Here are some ecological "laws" to consider:
The main one is "Everything changes over time." This can probably be
derived from thermodynamic principles: entropy, and all that.
Here are some corollaries of this law:
The physical environment changes over time.
Species diversity changes over time.
Gene frequencies change over time.
Species evolve over time.
Maybe we can even assign direction to some changing factors:
Trophic efficiency INCREASES over time.
Resource availability DECREASES over time.
The total number of species that has ever existed INCREASES over time.
Maybe some of our common observations could be formulated as laws:
The tropics have higher species diversity then polar regions.
Island populations reflect the populations of nearby continents.
There will always be diseases.
There will always be parasites.
There will always be predators and prey.
There will always be primary producers.
Is this what you were getting at?
Martin M. Meiss
2010/11/4 Bill Silvert <[email protected]>
> "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: [email protected]
> 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
>
