List, I am curious what people think of this.
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/information-theory-hold-key-quantifying-nature/ >From the article: MaxEnt is based on principles of simplicity and consistency, but it has additional assumptions baked into it, starting with the fact that researchers must choose just a few variables to feed into the procedure. In 2008, when Harte first considered the idea, he decided to try it out using the size of an area, the number of species there, the number of individuals, and the total metabolic rate of all those organisms. He didnt pick these characteristics at random; he had an inkling, from reading work on metabolic theory, that these had promise for describing biological systems. In some cases, they do very well. The simplification of a complex ecosystem into just a handful of variables has fueled criticisms of MaxEnt, because it assumes that those numbers and whatever processes generate them are the only things shaping the environment. In essence, it generates predictions of biodiversity without taking into account how that diversity arises. It implies that the details many ecologists focus on might not matter if you want to understand the larger patterns of an ecosystem. Harte said he usually gets two responses: Youve opened up a whole new theory, and youre an idiot, because we all know that mechanism matters in ecology. Other extrapolation methods are mentioned in the article that I am also curious about. John
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