to be their own advocates in the doctor's office. Ask any gay friends you may have, and you're bound to hear some cringe worthy stories. But patient advocacy requires privilege. With my PhD and middle class background and white maleness, I can talk back to a doctor (especially when it comes to anatomy). I can demand treatment. I can argue. A latina teen lesbian who'se been kicked out of her house has no such recourse. A closeted twenty something gay farm boy visiting the same family doctor his whole family and town sees isn't going to be comfortable asking for an HIV test.
The HIV crisis fundamentally damaged the (already shaky) relationship between LBGT people and the medical profession. Not helped by the fact that homosexuality was considered a disease until 1973. Many gay men and lesbian women in big cities set up parallel networks of healthcare providers, because they neither trusted the medical establishment, nor had access to insurers. These voluntary outfits do amazing work for outreach, education and testing, but they do not provide the follow through a established family doctor does. And in the rural areas of the US, these services are few and far between. I know this first hand. In my old city, I could get free HIV tests several times a week at several locations. Here in Ohio, my family doctor seems surprised when I order one, and my other options are a monthly clinic half an hour away, or planned parenthood, which my insurance will not cover.  And again, I am an out, educated, financially independent male. I'm not afraid of my doctor's looks, or the village gossips, or who sees me come in and out of the planned parenthood offices. I don't think that experience generalises to my LBGT friends who grew up here.
When Fox news goes after the paltry amount of money NIH is willing to give to investigating LBGT health issues, they are attacking vulnerable men and women in precisely the place where they are most exposed: their relationship with their healthcare provider. It is low and callous even by their standards. Fat lesbians and gay men who drink too much deserve NIH money. And remember, one day you may be grateful on behalf of your son or daughter that they got it.
PS: Hat tip to drungmonkey for alerting me to this.

Silver bullets, snake oil and software patches

My computer's operating system is updated every month with various patches. Patches, by definition, are work arounds, fixes to problems that were missed in initial software development. I'm a Windows user, which means I am used when going to help forums to being told "the problem is Windows, it's fundamentally broken". In the eyes of linux and UNIX users, no amount of patching can ever make Windows a good operating system. There is no silver bullet to fixing its myriad flaws. That being said, 80% of the time, my computer works fine.

A couple of weeks ago, this brilliant article on the limits the open access amount is encountering came out. The key here to me is that Elsevier's actuaries don't view OA as a threat to Elsevier's business model. Actuaries are terrifying people: no one will puncture your views of 'oughts' more thoroughly. (As an aside, this is why I really want to know what insurance companies' actuaries are doing about global warming). In their discussion of why OA isn't a threat to Elsevier, the actuaries hit the nail on the head. Open access claims to be able to solve too much. All the ills in science (glamour chasing, the under representation of developing world scientists, the unfairness of taxpayers not having access to the research they fund, science communication) can be fixed if we just switch to open access. In response, opponents trot out their line of perfectly valid critiques (junior scientists need glam pubs to get jobs, who will pay for publication charges, how will we judge publication quality). And the same argument happens all over again, while, incidentally, Elsevier's bottom line stays healthy and scientists continue to chase publications that will win them job security. 

Does this pattern seem familiar? It sure resembles what happened last week in a twitter discussion of the usefulness of crowdfunding for scientific research. On the one side, the young Turks, denouncing the corrupt and anti-innovative nature of the NIH and NSF. On the other, the Established Scientists, arguing that no one was covering overheads, and that none of this funding scaled to reach the levels of the government funded scientific enterprise. Same debate, same rhetoric, same failure to reach a conclusion. 

I have no issue with open access, or crowdfunding. I am no fan of the status quo. Paywalling research is problematic. My dissertation research, unfunded by NSF, would have been funded several times over by the amounts that opponents of crowd funding deride as insignificant.  Yet I feel that the proponents of both are all making a fundamental mistake. They are viewing technocratic, process changes as solutions to much deeper, sociopolitical problems with the way modern science is run. Open access won't solve the issue of prestige, because prestige is deeply rooted in the social networks that underlie scientific hiring decisions, amplified by the hyper- competitive nature of the job search in  modern science, Crowdfunding won't solve the current funding crisis, because it cannot counter the increasing instability and uncertainty associated with science funding. More fundamentally, neither of these mechanism, nor many other solutions put forward by scientists, explicitly engage with the socio-political dynamics at the roots the problems they propose to solve.
Open access makes research available for consumption by all. It neither opposes profiteering (just look at the amount that AAAS thinks it can charge for its open access publication), nor prestige based publishing (ask any junior scientist). Crowdfunding may help you collect preliminary data, but it won't pay your salary if you're on a soft money position.
Technocratic fixes are software patches: they fix local problems in a broader system. But fixing the deep problems requires rewriting the code. That difficult, political work cannot be replaced by a silver bullet. And if you keep claiming your patch will be a silver bullet, you'll end up looking like you're peddling snake oil.

