EGRU-blog

Some weeks ago I got to my hands a feature article “When fish adapt to fishing – Building a scientific consensus about the evolutionary consequences of commercial fishing” in IIASA magazine “Options”. The article generally provides an overview of how interest in evolutionary impacts of fishing re-emerged about a decade ago, what kind of research has recently been done, and what about prospects to adopt these views to fisheries management. Notably however, the article did not even mention the discussion, criticism and opposing views about the topic presented by the scientific community. Of course, a popular article can take such liberties, but then it cannot present a scientific consensus either. This example made me wonder how common has it actually become that scientists perhaps a bit too willingly push through results and abandon certain ‘conservativeness’ in their decision making. As any scientist should know, making research should be very open-minded, discussive, and results should be interpreted without biases to one direction or another. Undoubtedly, constantly increasing competition on research funding creates a situation, where business-style production of fancy results is highly favoured. Even though I think that some business-style is quite welcome in academic world (especially when it comes to certain promptness and keeping up agreed schedules) I would not wish it to start affecting the scientific decision making. A great danger is that if science loses its objectiveness (or there are even signs of such a trend) it loses also its respectability, and the opinion of the scientific community will hardly play a role in policy making, e.g. when creating conservation strategies.