scientific disciplineThe assessment of agroecology as a scientific discipline was made using the norms of science as defined by the sociologist Robert King Merton (Merton, 1973). This approach was inspired by a recent attempt by the physicist John Ziman (Ziman, 2000) to define science in terms of what it is and what it means.The first Mertonian norm of science is communalism, meaning that the outcomes of academic science are delivered to the public in the broadest sense, including other scientific colleagues and the wider public. Scientists differ in the weight they assign to the importance of these dissemination routes. These can vary from scientific papers in specialist journals to popular television programmes. Agroecology values communalism. It is probably the case that many agroecologists place as much emphasis on sharing results with society as with their scientific colleagues.The second norm is that science should be universal and open to contributions from all, irrespective of race, gender; nationality, religion, etc. The only things that should wither, and be excluded from science, are ideas and theories not meeting with experimental verification or observation. Agroecologists would try to maintain the norm of universality in the Mertonian sense, as is evidenced by the papers refereed to in Section 2.3. However, universality in agroecology can often be very broad and may deliberately include other stakeholders, so that agroecology sometimes borders on being a socio-political movement. Agroecology faces a paradox when moving its focus to higher and thereby more aggregated levels of hierarchy (Figs. 1 and 3). At the highest hierarchical levels, local context can so swamp generality that research in, for example, rural sociology often ends as a series of case studies from which it is impossible to draw general conclusions.Disinterestedness in the reporting of science is the third norm. Science reporting is unusual principally because of its impersonal manner, conveying an impression of non-prejudice and disinterestedness from the reported work.. Thus, the impersonality and care taken in reporting science stems from the knowledge that results and conclusions are likely to be challenged by others. It is thus part of a scientist's duty to facilitate this examination in the interests of the wider scientific enterprise. With respect to disinterestedness, agroecology does not differ from any other scientific discipline. Thus, experiments are reported, models can be verified, and social and economic analyses are sometimes but not always repeatable. An important interaction between these norms is that the commuona1ism of science acts as a control on science's disinterestedness (Ziman, 2000) - the value of an objective scientific observation or experiment assessed via the social process of peer review. Thus, science and agroecology are disinterested attempts to search for objective truths that are paradoxically mediated by socially constructed controls and evaluation processes.Originality is the fourth norm. The tried and tested route to making an original scientific contribution, in the sense of a 'new' piece of knowledge, is to plough the furrow ever deeper. Thus, it is a rational scientific response to focus on ever more detail in the hope of developing a fragment of the scientific story for oneself. In supplement,