tailieunhanh - A New Ecology - Systems Perspective - Chapter 8

8 Ecosystem principles have broad explanatory power in ecology INTRODUCTION The criticism that ecology as a whole lacks universal laws and predictive theory is frequent, and there are authors who even argue that theoretical ecology concerned for instance with fitness and natural selection is not scientific | 3 29 2007 09 59 8 Ecosystem principles have broad explanatory power in ecology The best answer raises most questions INTRODUCTION The criticism that ecology as a whole lacks universal laws and predictive theory is frequent and there are authors who even argue that theoretical ecology concerned for instance with fitness and natural selection is not scientific Murray 2001 . Scientific observations on natural phenomena usually give origin to possible explanations and furthermore provide tentative generalizations that may lead to broad-scale comprehension of the available information. Generalizations may be descriptive and inductive deriving from observations carried out on observable characteristics or become much more eager constituting the base of deductive theories. in ecology we must recognize that there are basically no universal laws maybe such laws cannot even exist in the same sense as those in physics . in fact most explanations in ecology are inductive generalizations without any deductive theory behind them and as a consequence we may find a large number of non-universal tentative generalizations. As explained earlier in the book regarding features such as immense number problem growth and decay and network interrelations ecology is more complex than physics and it will therefore be much more difficult to develop an applicable predictive ecological theory. Testing explanatory hypotheses by verification instead of by falsification is perhaps the easiest way. But many ecologists probably feel inwards the need for a more general and integrative theory that may help in explaining their observations and experimental results. In the last 20 or 30 years several new ideas approaches and hypotheses appeared in the field of systems ecology which when analyzed more deeply appear to form a pattern of theories able to explain the dynamics of ecosystems Jorgensen 1997 2002 . And in fact due to the complexity involved we probably need a .