---- Jaime Garizabal <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > By these days I´ve thinking about the differences between Ecology and > Natural History, and maybe I´m just not so good differenciating this terms > or I just need to read more about it, but sometimes it seems like the limits > between them aren´t always clear. For example, if you´re studying some bird > and you are taking into account things like clutch size, clutch mass, > incubation rhythm, social structure (in case for example, the bird is a > cooperative breeder), diet, feeding strategy, habitat description and so > on... How do I know, according to the definitions and the conceptual > commitment, > wich part is mostly ecology and wich one natural history? how can I draw the > limits? Of course, it´s always depend on the research question and the > context and limits I´m using to think about it, but, even so, sometimes it´s > not clear for me differenciate conceptually and in the practice when I´m > studying the Ecology and when the Natural History of some living thing.. > > Could you help me a little bit with this? > > Pd. Sorry about my english and thanks a lot for your time and pacience!
Jaime, your English is fine, much better than my Spanish. This gets at a bit of snobbery that has developed in some modern Ecologists (not on your part). Perhaps it is related to Physics Envy as it also occurs among some. The simple fact is that Ecology is Natural History practiced by modern scientists. That is, we are trying to understand nature. We use more modern statistics, more modeling, more elaborate (but not more effective) theory building than the originators of our science in its modern sense did, folks like Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and others who were their contemporaries and who along with them were proud to be called naturalists. We are certainly not better scientists than not only those two, but the myriads of lesser knowns who worked contemporaneously with them. Modern Ecology is modern Natural History, the two are identical, and derive from the exact same roots. When Ernst Haeckel invented the modern term from the Greek root to define our science, he simply mistook the rootstock of biological science (natural history) for a branch. That perceived branch is now in fact a branch, but call it what you will, ecology or natural history, it is the same, naysayers notwithstanding. You are doing ecology whenever you ask questions about nature that need answering and set up and follow data collection protocol to get at the answers. You are doing natural history when you do the same thing. Thanks for allowing me to expound on this yet again. mcneely
