Even scientific propositions regarding entities like strange attractors or quarks are not understood by many people—and are accepted as real only when these abstruse ideas, often enunciable only as mathematical equations, have been translated into practical results.

Call it miner's asthma, silicosis, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, coal workers' pneumoconiosis, or black lung—they are all dust diseases with the same symptoms.

They became activists and advocates, largely unaware of the possibility that, in advocating more of the same services for heretofore underserved populations, they might be exposing unwittingly the cultural parochialism from which they sought to unimprison themselves.

As in much of biology, the most satisfying truths in ecology derive from manipulative experimentation. Tinker with nature and quantify how it responds.