As Kant recognized and as every hands-on scientist knows, the natural world up close seems to be distressingly messy and full of holes.
Ape corpses are extremely rare, and there are scientists out there who would love to get their hands on one.
On the one hand, the scientists on that committee like most others truly did think of themselves, with good reason, as being scrupulously fair and balanced, and they would have rebuffed, vigorously, any overt efforts to buy or bias their conclusions.
On one hand, scientists need to be able to lay-out visionary messages on tangible benefits for approval on resourcing from senior management.
On one hand, scientists and judicial experts say, knowing that someone has committed a brutal crime as a youngster says little about his penchant as an adult.
On one hand, scientists such as Richard Klein, of Stanford University, Nicholas Conard, of Tübingen University in Germany, and others argue that advanced human behaviour – involving use of complex symbols, art and sophisticated tools – did not appear until about 35,000 years ago, during a sudden flowering of creativity called the Great Leap Forward.
On one hand, scientists have proved the utility of ecosystem services for DRR beyond doubts, say for example, mangroves play a pivotal role in wave attenuation, however, on the contrary, the key question remains, whether ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (Eco-DRR) approaches are robust enough to substitute traditional engineered DRR strategies and influence a strategic shift.
"They sent Curiosity to the last place on Mars where they would find life," complained one scientist, cocktail in hand.
On the one hand, scientists have to cope with structural issues, such as characterizing the topology of a complex wiring architecture, revealing the unifying principles that are at the basis of real networks, and developing models to mimic the growth of a network and reproduce its structural properties.
On the one hand, scientists may borrow from some diplomatic techniques to manage complexity, which is the modus operandi of the diplomatic profession.
The Council of Europe Guidelines (Recommendation CM/Rec 2008) proposes a wide range of participatory methods, stressing the exchange of ideas between local people affected by spatial planning on one hand, and scientists and experts possessing technical knowledge on the other.
