Feb
26
Biodiversity Explained, from Thomas Miller
February 26, 2010 |
Biodiversity Explained by Ignoring the Forest for the Trees:
A painstaking, multidecade study of 33,000 individual trees may finally have uncovered the roots of biodiversity.
That biodiversity’s origin needs uncovering is surprising because the word seems to be everywhere. But scientists still don’t quite understand why one place has more species than another, or fewer.
The traditional explanation — every organism has its niche, competing not with other species but its own — sounds nice, but has holes. According to the tree study, that’s because ecologists haven’t looked for the right niches.
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From the article:
“Ecologists spent a lot of time in the 20th century trying to find ways to reduce the complexity of natural systems so that we could understand them,” said Miles Silman, a Wake Forest University ecologist who was not involved in the study. “Clark has shown that the complexity that we were trying to reduce is very likely essential to understanding” biodiversity.
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A similar problems occurs in economics where neoclassical assumptions of perfect competition and information abstract away from key economic processes (entrepreneurship based on imperfect, distributed information and personal knowledge).
Rounding out individual variations turns people and firms into quanta ripe for mathematical formulas. But the world these formulas give explain are different in important ways from our real world. Similar problems apparently exist with ecosystems.
Should we care whether industries or ecosystems develop with many diverse firms or species competing and cooperating, or develop instead with a few firms or species dominating the industry or habitat?