From rivals to partners: adversarial collaboration in ecology and evolution

Since their inception, ecology and evolutionary biology have been filled with controversies. While controversies are generally beneficial, they can sometimes hinder meaningful communication and, ultimately, decelerate scientific advancement. A clear example is when scientific rivals enter a point-scoring mode in which proving the opponent wrong sidelines objective assessments. To counter this, we introduce to the ecology and evolutionary biology audiences the adversarial collaboration approach, where opponents cooperatively address their disagreements to advance their field. We describe the logic of adversarial collaboration, examine a series of potential challenges to its successful adoption in these disciplines, and show how they can be overcome. Adversarial collaboration is an invitation to align controversies with the scientific ethos of collectively seeking empirical truths.