----- Original Message ----- From: "David L. McNeely" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 11:08 AM Subject: [ECOLOG-L] the difference between Ecology and Natural H istory?
---- 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 ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1204 / Virus Database: 1435/3511 - Release Date: 03/16/11 Internal Virus Database is out of date. Jaime and Ecolog: I could not put it any better than McNeely, but I will expound on it another way. I don't know whether or not I am alone in this line of thinking, but I see ecology as a comprehensive or all-encompassing pursuit of a better and better understanding of how all life works or functions and an exploration of the endless forms that living things can take and trying to unravel their complex origins and how and why they got to be the way they are. I see ecosystems as a vastly complex dance of organisms with their environment--a kind of metaballet or symphony where a relatively few rules are used in its production, including the physics of stardust and the incredibly wondrous results of atomic transformations, beginning with what we call hydrogen, to helium, to RNA and DNA, to organisms including you and me. It's too, too much, but that doesn't matter, we are amused, as we should be, by the irony of starstuff contemplating itself--or something like that. I don't understand. And that's fine with me. All I hope to do is to keep trying to ask the right questions and to question all the answers, but staying open to what the physicist Richard Feynman called "the pleasure of finding things out." Being corrected is also a pleasure, as are the kinds of insights this forum provides and facilitates. WT PS: As McNeely says (as I interpret him), there's no real difference between natural history and ecology, but I accept the semantic implications of both terms in whatever context they are used--the important thing with words is clarity of communication and avoidance of confusion or misunderstanding. I wonder how different languages and cultures separate or translate those two terms, or if they have better ones. On the other hand, if some want to make useful distinctions between them, I'm eager to hear what they are. Someone on this list, I believe, provided this reference, which I found very useful: http://umsl.edu/~nexus2/ricklefswikelski2002.pdf
