Biological market models are a way to think about the evolution of behaviors in which organisms exchange goods. Examples of such behaviors include the exchange of "nuptial gifts" for mating opportunities in some insects, and the exchange of photosynthetically-fixed...
Generalizing in ecology, or any science, requires you to group together different things based on their similarity in some key respect. Debates about generalization in ecology and evolution often are debates about the relative advantages of more vs. less generalization...
I've been pretty rough on the 'zombie' ideas of famous ecologists lately. So I decided to balance things a bit by highlighting a famous ecologist with some very modern, and very non-zombie, ideas: G. F. Gause . He's famous for the competitive exclusion principle, of...
In a previous post, I suggested that mathematics is a powerful weapon against zombie ideas, ideas that should be dead, but aren't. But mathematics is a double-edged sword. Unless it's used carefully, math can create zombies as well as slay them. Just as our choice of...
In a previous post , I said that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is one of the works that most influenced me, because of the attention Wittgenstein pays to the ways in which the very words we use can mislead us. I think this is a particularly important...
At least, they should if they want to maximize their chances of funding truly groundbreaking research, and are willing to accept an increased risk of failure. That's the conclusion of what seems to be a quite rigorous and detailed study of the work of HHMI...
In the spirit of advancing contrarian ecology , here’s an idea for a provocative review paper which I think a lot of people would find really interesting and useful, but that I don’t have time to write myself. Someone should review the theoretical literature and...
This post is inspired by an honest and good-humored comment by Robin Svensson on my post on zombie ideas in ecology . Robin, by his own admission, is a zombie—he stills sees value in classical theoretical ideas about the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH)...
What papers and books have most influenced you as an ecologist? This isn’t the same as asking about the best papers and books you’ve ever read. I’ve read lots of brilliant papers which haven’t influenced me, for instance because they merely reinforced, rather than...
Ideas, once they take root, are hard to kill. Thomas Henry Huxley famously referred to "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact" as "[t]he great tragedy of Science". But like Hamlet , it's a fictional tragedy—it doesn’t actually happen that way. Ideas,...
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