Scale, rotate, translate: on moving between fields of biology

I'm currently writing up abstracts for our lab to submit to a clinical meeting. Writing abstracts for a clinical meeting, especially as we work on an animal model, is a very different thing that writing abstracts for a basic science meeting. It's reminded me that my background is unusual compared to the people at this meeting (which I will be attending for the first time). As it turns out, the most active people I follow on twitter are also more clinically oriented, and in a discussion yesterday about animal models, the differences in our scientific backgrounds became stark. To put it simply, I think sea slugs are probably just as interesting and worth studying as humans. If you don't agree, go and read up on how they co-opt the poisonous organs of sea anemones for their own defence. Furthermore, as a evolutionary biologist, the answer to "does knowing about sea slugs help us understand humans" is "of course it does!"
In fact, until I started this postdoc, I'd never worked with live animals. My undergraduate research had involved a little collection of ecological field data (staring at birds through a telescope). My masters and PhD work, however, were all palaeontology. My research was collections based, meaning I spent my time in dusty museums rummaging through drawers pulling out fossilized bones and measuring them. The questions I was interested covered increasingly large time spans (several thousand years for my masters, several million for my PhD). Taxonomically, I looked at the European wide distribution of an entire species for my masters, and several entire orders of mammal for my PhD. It is big questions that excite me. Questions like: how do entire faunas respond to major episodes of environmental change? What is the role of functional specialization in the evolution of goups? How does variation in shape change through time? And, for me, the big one: how does variation in shape of body parts (mostly teeth and bones) relate to how animals function in their environments? I've spent a lot of the past five years thinking about these questions. They are, to me, fundamental to biology, and relevant to understanding organism function at any level. After all, every thing we observe in any organism (yeast, mouse, sea slug, hairless bipedal ape) is a product of evolution. Yet I now find myself writing for an audience that not only doesn't think about things this way, but actually views such thinking as suspect or frivolous. I am not saying they are wrong to think that way (I would only do that after a couple of pints). However, it does require that I learn a new way of talking and thinking about research, about organismal function, about biology, about science.
Given the above, you might reasonably ask what the hell I am doing in my current position. Well that brings us right back to the question of the relationship between organism shape and function. Most paleontological work doesn't test this relationship experimentally. Instead, we establish correlations between variations in shape and differences in ecology, often broadly categorized. A complex and elaborate suite of techniques for quantifying shape variation, correlating it with ecology, accounting for confounding variables such as shared evolutionary history and body size exist to look at this problem. Initially, this approach seemed very promising, allowing me to reconstruct functionally important behavior in fossils, and use it to understand evolutionary change on a macro (millions of years or more) scale.
Ultimately though, this approach became frustrating, because the fundamental premise remained untested. Specifically, I was looking at joints. Although I established that mammals that live in certain habitats have joints of a certain shape, I had no real data on why that might be. This is a major limitation of the comparative approach. And I realised that to fill that missing gap, I had to get data on how animals actually work. I would have to become an experimentalist. So, when through a stroke of luck, I was offered a postdoc in a lab that did just that, even though it was in a different system to what I was initially interested in, and was more clinically oriented than my previous research (admittedly, not difficult), I jumped at the chance.
The transition hasn't been hard, exactly, but it has been challenging. I have met people who are experimental biologists studying evolutionary questions who openly scoff at methods I have used and considered gold standard in my old field. Researchers who express serious misgivings about the validity of methods used to ask those big questions I was so interested in. I've had to learn that big questions can be different types of questions. Questions about complex systems, questions about organismal function, questions about disease etiology.
Ultimately, the research program I would like to pursue requires me to learn to think about questions at both these levels, and hopefully integrate them meaningfully. I've already lost my naivety with regard to many of the questions I wanted to ask about mammalian evolution. Answers will be partial, clues gleaned from the fossil record illuminating clues gleaned from detailed experimental work illuminating clues gleaned from broad comparative studies of living mammals. And many researchers are studying these systems with very different end goals in mind, to do with human health, that make them suspicious of my intentions and my seriousness if I harp on about the shared evolutionary history of all living mammals. It is a valuable experience I think to learn the complex languages of biological research, for all that it is uncomfortable at times.
But I assure you, as animals, humans are not special.