Before diving into any of this, I'd just like to say I agree with Mr.
McNeely said:
'Personally, I think the use of terms like "law" and "theory" as applied in
elementary science courses (precollege) has confused the public so much
about how science works and is done, that I wish the terms would go away
completely.'
I teach high school science and each year go through the same laborious
dance with these words as vocab categories, and get to spend relatively
little precious time not actually applying them as concepts that assist with
the actual doing of science.
It IS a very interesting intellectual enterprise to ponder this jargon, but
when will it ever be used? Edward Wilson's book *Consilience* is just this
sort of vacuum-chamber frivolity. An entertaining and thought provoking
read, but is it useful? Well, maybe one thing was (besides his treatment of
the 'science' of 20th century economics): I recall him taking a
reductionist view of most learning, but Wilson seemed to place the ability
to use a certain fact of interdisciplinary knowledge on a scale from
reduction to synthesis. Isn't this what makes ecology so fun, and
ecologists so dreamy? Thermodynamics, water chemistry, geology and
evolution, succession, climate patterns and human use (to name a few
ecological satellites)--if there is any enterprise that evenly straddles the
need for reduction and synthesis, isn't it ecology? Well maybe economics
too, but that's not surprising.
The article to which this post originally referred played around with how
ecological principles could be laws and why they could be important.
Perhaps an ecological TOE will emerge one day, but it seems like any
equation ("law"?) that an ecologist might use today is "just" a starting
point, with "everything else being equal" as the entry way to the inherent
idiosyncrasies of a particular habitat.
Here's a law for us to consider that isn't too far removed from a definition
(though let's not get started on definitions for ecology): ecology deals
with only living things (though as soon as I say that, I wonder, can we
imagine an "ecology" of pre-biotic molecules? should the law then
automatically include "the evolution of--" as well?) Anyway, maybe one way
to think about what ecological laws would really look like is to hypothesize
what life would look like and evolve like on another planet? I know we have
remote islands and undersea vents on our own planet, but what would life
need to evolve, anywhere? And what would these emergent living systems
necessarily have in common with our Earth or any other hypothetical living
world?
Best,
Jimmy Green
On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Bill Silvert <cien...@silvert.org> wrote:
> Wow, to be a law or principle it has to be perfect? I have a PhD in Physics
> and thought that we had lots of laws, but they seldom pass that test. For
> hundreds of years we talked about and taught Newton's Laws of Motion, but
> then Einstein came along with examples of cases where they FAIL. As for
> propping up, where do hypothetical particles like neutrinos and quarks come
> from?
>
> Do we really want ecology to be a much more rigid and philosophically pure
> science than physics, astronomy and the rest? Or can we just focus on trying
> to figure out how nature works?
>
>
> Bill Silvert
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Wayne Tyson
> Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2010 1:55 AM
>
> To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU
> Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] ECOLOGY Fundamentals Principles Laws Other
>
> My original question was about whether or not the discipline of ecology (I
> meant in the broadest sense) recognizes or should try to recognize, some
> observations about how "things" function or work that amount to laws or
> statements (hypotheses), when applied NEVER FAIL to prove valid--pass the
> test for a law or a principle. (And, I might add, one [or more?] that needs
> no propping up with qualifiers. (This, I will confess, is one issue I have
> with the referenced paper, but the author might be right and I might be
> wrong.)
>
