“Guilty Until Proven Innocent”: Bias in Invasion Biology

According to scientists who've noticed

[Another draft chapter from the book I am co-authoring with Nikki Hill, tentatively entitled “Don’t Blame the Messenger: A critique of the ‘invasive plant’ narrative.” Paid subscribers will receive a copy of the full draft when it’s completed.]

It is an interesting question as to whether an ecologist’s fundamental view of the world is derived more from ecological data and experience, or one’s basic personality and predisposition... Of course, since ecology is a science, then empirical evidence should, over time, be able to resolve the debate over which paradigm is a better representation of the natural world.ⁱ —biologist Mark Davis, author of “Invasion Biology”

As a human enterprise, invasion biology is subject to bias. Research priorities, initial hypotheses, experimental design, and interpretation can all be affected by the biases of researchers and institutions. This doesn’t make invasion biology unique of course, and to its credit, various forms of bias are openly discussed and debated and some researchers even try to quantify them. Points of view run the gamut, and the conversation gets heated from time to time.

As with the knowledge base shortfalls we covered in the previous chapter, the in-house deliberations about these biases have really not trickled out of academic circles yet, so the popular perception of the science remains, like the “invasive plant” narrative itself, unnuanced. We ourselves only learned about the depth of the ongoing contention by diving down a few peer-reviewed rabbit holes, but too many of them are behind paywalls.