If Jurassic Parking is out of the question, what are some biology-based science fiction premises you'd consider feasible?
Well, I was always sucker for GATTACA. Very good film with rather feasible premise. I don't see any drastic improvements of the human condition in near future, but we could eliminate many defects, that's way easier than improvement. And I fear that humans are di**s enough to make the genome apartheid possible.
But there is little sci-fi with ecological premise,
Tuf Voyaging, by G. R. R. Martin was excellent, but we are far away from ecological engineering on planetary scale and the presented examples were highly simplistic. And unfortunately, I haven't read the Mars trilogy by Kim Robinson, so that's for ecology.
In the biology-based premises, I can imagine that we could have artificial wombs in few decades. There are no principal obstacles known to us and all is left are "just" technical problems.
What would you say the biggest misconceptions about your particular field of study are?
There are two in the field of ecology. The first is that we are some treehugging hippies. While we are all friendly to the environmental cause, we are on the other hand somehow detached from the problem, becuse as the saying goes:
"The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. The extinction of thousands of species is a macroecology"
The second one is, as The_J and others already said, is that most is already researched and all is left is fill some gasp and maybe by some leap of genius move whole boundaries of biology. We know nearly nothing. We don't know what drives speciation or extiction without restoring to circular arguments, what makes ecosystems stable or not and so on. We have only some educated guesses that are probably true, but they haven't been proven yet.
Do you carry a squid and a dissection kit around everywhere, just in case?
Tha's probably some reference that I don't get, but no, I don't. I'm not zoologist to pick up every dead animal that I find and fill refrigerator with dead moles. But squids are cool.
As a biologist what do you think of Richard Dawkins. He's a biologist isn't he? Would you recommend his books?
He is a superb popularizer of science and I would highly recommend you his first books. Then the quality gone done, but he still is one of the best. As a biologist, I sometimes refer to his concept of selfish gene and gene-centric approach as
just compilation of other's thoughts. But that is probably only envy on my part, he
just created new paradigm in evolutionary biology that we (nearly) all subscribe to. And his concept of extended phenotype is genial. But his anti-religion stabs are....sad, pathetic and kinda embarrassing, his knowledge of philosophy and religion is only slightly better than high school level.
How many biologists do you meet that don't understand evolution? Because I meet many neurobiologists that do not. These are practicing, well known, professors who do not understand the concept of spandrels. Essentially if they see something change in their experiment they assume it is functionally important for what they are studying. When questioned about it being only a correlation they say well why would it be there, evolution would not waste so much energy on this if it wasnt important.
Well, no one. All that I met understood the concept very well. But I've met some students of medicine (And, in fact, majority of them planned to continue with neurological research) and few others (mainly economists) that were this kind of ultra-adaptionist. All of them have some libertarian leanings, AFAIK.
I have never heard of the term "pop-science" before and I'm honestly not sure what it means. Science in popular culture perhaps? In the same way that watching the Moon landings would be pop science?
Presentation of science to the public. Like when instead of reading number of slightly boring papers, you would read some book on science instead, where the author would interpret the results for you into a readable narrative, without boring you to death with methodological questions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_science
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