It's really hard to see things from other perspectives

but we still have to try

If this photo was taken in a house of worship, then this book would be scripture:

But it’s in the library at La Selva Biological Station, a particularly well-investigated patch of lowland rainforest in northeastern Costa Rica. This book indeed sits in a place of honor and reverence. It’s Costa Rican Natural History, published in 1983 and edited by Dan Janzen. The heart of the volume is a hearty compilation of brief accounts of the biology of many organisms that you might encounter in Costa Rica, each written by scientists who were well positioned to provide the most up-to-date understanding of each plant and critter.

I took that photo this spring¹, 41 years after the book was originally published. I digested much of this book when as an early grad student, when I started working in Costa Rica. Though this place of honor has always been perennial over the three decades I have worked at La Selva, I haven’t really cracked the book in a long time Until this spring, when I looked up the species accounts of a few organisms that I know particularly well.

What I read wasn’t really a surprise, but it nevertheless was a shocking to me, on a personal level.

When I first read Costa Rican Natural History, it was at a time when I was overwhelmed with the information about this stunningly biodiverse place, that was new to me. I think every biologist who grew up in the temperate zone and then visited the rainforest for the first time is probably blown away by what they see, and I think for good reason. This rainforest is still very much a puzzle to me and still get overwhelming, and that’s part of why I love the place so much. But I also have worked there enough that it wouldn’t be wholly out of place for me to author a few of the entries in such a book if a new edition was compiled today. I’m just saying that as this book has aged, so have all of us, and that includes my steady evolution as a biologist working in Costa Rica, and in parallel with the discipline of ecology more broadly.

So what was a bit shocking to me in my re-peruse of this book?

First: there were a bunch of factual errors. Lots of statements of fact that were simple assumptions scaffolded on the current state of knowledge at the time ended up not always having a rigid scaffold. I would say that all of these “errors” were presumably perceived to be correct at the time, but as we’ve learned so much about phylogeny, community ecology, ecosystem processes, genomics, and so on, it turns out that the folks writing some of these accounts were the most knowledgeable but also in full ignorance of many of the things that we know nowadays. For example, assumptions about the biology of an animal’s characteristics based on their closest relatives could end up being very wrong once the structure of the evolutionary trees changed radically. Another example is that broadly accepted assumptions about the diet of an animal could be radically different once we used stable isotopes to find out what they really do eat. All of those things make sense in the context of what we knew and didn’t know back then. As I was reading through the book, I experienced so many times where I thought, “Oh, in hindsight that seems very naive and simplistic.”

Second: A lot of the information in the book was placed in the context of ecological theories and concepts that were in vogue in the 1970s and early 1980s. There were a some statements that might have meant a lot to people working in the context of those theories but if you moved past those theories, and were operating from a different paradigm, then it wouldn’t seem that relevant or useful. In some ways this book was a time capsule of big scientific ideas of the time.

What was science like when this book was written? PCR wasn’t invented. The punchcard days for doing statistics were being replaced by coding SPSS on a mainframe, and if you were sending documents anywhere, it would be by postal mail or fax machine. You needed to make travel plans in Costa Rica? Maybe make an international phone call or use a travel agent, but if you’re off the beaten path, good luck. Folks from the Global North (not that we called it that) who went to the tropics to do biology were embarking on more of an adventure, in a logistic sense, than nowadays.

It’s wild to think about how much has changed over the past forty years, in how we do and think about science, how we communicate with one another. We are awash in information. A lot of the things that we used to think of as true might not necessarily be seen as true anymore. It’s not that those prior understandings were correct then and wrong now but instead, we are now navigating the world from a different realm of understanding.

There is a discrete cultural difference between the scientists reading and writing Costa Rican Natural History in the early 1980s and those who are reading and writing science nowadays. The magnitude of that cultural difference isn’t so huge, in the sense that many people have lived through the 40 years that have elapsed and experienced a parallel evolution of their own person and perspective over this time. It’s not an unbridgeable or unthinkable gap. It’s one that I mostly have lived and experienced myself.

So as I was looking at this scripture in its place of honor in the library of the field station, I experienced something of a mini-epiphany about the fuzziness of facts and knowledge in the minds of people who are approaching the world from different perspectives. A person who isn’t deeply immersed in contemporary biology research probably wouldn’t even be attuned to the out-of-date notions and no-longer-true-facts in natural history guides from the 1980s. But to me (and lots of you), it’s glaringly obviously coming from an extremely different perspective. I don’t need to think of this earlier stuff as factually wrong, but simply operating from a different realm of understanding. Was it wrong then because it is wrong now?

Experiencing this scientific-cultural span of four decades got me thinking about statements of fact about nature from hundreds and thousands of years ago, and from people from different civilizations, and from people who are existing in cultural contexts where well-demonstrated facts (such as vaccine safety, climate change, evolution) are dismissed. This four-decade span is infinitesimal compared to the span of people who are coming from faith traditions that have different ways of knowing and understanding. Or from scholars of nature from distant times who were diligent scholars working from entirely different foundations of knowledge and radically different worldviews.

I don’t personally think of Janzen (1983) as a bible or holy book of any sort. But seeing it on that pedestal not unlike a holy book, it highlighted for me the reality that our view of scientific truth is focused through the lens of your perspective. When you’re trying to understand something bigger than yourself, if you look at it from a different perspective, you’ll see different things. (The parable of the blind people and the elephant, y’know.)

I can understand how people looking at the world can arrive to a different set of facts because they’re coming from a different perspective. At least, I’m trying to do this, but if I don’t see things from that perspective, it’s hard to see those facts. The search for facts is different than the search for truths.

This is not to say that all perspectives are valid, as some perspectives have distorted lenses. If we’re going to be working for science education against the opposition of climate dismissers, anti-vaccine activists, and creationists, it’s useful to understand what lens these folks are using, and understand that most folks are struggling to make sense of the world just like we do.

I’m not sure how possible it is to see the world from other perspectives, because we ourselves are positioned where we are positioned. Nonetheless, as an intellectual exercise, we can recognize the reality that others have these different perspectives, and that these differences in perspective can account for differences in our perceived truth and fact.

As scientists, I think we need to own our perspectives rather than pretend that we have some omniscient neutral view of reality. Moreover, as educators, we need to work with our students to develop a shared perspective from which we all can look together. That’s the real work in the classroom, in building community so that when we are sharing facts and ideas, that everybody has a sense of identity and belonging so share what they are seeing from that perspective. I love it when I share the outcome of an experiment in a lesson, and students will have different take-home lessons on what conclusions should be drawn. They’re often correct but point out things that I never would have thought of or have said on my own. When we can model that vulnerability for others, then we start expanding our perspectives, and perhaps we can arrive at shared understandings.

1. On the occasion of a brief writing retreat to La Selva, which has been a second home to me.