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10 - The Species–Area Relationship: Idiosyncratic or Produced by ‘Laws Acting around Us’?

from Part III - Theoretical Advances in Species–Area Relationship Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2021

By
John Harte
Edited by
Thomas J. Matthews ,
Kostas A. Triantis  and
Robert J. Whittaker
Thomas J. Matthews
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Kostas A. Triantis
Affiliation:
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Robert J. Whittaker
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Ecologists generally hold out hope that a unified understanding of ecosystems is possible because, in Darwin’s words, they are governed by 'laws acting around us'. But at the same time, ecologists take delight in the idiosyncrasies of nature, in the features that are unique to an organism or an ecosystem, in the phenomena that resist general theory. Sometimes this duality leads particularists to condemn the search for laws and universal theory and theorists to denigrate natural history as stamp collecting. Such conflicts are foolish. Here I demonstrate that the search to understand the species–area relationship (SAR) and the other patterns studied by macroecologists as well, exemplify how a well-defined boundary can be drawn between two legitimate domains: the phenomena that are unified by theory and those that are idiosyncratic.

Keywords

Maximum entropy theory of ecologyspecies–area relationshipecological lawsuniversal theorymacroecologyMaxEntinformation entropyuniversal SARtriphasic SARtaxonomic resolutionmechanisms
Type
Chapter
Information
The Species–Area Relationship
Theory and Application
 , pp. 227 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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