Competition and coexistence: on the historical background in ecology and the influence of economy and social sciences

Abstract

Abstract Competition plays an important role in a large number of ecological models. The paper discusses historial aspects of this concept in ecology with respect to the influence of the social background. Competition became a concept of a priori necessity in modern thinking, when life was not longer conceived teleogically. The biological sciences therefore are unthinkable without the idea of competition - but not for empirical reasons. Competition became the basic principle of social life for liberal and democratic, progressive social theories and ideologies. For conservative theories it is the cooperative coexistence, respevtively the adaptation within the framework of a social whole, which is thought to be in accordance with the model of the living organism. Theory dynamics in biology can be understood to be parallel to this pattern: On the one hand, the idea of the biological community as an accumulation of individuals emerges with the Darwinian theory of evolution. Here individuals primarily have an antagonistic, competitive relationship with each other. But in early ecology (different from evolutionary biology) the community was not conceived primarily in terms of competition, but in terms of adaptation and interrelated mutual dependence. Thus, “progressive” evolutionary theory is opposed to “conservative” ecology. In ecology, this inner splitting appears again: The organismic, holistic, ecosystem-oriented concepts are opposed by individualistic, population-oriented ones. However, usually approaches based on the integration level of populations start out stressing the role of competition and lead to theories of deterministic successions ending in a state of equilibrium and complete mutual adaptation of the components, just like the early organismic theories (“monoclimax”). The recent criticism of the competition concept in ecology may be understood as a part of the general tendency against teleology. The discussion about competition and coexistence provides an example how the social background and ecological theory dynamics relate.