Each year the second floor of the Institute for Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier (ISEM) organizes a Christmas lunch. This year’s was on Friday, December 15th, and the custom is to have a raclette. My understanding is that raclette is a Swiss invention, combining characteristic cheeses together with cold-cuts (French = “charcuterie”) and vegetables (“legumes”). There are many versions and diversions of raclette, but the idea is to melt the cheese either together with the charcuterie/legumes in a special raclette maker, or melt the cheese alone and pour it onto the charcuterie/legumes, or the authentic Swiss way which is to scrape (“racle”) the melted cheese directly from a large chunk directly onto the complements awaiting on the plate. Whichever method it is, raclette is a social phenomenon. It’s synonymous with friends and family. Raclette is almost invariably eaten in the winter: it’s warmth from the cold.
The 2023 ISEM second-floor raclette was attended by more than 40 colleagues. The structure of ISEM may seem special compared to academic institutes in other countries, but it is fairly typical by French standards. ISEM is composed of departments and departments are made up of teams. Each team typically has several permanent researchers. Being based at a university, ISEM houses scientists from a diversity of institutes: of course, this includes University of Montpellier faculty members, but also scientists from other institutes, such as the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the IRD (Institut de Recherche et Développment). There are over 250 people at ISEM of which about 100 are tenured academics.
The second floor of Building 22 houses three research teams: Experimental Evolution of Communities (EEC), Evolution and Demography (ED), and Biodiversity: Dynamics, Interactions and Conservation (BioDICée). There are 18 permanent researchers and over 30 technicians, students and postdoctoral scientists. Most of our floor attended the 2023 raclette and by and large, members of the same team sat together. The 7 raclette makers each with 6 to 8 “poêlons” meant that a maximum of about 50 people could participate. As such, the makers were spaced along several joined rectangular tables so that everyone had one raclette dish and was not too far from the nearest raclette maker.
At about 1pm everyone was seated, the raclette makers were heating up, and people were serving themselves in meats, vegetables and cheese and starting to cook their first servings. It takes several minutes for a given poêlon’s contents to cook enough so as to either slip or bloop on to the plate. This gives everyone plenty of time to talk and reflect on the year gone and the year ahead.
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Everyone was happily chatting away, when all of a sudden, I had a strange feeling. I rose slightly from my chair and looked to my left, seeing the whole group, each and every person younger than me and having a great time. I suddenly realized that the members of my team (EEC) and the BioDICée team would not have been present at this meal had I not founded the EEC team as a solo researcher in 2000. In fact, some might neither be in Montpellier nor in France!
This came and went quickly and it was only later that I thought more deeply about the general phenomenon of “place”. So I want to be clear that I’m not taking any credit for the recruitment or scientific achievements of my colleagues. Rather, I am commenting on causality and how our life trajectories may unexpectedly stem from apparently non-consequential decisions. I have written a series of posts that revolve around my own decisions and life bifurcations, but here, in the present post, I’m making the point that one’s decisions “of place” can affect the life trajectories of one or more other people. This is obvious when we think about hiring or firing someone: the person or persons who are responsible have a causal influence on that life’s trajectory. This is not to say that any of my life’s position-decision-makers are responsible in any tangible way for the specific content of the present blog post, but it is conceivable that I would not be writing blog posts at all had I not been accepted, for example, to the PhD program at the University of London in 1986. Had I gone to UC Davis (where I was also accepted) I would have likely done my PhD in applied entomology. Who knows where I’d be in 2023.
For the aficionados amongst you, the influence “of place” harkens to the debate about whether humans have free will. (Spoiler alert) I plan to visit the issue of free will in a future post (spoiler alert), but for now consider the argument that if there is free will and if I exercised it in coming to ISEM, then the presence of the teammates at the raclette somehow stemmed from me. If there were no free will, well then everything is just destined and I have no more responsibility than would a robot.
Back to the raclette.
