Approach to Science

If you view science as a 'career', this lab is probably not for you. We view science the way a classical singer would view his or her music. To us, science is 'justajoo' (Search) – a quest for understanding. We work on basic questions in ecology and evolution, many of which are not fashionable. We believe it is more consequential to contribute new concepts to science, rather than merely new facts, since science is about conceptualizations, not facts (the 'facts' are discernible even by a fruitfly!). We believe that unless you can see beauty in conceptualizations – a beauty of the same order as you would see in good poetry – there is no point doing science.

Our lab believes that you should 'own' your work – it is your PhD, after all. We do not 'assign' projects to students when they join – we expect students to develop their own problems and wrestle with them. The nature of our experimental work is such that no one person can hope to manage even one assay on their own – so, everybody needs to help out with everyone else's work. The bottom-line is that, in order to enjoy your stay in this lab, you need to be sharp, hard-working, independent and, yet, cooperative.

This lecture, which is somewhat long, might be helpful if you are considering joining our lab. It lays out in some detail the conceptual underpinnings of the view of micro-evolutionary change that is the foundation of our experimental work. Another version of this lecture, given almost 4 years later.

This one, on the other hand, is more of a background lecture about evolution as a major intellectual advance in the history of human thought.

And this is a lecture covering the history of evolutionary biology between Darwin and the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.

This Hindi lecture from 2018 is essentially about holistic versus reductionist approaches in biology, and uses Ayurveda as an example of holistic bio-medical thinking.

This is a talk arguing for the "poets' way of doing science", delivered as a Mentor Talk at the Young Investigators Meeting in Guwahati in March 2019.

This is a 2019 talk about the nature of science and what it means to be "scientific", at the Culture of Reason event organized by the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti.

This is the first (Jan 2020) 'Pale Blue Dot - IIT Palakkad Public Lecture' on 'Why evolution is central to both biology and our lives', a general talk about the importance of evolutionary biology and a brief glimpse at some Indian contributions to the growth of evolutionary knowledge.

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Science is a lot like mountain climbing - we need to leave the crowded 'plains' of facts and climb up the pristine and austere 'peaks' of conceptualizations - "the high country of the mind" as Robert Pirsig called it in his book, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.