Wirt, Thanks. A reply and two questions:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The metaphor I tend to use however invokes a different art form, that of a > movie. The study of ecology, which entails investigations into the totality > of > the biotic interactions we find on earth, is like the last, current frame of > a > movie that has been running at 24 frames per second for the last several > hundred years. > > When we do ecology, we're looking only at the last frame of the movie. > Ecology is evolution in "now" time, captured in the current frame, but no > matter how > intricately we tease apart the ecological physics of those interactions in > this last frame, the interactions will never make complete sense unless they > are > examined over the course of the entire movie. I like this metaphor. In addition to your perspective above that ecology is mainly about the last frame, I would add that ecology was integral to interactions during *all* frames. We may not have data on the ecology of all past frames, but I think we know that relations between life forms and between life and environment were integral to the life story and to evolution from the beginning. Thus I see ecology and evolution as equals. Re: your Darwin quote: > "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many > plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects > flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to > reflect > that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and > dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by > laws > acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with > Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; > Variability > from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and > from > use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for > Life, > and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character > and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from > famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, > namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is > grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been > originally > breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone > cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning > endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, > evolved." When was the phrase "by the Creator" added or dropped? A last general question - based on your term "ecological physics" and use of "mechanist" to describe Darwin I wonder if you are in full agreement with neo-Darwinism and The Modern Synthesis? No problems for the theory or weak links at all? Statistical mechanics OK for use in biology and ecology just as in physics? I see major problems with this and need for "evolution" of our main paradigms and am curious as to your views. Thanks for any more, Dan -- Dan Fiscus Ecologist/PhD student Appalachian Laboratory University of Maryland C.E.S. 301 Braddock Road Frostburg, MD 21532 USA email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 301-689-7121 fax: 301-689-7200 http://al.umces.edu/~fiscus/research http://ecosystemics.org/drupal
