Mark D. Thompson
Bio
I'm a professional biologists (RPBio), an adjunct professor with the Ecosystem Science and Management Program at UNBC, and past-president of the BC Association of Professional Biology.
Education
M.Ed. 2012 UNBC Multidisciplinary Leadership, Amphibian Ecoliteracy and Conservation Leadership
​
M.Sc. 2003 University of Calgary, Department of Biology, Zoology
​
B.Sc. 1998 University of Northern British Columbia, Department of Biology, Wildlife Biology
Overview
Mr. Thompson is employed as a senior ecologist with EcoLogic Environmental Consulting and previously worked as a genetic lab specialist (2004-2012) at the University of Northern BC. Mr. Thompson works on problems in remote sensing for developing wildlife habitat models with R and Python programming, ecological statistics, study design, and population genetics. He manages projects covering a wide range of topics including animal movements, animal vehicle collision hotspot and mitigation, and ecotoxicology involving trace metals, road salts, herbicide over-spray, and fertilizers (ammonia, nitrogen, nitrates, and nitrites).
​
Statement of Philosophy
Mark is interested in the philosophy of science, epistemics, and the logic of inference that used to explain observed effects (organisms and their features) through physical causes that are ultimate (evolutionary or historical ecological) or proximate (changes in the life of an organism, physiological) in origin. I am interested in the nature of perception (observation, smell, feel, hear, taste, and contextual thinking) and how our mind infers causality by abductive inference (hypothesis). Organisms, populations, species, and other taxonomic hypotheses are organized in our explanation sketches (e.g., phylogenetic trees, food webs, metapopulation path diagrams) that illustrate our theoretical understanding of causality in the history of life.
Necessary and sufficient conditions are required for natural preservation to be caused in places around us, in our communities, where we live, and how we operate. Free, open, and encouraged empiricism for observing and forming relations with nature is a key part to my philosophy of conservation. My philosophy and understanding of systematics is inspired by the work of Dr. Kirk Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh has written extensively on the epistemics and logic behind species as hypothesis. The idea that species are weak guesses will sound peculiar to many readers, because our language has become accustomed to speaking about species as individuals. Many scientists do not even realize the metaphor has been exchanged for a false reality. Species are not 'real' objects in the world, but are instruments of nominalism.
As hypotheses, species are weak guesses. Such hypotheses are abductive inferences into ultimate causes and these hypotheses are rarely tested. Many of the different types of genetic or phylogeographic investigations being published are not providing severe tests of the effects being investigated in large part due to the confusion over species. Species are not things. Species hypotheses offer insight into historical causes of heritable traits or DNA sequences that are distributed into contemporary populations. Individuals in populations are the only things that are involved in causal interactions; species cannot collide, bang, or whistle because they are conceptual instruments. As such, species are not things that can be conserved, which is problematic because many laws and actions are built upon the premise that species are real things in the world that we can manage.
My alternative view is that just being with nature causes us to learn about it, to understand it, to care about it, and to value it more than we would had we not experienced it. It causes us to conserve, but we have to learn to observe it properly. Turning on the lens of a species in your thinking about your observations of nature changes how you view and value the organisms that we form relations with as we study them, sample them, or simply enjoy them as part of our living environment. To be solid in our understanding of how to conserve nature, we need a strong empiricism that is rooted in causality, a community of thinkers that are causally experiencing and sampling nature to communicate on how to preserve it, value it, and understand the necessary conditions for existence in the entangled bank of life.