I realized that had I not founded the EEC team in 2000 (which was called the “Host-Parasite Interactions” team until the name changed in 2006), then obviously none of the members over the past 23 years could be in a non-existent team, nor would the BioDICée team exist, since it was founded by two researchers who previously were recruited into the EEC team. I can say with certainty that none of my current colleagues would be at ISEM, since when I arrived in 2000, there was no population ecology, no community ecology and no experimental evolution at ISEM. These three and several other research areas are specific to the EEC and BioDICée teams. On the other hand, many if not most of the more than 100 students who have been in the EEC and BioDICée teams would have done their theses in Montpellier anyway. However, they would have been in different teams and possibly worked on different subjects. I also have no doubts that most if not all of my professional colleagues would have found their way into research – perhaps in Montpellier, since there are several research institutes aside from ISEM hosting ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Even if being recruited by the only other team doing similar research at ISEM (the Evolution and Demography team), the trajectories of any scientists and students not having been in (non-existent) EEC or BioDICée would have arguably been different.
My point is that decisions “of place” affect not only the focal individual but also those given place by the environment instantiated by that focal individual. In my case, I was the sole permanent researcher of the team until the first recruitment in 2006. Thereafter, the team grew considerably, including new permanent recruits. The team branched-off in 2015 to form the new BioDICée team, and they subsequently recruited their own permanent members. All in all, 9 permanent researchers joined the EEC and BioDICée since my arrival at the Institute in 2000.
“Creating a new space”, such as an institute, a team, or a position within a team, has an intangible influence and as such is not something we think about. But thinking out loud: if only 2 of the 100 scientists hosted by EEC/BioDICée someday go on to host 100 scientists, and 2 of those do the same thing and so on, then (over many generations) you will see that many thousands of scientists will be where they are due to my (and my progenitors and my successors!) decisions “of place”. I am just one of many lineages and any career in science that hosts students, postdocs or faculty is a contributor to one or more lineages.
Now consider this: had I gone to another institute in 2000, then a different lineage would have resulted, and as above, it is sure and certain that the majority of the people who in fact joined EEC and BioDICée teams would now be elsewhere. Some may even had joined me in the place I never in fact went to!
Representation of research teams through time. Circles correspond to scientists, diagonal lines to continuity of teams, vertical dotted lines to the founding of a new team, and dashed lines to two researchers (5,6) in different teams co-directing a new student (7) in an existing team (d) founded by researcher (4). Researcher (1) founds team (a) and later team (b). Researcher (1, indirectly) together with researcher (2, directly) are responsible for the birth of team (c). Researcher (3) founds team (e) that never produces new researchers.
We affect each other’s lives in unapparent ways. I could be making a big deal of the many people who have been affected by my move to ISEM in 2000, though I’m now very cognizant that my decision did indeed depend on the previous decisions of others: notably, Isabelle Olivieri (University of Montpellier) and Robert Barbault (University of Paris). So it is reasonable to say that the one hundred or more academic lives that I am partly responsible for can also give thanks to Isabelle and Robert! And we can push this logic back further to look at previous institutes at which they were based and (like me) key junctures in their lives.
In the end, it is all about creating opportunity. We live in a massive network of interdependence and influence. Some decisions and events would have happened even if apparent progenitors were in no way involved. But we cannot know this for sure since the tape of life cannot be replayed.
***
Thinking about it now, I wonder whether there was a tear in the fabric of time. A portal to a parallel universe. I say this because an hour before the raclette, I attended a seminar by a colleague visiting ISEM with whom I have kept in contact over the past 20 years. We shook hands and he proposed that we meet just after his seminar to discuss this and that. In that instant, it crossed my mind that perhaps a meeting could blossom into a project and as many projects do, involve new students. But I politely declined, mentioning my commitment to the raclette. For whatever reason I did not think that in missing the raclette I would not have been very missed by my colleagues, nor that I would not be writing this.