Abstract
From physics to ecology, one formidable goal of scientific exploration is determining the forces at work in nature and how these forces organize our world. In trying to uncover simple laws, scientists must balance the accuracy and complexity necessary to describe essential mechanisms. Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion were sufficient for almost 200 years, but Einstein's addition of a fourth dimension of space-time was justifiable because it not only increased the accuracy and complexity of understanding but also moved physics past a descriptive stage. Understanding the patterns of biodiversity in a tropical forest or a coral reef, however, has had ecologists mired in the multiple dimensions of natural laws to simply describe how species survive and co-exist. Distilling this complexity to the essential drivers of species assemblages will not only help ecology meet its most daunting conservation challenge—staving biodiversity loss—but also help move the science into a predictive stage.
Highlights
One formidable goal of scientific exploration is determining the forces at work in nature and how these forces organize our world
Understanding the patterns of biodiversity in a tropical forest or a coral reef, has had ecologists mired in the multiple dimensions of natural laws to describe how species survive and co-exist
The debate in population genetics continues, the neutral theory Kimura developed helped reconcile the importance of natural selection and genetic drift
Summary
One formidable goal of scientific exploration is determining the forces at work in nature and how these forces organize our world. Unconvinced that species differences alone drive community dynamics, ecologists Stephen Hubbell at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, United States, and Graham Bell at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, independently developed a theory to determine the extent to which patterns could be explained by random, or stochastic, forces beyond a species’ control. Throwing out traits such as competitive advantage entirely, and, even more heretically, viewing different species as functionally equivalent, Hubbell’s controversial The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography relies on nothing more than randomness of births, deaths, speciation, and dispersal to describe the distribution of species in an environment. Ecologists are striving for a degree of predictive power that will demand a level of rigor as yet unseen in ecology
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