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Community Ecology, Scale, and the Instability of the Stability Concept

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

E.D. McCoy  and
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
E.D. McCoy
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
Kristin Shrader-Frechette
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Extract

In the Preface to his recent philosophy of biology (1988) and in his earlier Growth of Biological Thought (1982), Ernst Mayr emphasized that recent progress in evolutionary biology is a result of conceptual clarification, not a consequence of improved measurements or better scientific laws. Although complete agreement on the meaning of key concepts is not essential for all communication in science (see Hull 1988, pp. 6-7,513), we likewise believe that conceptual clarification is perhaps the most important key to progress in community ecology. In order to investigate some of the reasons that might explain why community ecology has been unable to arrive at a widely accepted general theory, in this essay we analyze “stability,” one of its most important foundational concepts. After reviewing the stability concept and sketching its associated problems, we assess the epistemological status of four difficulties with the concept.

Type
Part V. Problems in Special Sciences
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 184 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Work on this project was funded by NSF grant BBS-86-159533, “Normative Concepts in Ecology,” although the opinions expressed are those of the researchers, not the NSF. The authors are grateful to Greg Cooper, Reed Noss, and Dan Simberloff for constructive criticisms of earlier drafts. See Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993.

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