Year: 2022

THE ENTANGLED BANK. "Although Darwin’s (1859) classic ‘entangled bank’ of species ‘dependent on each other in so complex a manner’ is often referred to in food web research, Darwin was referring to a wide variety of interactions in addition to feeding, e.g. bees pollinating flowers, shrubs providing shelter for other species and trees providing nesting habitat for birds." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01732.x/full View in LinkedIn

THE DIVERSITY QUESTION. “Why are there so many species on earth?” Almost everywhere, we see many species living together. One answer of course is “niche differentiation” powerfully counteracting the Darwinian concept of competitive exclusion and the survival of the fittest." https://lnkd.in/dcnXnAQ View in LinkedIn

INTERACTING ECOSYSTEMS. Robert MacArthur (1955) "argued that “Biodiversity begets stability”: when a species is part of a species-rich community, it will be better able to withstand environmental change and disturbance because of buffering effects through the complex network of biological interactions with other species in the community." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12080-016-0292-1 View in LinkedIn

CONNECTANCE. "Robert May "showed that aspects of biological complexity, i.e., the number of species and the frequency of interactions among the species (“connectance”), constrains stability. The apparent contradiction between the notion of MacArthur and the model results of May has been a central focus of ecology ever since." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12080-016-0292-1 View in LinkedIn

SPECTRAL INTERACTIONS. "The models of May represent communities with random types of interactions (predator–prey, competition, facilitation, mutualism, commensalism) with random strength of the interactions." Not just eating one another. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12080-016-0292-1 View in LinkedIn

DARK DRIVER OF EVOLUTION. "Evolution advances by means of death (as opposed to the survival of the "fit")? That's a dark spin on Darwinian theory that I didn't expect to come across." All creatures die. Death is a synonym for natural selection. No evolution without death. No fresh genes without death. And even genes have life cycles. Even genes die. https://lnkd.in/ddsS3VH View in LinkedIn

"AGING evolved first to promote demographic stability." https://lnkd.in/du2zdbF View in LinkedIn

BALANCE OF NATURE. "Darwin nevertheless saw the ecological roles of the diversity of species as parts of an almost superorganismic nature, and his main contribution to the idea of a balance of nature was his constant emphasis on competition and other mortality factors that kept all species' populations in check." https://lnkd.in/d8aX399 View in LinkedIn

THE WORLD IS GREEN PROPOSITION, Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin (1960). "The green biomass (in mature terrestrial communities) exists because predators kept herbivores in check." https://lnkd.in/d6T6CmR View in LinkedIn

CAUSTIC CRITICISM. "Slobodkin's statement may well be the most thoroughly falsified hypothesis still current in population biology. A survey of the literature fails to disclaim se a single case of a natural population behaving in the manner described." An outlier opinion. https://lnkd.in/dK-66Q6 View in LinkedIn