Alice Xu
Undergraduate Fellow
What has been challenging so far this summer?
“It's the first time I'm working a serious nine-to-five job.” [Laughing, Alice swats a mosquito that lands on her. She is sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree in the middle of forest plot #13.] “Eight! Mosquitoes. Like, stable hours and when you go back home you don't really have a lot of time to yourself. All you want to do is lie down and not do a lot of things.”
What has surprised you so far?
“It's been a lot of fun. It was a lot of information, really overwhelming, trying to learn what kind of tree this is, what kind of leaves. Also climbing the hill everyday, four times a day; a lot of mosquitoes. But it’s surprising how time goes by really quickly and you're actually enjoying doing it. Especially with the people.”
What is the inspiration behind your independent project?
“I'm a philosophy [and environmental biology] major. I believe that the goal of science should be to know about how the world works instead of how we can make correct predictions and make use out of it. Last semester I was taking a class with Jonathan Myers and we were learning about dispersal and drift, speciation, and selection. Dispersal and drift are mainly neutral processes, which means they are not focused on species identity, [but] organisms as individuals. They don't care what species they belong to, but they care about their demographic rates.”
“I was wondering: how do we study these kinds of processes? Do you just say, ‘Oh, this just happened. It's just a one-out-of-six chance that this species will live instead of the other species.’ There's no causal structure or causal explanation in that case. You can't just look at an individual and say, 'Oh, he's going to die'. You don't see drift when you just look at a few organisms.”