“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra

“You can observe a lot by watching.” — also Yogi Berra

One of the formative papers I read in my first year of graduate school was a lament about the state of the field I was trying to enter. It was a 1998 essay by Doug Futuyma, “Wherefore and wither the naturalist?” published in, appropriately, The American Naturalist. Futuyma was concerned with the future of naturalists, or natural historians, people with granular knowledge of organismal taxonomy and life histories. He reports results from a survey taken at the 1993 Evolution meetings, in which the general sentiment was that (1) natural history knowledge is important and valuable, but (2) it is increasingly hard to come by, probably because (3) it isn’t, on its own, a viable basis for a career in science. This is a problem because, as Futuyma explains, even if with think that “conceptualization”—forming and testing hypotheses about the processes of evolution and ecology—is the “real” work of science, we can’t do that work without a foundation of natural history knowledge.

Worries about the state of natural history probably also reflect our personal anxieties. On the one hand, there’s a fear that one’s own natural history knowledge isn’t valued in hiring, grant funding, or promotion decisions. On the other hand, there’s the fear that one knows less natural history than one ought—and that ecologists and evolutionary biologists working today, as a group, know less natural history than their predecessors did. I know the latter very personally, having first taken over an angiosperm systematics course in a region—southern California—wildly different from the Pennsylvania woods where I learned plant identification; and then watched not one but two more knowledgable (and confident) senior colleagues retire. It is weird to find myself the senior botanist in a department where, before winning tenure, I was at best the third-most adept plant taxonomist.

These worries, both the personal and the systemic, are recurring themes among ecologists and evolutionary biologists—Futuyma cites a precedent from 1950, and a paper slated for the September 2026 issue of The American Naturalist cites Futuyma and then a series of reiterating articles that bridge the three decades between them. That newest paper, by Hari Sridhar, Joyshree Chanam, and Priyanka Hariharan, finds a fresh perspective on our natural history nervousness, however, by drawing on an impressive scientific oral history project to describe how natural history supports fundamental research in ecology and evolutionary biology.