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Against Lawton’s Contingency Thesis; or, Why the Reported Demise of Community Ecology Is Greatly Exaggerated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Stefan Linquist
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Abstract

Lawton’s contingency thesis (CT) states that there are no useful generalizations (“laws”) at the level of ecological communities because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. I argue that this influential thesis has been grounded on the wrong kind of evidence. CT is best understood in Woodward’s terms as a claim about the instability of certain causal dependencies across different background conditions. A recent distinction between evolution and ecology reveals what an adequate test of Lawton’s thesis would look like. To date, CT remains untested. But developments in genome-level ecology and molecular ecology point in promising directions.

Type
Biology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 1104 - 1115
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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