By any estimation its been a tough week. But I did manage to get some real work done. This week’s research work has been to revise and re-write large chunks of the TREE article that is emerging from the ESF funded meeting in September. Volker Grimm has done a huge amount on this and I was supposed to be taking over this week along with Michael Weisberg. Unfortunately Michael was otherwise occupied so I have worked my way through it. The paper is a collaboration between ecologists and philosophers of science on the ecological modelling. We are trying to lay out why the dogma that has applied since the 1960s, that only simple models can give you general insights and hence only simple models are good models, is wrong. It’s been a long drawn out exercise to get it to even this stage as several parties have firm views!
