The journey of the naturalist is over

We would like to devote this number to the memory of Alexei Merkuryevich Gilyarov (May 19, 1943 - October 20, 2013), a well -known biologist, a popularizer of science and a friend of our newspaper. Several hundred people came to the farewell ceremony with him, which took place on October 23, 2013 at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University. Then, a funeral took place at the Nikolo-Arkhangelsk cemetery. At the commemoration, relatives, friends and colleagues recalled stories from their life associated with A.M., and more than once a smile appeared on their faces.

“It is very bitter when worthy people leave. Once at the funeral of M.V. Wolkenstein, his wife Stella Iosifovna, said that we should not grieve, but rejoice that we were with him. Like Zhukovsky: "About the lovely companions who have been lively for us, / do not say with their jokes, / do not say with longing: they are not, / but with gratitude: they were." This all applies to Alexei Merkuryevich. He really lives. I knew his name from publications in the TRS and grateful to the circumstances that allowed me to get to know him, ”the doct wrote to us. physical mat. Sciences Tatyana Maksimovna Birshtein.

In this number we included one of the last articles by A.M., sent to the editorial office on October 13, dedicated to self -education, and the responses of colleagues to it.

About the need for self -education

The other day I had a long dispute by phone with one of our employee about self -education. My interlocutor was all the time indignant about the fact that we were not taught to one on a biofac, then another, in particular, were not taught population genetics. At the same time, he referred to America, to his guru (but they don’t argue with the guru, there is a guru guru).

God with him, with the guru, but the position of my opponent - we were poorly taught, but in America they teach well. May be. I did not study there. He asked his interlocutor a very simple question, as it seemed to me, the question: dear N, why didn’t you go through the population genetics yourself - after all, there are a bunch of books and articles, even in Russian, not to mention English, which you would have understood a lot in the science of interest to you. With the answer, my opponent was clearly hesitated.

And I began to recall, and what, in fact, he himself extracted from lectures during training on the biofac (1960-1965), and what I mastered by self-education. From lecture courses, individual lectures were remembered, which Lebedinsky gave in the physiology of animals and human physiology. And of course, a special course in zoogeography, which was read by my teacher, unforgettable Yakov Avadievich Birshtein, but I already wrote about it recently separately [2].

Yes, another special course, I listened to me on the advice of my comrade, anthropologist Ilya Perevoschikov. It was a course on anthropology Yakov Yakovlevich Roginsky. I went to these lectures, of course, walking some kind of classes, since they did not enter the curriculum of zoologists. That's perhaps that's it! As for self -education, although I did not really burden myself in his student years, nevertheless in the last courses I spent a lot of time in the library.

And two books, read in the first year, left an indelible impression. These are the “ecology of invasions of animals and plants” by Charles Elton and “Paths and patterns of the evolutionary process” I.I. Schmalgauzen. Reading Schmalgauzen was not so easy, it required stops, thoughts, but all this was overcome. I was amazed at the grace and clarity of the idea, I learned about mutations and modifications, about genocopies and phenocopies. Moreover, we studied on the wreckage of Lysenkovschina.

But the real era of self -education began for me with admission to graduate school, especially since my supervisor Yakov Avadievich Birshtein greatly facilitated this. The theme of my dissertation sounded as "structural features of freshwater planktonic communities." Although I myself came up with this name, the idea of ​​what the structural features of communities are, frankly, I had rather foggy. But I hoped that I would find something in the literature, and for this it was necessary to do self-education.

And now I spent the long winter of the first year in graduate school in the general hall of the Lenin Library. There were no search engines at this time. And oddly enough, this was a major plus. The search strategy was elementary: I ordered sets of leading hydrobiological magazines and carefully looked at their content - from the very latter, moving consistently to the older ones. In addition to magazines, I studied the volume of the works of international limnological congresses. They had some long German name: “Verhandlungen Der International Vereinigung Fur Theoretische und Angewandte Limnologie ...”

It seems that in this publication I came across an article by the Spanish researcher Ramon Margalef. In it, I read an unexpected interpretation of how the suczestia (change of species composition) flows in the reservoir [3], but the most important thing: I was simply captured by the author’s idea to present a phytoplankton test as a certain text in which individual letters are analogues of species, and the frequencies with which they meet are analogues of the relative abundance of different types.

The Shannon formula from the theory of information can give a characteristic for such a text (sample), which takes into account both the number of species and the ratio of the number of different types. This was the species of species diversity proposed by Margalef, which I began to use in my work with might and main.

Prior to this, back in my student years, I had to engage in self -education with a purely defined purpose to master the basics of ecology in order to give a small cycle of lectures to schoolchildren - members of the mug of young biologists under Moscow society of nature testers (MOIP). And I took up the study of the recently published book of the Fundamentals of Ecology. It was the second, 1959, the best edition, the so-called “green ox” (in a very pleasant to the touch, light green color).

They say that a whole generation of American ecologists has formed on it. And it is not surprising: I have not met such a compact, surprisingly clear presentation of the essence of the ecology at that time. The third edition, translated into Russian, turned out to be bulky, and a lot disappeared in translation. Of course, in English, you need to read the personal account. Thank God, I already knew the language enough to cope with this.

Finally, the last stage of my self -education is the independent development of a considerable in volume of material regarding global, covering the entire biosphere of the cycles of the main biogenic elements - carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. Although I have long read the ecology course on the biofac, I felt that his weak spot was too short a section of the section about cycles.

I relied mainly on the last edition of the Odidu, but I understood that this was not enough. And since 1997, I began to write out the journal Nature. The whole world has opened before me, unfortunately before that I was almost unknown. In a surprising way, in domestic publications, the schedule of changes in the content of carbon dioxide, as well as the temperature course over 420 thousand years, according to the analysis of ice columns from our Antarctic Station Vostok, did not even reproduce in 1999. I learned about the recent important discoveries in the cycle of nitrogen and, finally, figured out in detail why it was in the Black Sea that almost the entire thickness was infected with hydrogen sulfide.

From some moment, I was very helpful that I began to write the news of science for the site "Elements.ru", supported by the Dynasty Foundation [4]. I myself found works that seemed important and interesting to me (among them there are many publications on global cycles), and wrote as much as possible their popular presentation.

I still do such self -education. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that I do not at all consider the system of university education through which I passed is optimal. No, she, of course, is no good. But it is obvious to me that the improvement of the system should provide students with much greater freedom in choosing courses and topics, as well as compulsory independent work (composition) on a fairly wide topic. Students must learn to work on their own.

1. Articles A.M. Gilyarova in a TRV-hobby. http://trv-science.ru/tag/aleksej-gilyarov/
2. A.M. Gilyarov. Communication with him was happiness. Memories of Professor Yakov Avadievich Birshtein. TRV, No. 80, June 7, 2011. http://trv-science.ru/2011/06/07/obshhenie-s-nim-bylo-schastem/
3. We are talking about the model of Sukzessia of Ramon Margalef, see Ouchu E. 1968. Ecology. M., Education, p. 96-98. - approx. L. Polishchuk
4. Articles A.M. Gilyarova for elements.ru http://elementy.ru/news?theme=1549629