The old hunters cum wardens cum camp managers, in turn, seem to loathe the zoologists, as a general rule. I suspect we represent a final affront, the domestication of their Africa. The are old tough Brits who were there at the beginning, didn't have much schooling, and learned about the bush from the bush, understanding the big picture. We, in turn, are generally young Americans, already a strike against us, from impossible places like Ann Arbor or Queens. We come out there and try to turn their bush into equations about vegetation, or talk about ecosystems and niches, for god's sake. We spend only short periods there (i.e., less than the hunter's lifetime) and study tiny slivers---how one species of plant pollinates, how some disease moves through ungulates, how many acres of land is needed for a whatever to survive. We're a bunch of candy-ass PhDs who know more and more about less and less and barely know how to wipe our noses when it comes to the bush. All probably true.
= Robert Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir
(on zoologists doing fieldwork in Africa, even more applicable to the dominant reductionistic trend in Neuroscience perhaps)
