Last week we asked a scientific question. How had it been that when we were young, we saw many dead woodchucks along the highways. Today we see very few. Why is that? Have woodchucks evolved? Have they become more wary? Wouldn’t that be interesting? But only if we could prove it. Our notion might be called an educated guess, but it is what scientists call a “scientific hypothesis.” Scientists develop all sorts of hypotheses and always go on to see what the evidence tells them. We decided to sound out our readers on our facebook page. There are almost 10,000 of them and we have learned a lot from them in the past. We asked upstate New York people if they had seen more woodchucks in the past and were they seeing many dead ones today. This was not the gathering of statistically significant data; our results would never survive a peer review for any respectable scientific journal. But we think that such anecdotal testimonies are worth consideration. And many of our readers did provide interesting and thoughtful insights.
And we did get results; a consensus developed that, in fact, woodchucks, both living and dead, were more abundant in the past. Ten people flat out said that woodchucks had been more common back about 60 years ago. Not one person thought otherwise. We weren’t hoping for that; we rather expected that woodchucks had, all along, maintained a roughly steady population. Not surprisingly nobody thought that dead woodchucks were very common along today’s roads, so they agreed with our observations on that. But they went on to express a variety of views on why woodchucks are less common today. They were offering us what scientist call “multiple working hypotheses” And that is fundamental to the scientific process. One person suggested evolution which was our hypothesis. But the main focus among our readers was on ecology. Several thought that pasturelands favored woodchucks, but those had become less common with the disappearance of farms. More than a few thought that there were more coyotes and foxes now and that these predators were responsible for the decline in woodchucks.
We were getting a variety of interesting ideas – too many! In the end our evolution hypothesis was not doing very well. We found no evidence that actually supported it and our readers had provided us with a number of interesting alternatives. We can’t actually falsify our hypothesis, but it is not looking good. We are rather disposed to abandon it. And that is also a fundamental aspect of science. When an idea starts looking bad, we are generally inclined to give it up and pursue a new avenue. The process involved might be disappointing, but it may well lead us toward a better direction. They don’t do that in politics, do they?
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at ‘thecatskillgeologist.com.”
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