"discipline" ? Ecology suffers from too much concern with philosophy and not
enough science.
Consider Gauss' Competitive Exclusion Principle. It is very useful, provides
a guide to identifying the niche of an organism, but it has been identified
as tautological by the late Rob Peters so we aren't supposed to use it.
Lawrence Slobodkin used to complain about theorists invoking principles like
conservation of energy as if that were optional for living creatures.
Basically the answer to Wayne's question is that if ecologists come up with
something useful that might serve as a law or principle, then it would be
drowned out by claims that it was not rigorous enough. We worry too much
about being "scientific" and not enough about learning how things work.
Bill Silvert
-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Tyson
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 2:39 AM
To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] ECOLOGY Fundamentals Principles Laws Other
Ecolog:
In recent years the debate about Laws of Ecology has been re-heated.* If the
study of the interactions of living organisms with environments is to have
discipline, it seems to me that it should have produced some observations
about how things work or function that, when applied, never fail to prove
valid. Can such observations, rendered as statements or equations, be termed
"laws" or "principles," or?
WT
*For example, see
http://philosophy.unc.edu/people/faculty/marc-lange/Oikosfile.pdf
