Book Reviews

Abstract

Brian Maurer (1999) Untangling Ecological Complexity: The Macroscopic Perspective. Pp. 262. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. £39.95, $50 (hardback), ISBN 0-225-51132-4. £14.50, $18 (paperback), ISBN 0-226-51133-2. At least we cannot be accused of arrogance. Whilst the geneticists boast about understanding the roots of human behaviour, and the physicists look forward to a general theory of everything, community ecologists continue to debate the widely acknowledged inadequacies of our subject. One response to the failure of many general predictive principles to emerge from community ecology is to call for a retreat to autecology; if each species if unique, then progress can only come by understanding each one in turn. The approach described by Brian Maurer in this eclectic and stimulating book is the polar opposite. Rather than limiting our horizons, we need to expand them and embrace ecology on a macro scale. Maurer begins with a diagnosis of the problems as he sees them. He revisits some well-known criticisms of linear population and community analyses based on Lotka–Volterra equations, showing how the accuracy of any prediction based on this approach is likely to decay rapidly with time. This might be because communities have non-linear, chaotic dynamics. Maurer describes some techniques used to search for regularities in chaotic data, but concludes that the variability found in local communities will mean that general principles will remain elusive. So what is the solution? Maurer proposes that the problem of uniqueness arises simply because our sample sizes have been too small. In the same way that the iron laws of chemistry and physics are just statistical regularities arising from the variable behaviour of billions of particles, so very large collections of organisms will show regularities that transcend the idiosyncrasies of individual populations and species. Examples include the positive relationship between geographic range size and local abundance of species, the log-normal distribution of body masses within species assemblages, and differential rates of speciation and extinction within clades over evolutionary time. Maurer presents quantitative models to explain these and other patterns. By calling for a new emphasis on what he describes as the statistical approach to ecology, Maurer has provided a valuable challenge to community ecologists to tackle the big issues. Many problems remain – how do we infer cause from pattern, how do we discriminate pattern from randomness and, perhaps most crucially, how do we acquire the big, reliable data sets that are needed? Maurer does not give the answers, but he does point the way towards a bold and confident ecology.