Job, career, calling

My short blogging break this week was due to my participation in a work-related workshop (forum?). It was in many ways very useful and inspiring, although one aspect that I have mixed feelings about is the coaching aspect. The coaches at these kinds of events really LOVE personality tests, the kind where you answer a few dozen questions and then end up in one of four or more rarely three overly simplistic boxes. It does not help that this is at least the third workshop at which I was subjected to this kind of test, making my experience a bit repetitive.

On the other hand, one thing mentioned by the coach we had on Friday was very interesting because I had not previously considered it from that angle. He pointed out that there are different stances people can take towards their work:

Job - they do it because they need to bring money home.
Career - they do it because they want to rise through a hierarchy.
Calling - they do it because they are really passionate about this kind of work.

It is clear that sadly most people will be unable to do professionally what they see as their calling and thus a great part of the workforce will see their work merely as a job. That does not mean, however, that they will be under-performing, quite the opposite. What the coach wanted to drive home is that a supervisor who sees their work as a calling or a career and who happily works many hours of unpaid overtime cannot expect everybody else to do the same. They can only expect them to do the work that they are paid for, and to do it well, and expecting everybody to be like yourself is atrocious leadership.

The funny thing is, I consider the aspect he stressed to be a no-brainer. I know that many people perform superbly and, if you give them the right environment, identify very much with their workplace even if they see their work only as a job. What I would be more concerned about are overly career-oriented people!

You may ask reasonably why that would be so. Should they not be very productive due to their great ambition?

Well yes, but productive in what sense, and to whose benefit? A job oriented person will aim to satisfactorily complete the task at hand because that is their job. A person who feels a calling will aim to complete the task well because they are enthusiastic about that type of task. But career oriented people may only see the task at hand as a minor stepping-stone on the way to where they really want to be, and it may forever be so because there is nearly always an even higher management level above them. Can I be focused enough on what I am currently working on to do it well if my real interest is not having to do something like that any more? Will I really work to the benefit of my current organization if my eyes are already on a more prestigious job elsewhere?

Perhaps that is a nasty way of thinking about it. Nor do I begrudge anybody their aspirations. What I mean to show is that, from my personal perspective, it might be a much harder to learn leadership skill to understand the personal needs and motivations of very career oriented people around oneself, and to balance the fulfillment of their ambitions and the needs of the organization as a whole, than it is to understand and deal with job-oriented people, although the latter seemed to be the major concern of the coach.

Botany picture #112: Trifolium subterraneum

Trifolium subterraneum (Fabaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. It is an introduced weed here in Australia but mostly, as far as I can tell, in urban areas (?). Forming quite pretty carpets at the moment.

Botany picture #111: Cryptandra amara

Cryptandra amara, Australian Capital Territory, 2013. Among the early spring flowers in nearby Mount Majura Nature Reserve is this white-flowered dwarf shrub. It looks superficially like a heath but the spinose branches and a closer look at the flowers betray its affiliation with the Rhamnaceae. When in bloom, it exudes a strong sweet smell that is very noticeable even from a distance.

Failures and virtues of peer review

For a few days now, scientists have been discussing a small experiment conducted by a Science correspondent. He invented several variations on a bogus study in cancer research that contained several fundamental flaws and sent them out to 304 open access journals. 255 of them made a decision, and of those, 157 (or slightly more than 60%) accepted them.

Predictably, this experiment is being discussed along what we might call partisan lines. Those skeptical of the OA model see this as one more illustration of the problems of a system in which journals earn their money based on the number of accepted papers, pretty much regardless of their quality. Those advocating the OA model consider the affair a piece of propaganda for the traditional commercial publishing industry and stress that the experiment did not feature a control group of subscription based journals to see if they would have a lower acceptance rate.

I have already written about my concerns about the OA model so I will not repeat myself here. Note simply that I would very much prefer a system in which the rainbow press of science would be seen for what it is, in which all major journals are run as non-profit public utilities, and in which the results of scientific research are as available to the public as access to publishing venues is available to those who cannot afford $1,300 in article processing fees. I am merely worried about the incentives publishers operate under when using the OA model.

Instead, I wonder about the general issue of peer review. To express his opinion that the problem is not with OA but with peer review in general, Michael Eisen uses his linked blog post to call peer review a "joke", and similar sentiments are being expressed elsewhere. Others stress that this process is the gold standard that allows us to distinguish real scholarship from crankery. What gives?

Botany picture #110: Heracleum mantegazzianum

Heracleum mantegazzianum (Apiaceae), Botanic Garden of Zürich, 2009. When I was a child there was quite a scare about this species in Germany. It had been introduced from the Caucasus as an ornamental and nectar source for beekeepers but had started invading natural habitats, and the problem is that the plants produce a substance that burns the skin when exposed to intense sunlight. Parents were worried that their children might play with it in summer, and many people were concerned whether it would outcompete native plants. The scare seems to have fizzled out over the years, or at least I did not hear much about it any more as I got older.

Speciation in plants

On his Sandwalk blog, biochemist Larry Moran recently posted about the many different definitions of the term evolution. Very interesting topic but I see no reason to duplicate his efforts on this much less frequently visited blog. What got me thinking instead was a somewhat incoherent creationist who immediately jumped into the comment thread to declare

Evolution is not a fact or a theory in explaining changes in populations beyond reproducing types at any one point in history. Show where a population changed so that it could no longer reproduce with its parent population??

So he denies the possibility of speciation. Would be laughable in face of all the evidence we have, but the problem is of course that somebody like that will never be satisfied with the kind of evidence a biologist can actually produce. Speciation rarely happens over a human lifespan (although sometimes it can, see below), and so the retort will always be, "were you there?", or to let the creationist speak,

Of coarse extrapolating from these is not scientific evidence for a history of biology. Even if true history.

That is a fairly myopic stance, entirely comparable to doubting that the Roman Empire existed because nobody who is currently alive has seen it and historical documents and archeological artifacts do not constitute direct evidence. I think Richard Dawkins used the same analogy in a recent book, actually.

No, the standard of evidence for processes that take hundreds of thousands of years to happen cannot possibly be "have you seen it with your own eyes?" But just as with the Roman empire or with a murder trial lacking direct witnesses, we can infer events beyond reasonable doubt. The nested structure of biological diversity is our friend here - we can produce phylogenetic trees to find out which species are most closely related, and sometimes we find two species that are genetically so extremely close together that we can infer what may have happened to make them different species, perhaps as little time ago as before the last ice age. In other cases, we find groups in the incipient stages of speciation, somewhere uncomfortably between being able to interbreed and not being able to interbreed.

Anyway, this got me thinking. The evolution/creationism controversy is usually fought over animals, whereas plants are usually cruelly neglected. So what is the state of evidence in plants? I am not talking about a formal review here, but merely a short list of spectacular cases, well understood mechanisms of speciation, and some well researched examples. Here goes.

Botany picture #109: Olearia pimeleoides

Olearia pimeleoides (Asteraceae), New South Wales, 2013. As currently circumscribed, Olearia is the largest genus of daisies on the continent, accounting for a bit more than 10% of the known native species of the family. They are simply known as daisy bushes, and several of them are grown as ornamentals.