Narrative, Trust, and Teaching: A Case Study

A Particularly Pedagogical Passage
Within a Successful NSF Proposal

Few proposals are sufficiently expansive to credibly claim as their domain all of biology. Yet this is more or less how the proposal that we are to read opens, and this broad opening becomes the springboard for a very cleanly illustrated and pedagogical passage. 

More specifically, the passage that we will read lays claim to all of phylogeny--the very idea of classifying organisms and producing a tree of life interrelated by evolutionary history--with the key link to all of biology being the fundamental importance of phylogenetics to the biological mission. Thus, advancing phylogenetics will advance biology. 

Reading the following, try to gauge difficulty level. Would it be difficult to understand for a senior professor in ecology and evolutionary biology? A junior professor? A graduate student? An undergraduate in the sciences? Even an undergraduate in the humanities? I would argue that none of these groups would struggle to follow the logic of this explicitly explanatory opening, this particularly pedagogical passage.

Among the most fundamental missions of biology are a complete global inventory of the species on our planet, and a natural classification of those species on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships; the importance of both missions is well delineated in the reports and recommendations of Systematics Agenda 2000. Phylogenetic classifications are scientific hypotheses that are crucial to all aspects of comparative biology; not only do they provide maximally efficient descriptions of the data on organismic attributes already at hand, they allow maximally effective predictions about the distributions of attributes not yet studied in detail

Imagine that we find a newly discovered species, and are able to identify it as a spider (for example, by discovering that it has abdominal silk glands and spinnerets, features unique to spiders). From that information alone, we can predict, for example, that this new species will have male pedipalps that are modified for sperm transfer (another feature unique to spiders). We can also predict that it will have the features characteristic of the larger groups to which spiders belong; as an arachnid, we can predict that the newly discovered species will have two body regions and four pairs of legs; as an arthropod, we can predict that it will have jointed appendages, etc. Every grouping of species in a hierarchical classification enables such predictions, and the accuracy of the predictions depends on the degree to which the classification reflects the evolutionary history of the groups (i.e., the phylogenetic interrelationships of their component taxa)." (Hormiga et. al, A Tree of Life: Phylogeny of Spiders)

 The above passage was indeed highly explanatory. But is it not a flaw to have written something that could be followed even by an undergraduate student in the sciences, if not also the humanities? Is that not a misunderstanding of audience, to presume to teach a panel of experts about the basic merits of classifying the interrelationships of species? 

If it was, it did not get in the way of the proposal being funded. And what is the paragraph at heart? With a lead-in sentence that invokes the fundamental mission of biology, and a subsequent paragraph clarifying the nature of that mission, and why it matters, the paragraph is not pedagogy. It is a sales brochure delivered in the manner of a classroom lesson. But undoubtedly it is selling something, only a bit different from a salesperson teaching their customer the importance of a sharp knife in the kitchen. 

That 'something' is the idea that phylogeny is one of the fundamental missions of biology. The lesson is unhurried and, as with any good piece of writing, it grows to a larger point. After some examples that drive home the idea that phylogeny is not merely descriptive, but prescriptive, it arrives at a point subtle enough to quote once more, with the key part bolded: "Every grouping of species in a hierarchical classification enables such predictions, and the accuracy of the predictions depends on the degree to which the classification reflects the evolutionary history of the groups"

In the world of grant proposals, if accuracy can be improved, it will be improved. Thus the passage hums along from merit towards approach along a clean logical line. Phylogeny is fundamentally important to biology because of its predictivity, and the quality of that predictivity depends on the extent to which the groupings adhere to evolutionary history. Now imagine that we can improve our knowledge of the evolutionary history of the groups, and watch the dominos fall. Phylogeny's predictive accuracy will be improved; the fundamental mission of biology will be advanced.

The key takeaway: you are given great latitude to define the terms of your claim to significance. Is there a reason that an advanced undergraduate couldn't understand the core claim to significance of your project? 

One other point: tracing through this passage, we can see that the authors have not yet arrived to the subject matter of their project. A great effort to deepen our knowledge of the phylogeny of spiders will be proposed. It will be a vast, multi-PI, multi-million dollar effort that itself piggybacks off a variety of current NSF projects, a whole even greater than the sum of its parts. But not yet. Right now it is more universal. Even in these examples, the overarching merit of phylogeny is the key, merit belonging not to that particular branch but to the very concept of the Tree of Life. The point would be illustrated just as well through examples drawn from the phylogeny of Ruminatia. Indeed, a later section will be titled Why Spiders? 

UP NEXT:
The Relationship Between Teaching and Narrative

Contact:
Nural Akchurin, Associate Dean for Research
College of Arts & Sciences
806.834.8838
nural.akchurin@ttu.edu