Ecological Orbits |
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Lev Ginzburg and Mark Colyvan |
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March 2004 |
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The main focus of the book is the presentation of the "inertial" view of population growth. This view provides a rather simple model for complex population dynamics, and is achieved at the level of the single species, without invoking species interactions. An important part of the proposed view is the maternal effect. Investment of mothers in the quality of their daughters makes the rate of reproduction of the current generation depend not only on the current environment, but also on the environment experienced by the previous generation. The inertial view is a significant departure from traditional ecological theory, which has been developing within the Lotka-Volterra framework for 75 years. |
1.1 How Planets Move
1.2 How Populations Grow
1.3 Metaphors and the Language of Science
1.4 Inertial Population Growth
2. Does Ecology Have Laws?
2.1 Ecological Allometries
2.2 Kepler's Laws
2.3 What is a Law of Nature?
2.4 Laws in Ecology
3. Equilibrium and Accelerated Death
3.1 Accelerated Death
3.2 Galileo and Falling Bodies
3.3 The Slobodkin Experiment
3.4 Falling Bodies and Dying Populations
3.5 The Meaning of Abundance Equilibrium
3.6 The Damuth Allometry
3.7 A Harder Question
4. The Maternal Effect Hypothesis
4.1 Inertial Growth and the Maternal Effect
4.2 The Missing Periods
4.3 The Calder Allometry
4.4 The Eigenperiod Hypothesis
4.5 What Can Be Done in the Laboratory
5. Predator-Prey Interactions and the Period of Cycling
5.1 An Alternative Limit Myth
5.2 Prey-dependent Versus Ratio-dependent Models
5.3 The Fallacy of Instantism
5.4 Why Period Travels Bottom-Up
5.5 Competing Views on Causes and Cyclicity
6. Inertial Growth
6.1 The Implicit Inertial-Growth Model
6.2 Parametric Specification
6.3 Malthusian Invariancy
6.4 What is and What is Not Analogous
7. Practical Consequences
7.1 Theoretical and Applied Ecology
7.2 Managing Inertial Populations
7.3 Rates of Evolution
7.4 Risk Analysis
7.5 The Moral
8. Shadows on the Wall
8.1 Plato's Cave
8.2 Evidence and Aesthetics
8.3 Overfitting
8.4 A Simplified Picture of Population Ecology
A. Notes and Further Reading
B. Essential Features of the Maternal Effect Model
C. Appreciations
Bibliography
Index
