Ecology and Conservation Biology, Misc

Many commentators have analyzed the Papal Encyclical on the care of the environment entitled “Laudato Si’” from various angles but relatively few have written on the philosophical presuppositions that inform the overall stance of the encyclical. It is becoming increasingly evident that, to appreciate the full impact of this work, we need to uncover its ontological and epistemological commitments. This paper makes a contribution in this neglected area by focusing on the nature of life. Two main points are explored: the (...) way all lifeforms depend on other lifeforms, implying that the biosphere often functions like one single unit of life, and the issue of the intrinsic value of each living thing. By situating the encyclical’s arguments within the history of ideas on the nature of life, the environment, and ecology, this research helps to better appreciate the originality of this document. (shrink)

Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity. First it is suggested that this scheme can be understood as a reaction to how heterogeneity adaptations were discounted or ignored in the modern synthesis. Then a positive account is proposed, distinguishing between two broad categories of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity: properties selected (...) for by well-defined patterns of environmental heterogeneity, and properties that help organisms exploit novel patterns of environmental heterogeneity. (shrink)

This article addresses the contributions of the literature on the new mechanistic philosophy of science for the scientific practice of model building in ecology. This is reflected in a one-to-one interdisciplinary collaboration between an ecologist and a philosopher of science during science-in-the-making. We argue that the identification, reconstruction and understanding of mechanisms is context-sensitive, and for this case study mechanistic modeling did not present a normative role but a heuristic one. We expect our study to provides useful epistemic tools for (...) the improvement of empirically-riven work in the debates about mechanistic explanation of ecological phenomena. (shrink)

It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as “invasive”. We argue that the classification of any species as “invasive” constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals—assuming that conservationists “kill equally”. It simply is not compatible with the double standard that conservationists tend to employ in their decisions about who lives and who (...) dies. (shrink)

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations (...) across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. (shrink)

Ecosophy or ecological wisdom – the new philosophy of contemporary life is also a philosophy of security, digital content, tolerance; it is a philosophy of survival and sustainable development of man, society and nature. Man, society as well as science currently need and will need a new philosophy – ecosophy. All together and each one in part they are based on security, first of all on human security. The interaction of philosophy with science occurs historically through three main stages. The (...) first one is characterized by the ancient belief that all the theoretical knowledge is philosophy. The second one, which has started approximately in the 15th century, suggests that the science is apparently independent from philosophy as a main focus. The third stage, that has just started, treats the scientific knowledge as complementary to the philosophical one. Both of them can successfully develop and function only with reciprocal interaction. Studying and understanding of the scientific knowledge leads to the professional development. The study of philosophy develops and strengthens the spirituality, the core of a developed personality. (shrink)

Life is the center of our existence. One would be tempted to say that first of all we live. However, our existence does not seem to pass in that modality. The exacerbated materialism in which our existence takes place, displaces life from the center of the scene. Our society is organized around production, consumerism, exploitation, efficiency, trade and propaganda. That is to say, our existence seems to have economy as the center of organization of our activities. The struggle of this (...) century that is beginning is to put life at the center of our existence, and to put economy in its proper place, that is, in the service of life. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science in Practice (PoSiP) has the “practice of science” as its object of research. Notwithstanding, it does not possess yet any general or specific methodology in order to achieve its goal. Instead of sticking to one protocol, PoSiP takes advantage of a set of approaches from different fields. This thesis takes as a starting point a collaborative and interdisciplinary research between two Ph.D. students from distinct areas: ecology and philosophy. This collaboration showed how a scientist could benefit from (...) philosophy of science (in this case study the philosophical approach of. mechanistic explanation) to construct a model of his explanandum, by means of heuristics approach (heuristics as an instrument but also a methodological approach) and, also allowed philosophy of science take a closer look into the scientific practice to investigate how explanations are constructed and how scientific understanding is achieved (in this thesis, with a dialogue with the contextual theory of scientific understanding). As a result, it is asserted that (i) mechanistic explanation possess limitations but may work as epistemic instruments that mediate between theories, data, scientists, and models; (ii) explanation construction and scientific understanding deeply relies on intuition; (iii) scientific understanding is an instant, a moment, a temporary achievement, and its process may happen in degrees; (iv) philosophy of science, by means of heuristics process, may enhance scientists’ epistemic virtues, improving his academic skills, by means of self-evaluation. This research shows that interdisciplinarity and collaborative work can act, through heuristics, as a toolbox for PoSiP to achieve its goal of understanding how science is made. Despite its success, an analysis of this collaborative practice leads to some fundamental issues. First, philosophy of science in practice is a philosophy of past practice, in that the majority of examples used by mainstream PoSiP come from the final products of science. Second, is it philosophy of [science in practice] or philosophy of science [in practice]? How to practice philosophy of scientific practice and, how to practice interdisciplinarity in the philosophy of scientific practices simultaneously to its scientific activity? This research exposes the epistemic role heuristics and interdisciplinarity possess as methodological toolboxes for philosophy of science in practice. It is defended that other ways of constructing sciences would be through different dynamics such as collaborative networks and interdisciplinarity research contributing to the vision of Trading Zones from Peter Galison, in which bridges between specialized disciplines are created in order to exchange knowledge and information. (shrink)

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research (...) design and data interpretation toward one discipline’s epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines. (shrink)

Forrageamento por Recurso Alternativo em Época de Estiagem por Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758.

In their article “Is There a Prima Facie Duty to Preserve Genetic Integrity in Conservation Biology?” Yasha Rower and Emma Harris argue that there is no underived prima facie obligation to preserve genetic integrity. In particular, it is argued that there is no such obligation because genetic integrity has no intrinsic value. In this commentary I raise doubts about this part of the authors’ argument. I argue that there might well be at least prima facie value in genetic integrity, that (...) the Moorean isolation test the authors use might not work in their favour, and that connecting genetic integrity to the idea of identity might work against the authors’ argument. (shrink)

The development of ecological thinking in North America has been conditioned by the imperative aiming at a valuation of the biotic community. Since the end of WWII, the US population was warned against the dangerous and violent alterations of nature. Many then found in theology an unforeseen ally. I review the roots of the tension which led to debates involving radical ecologism or its denial, and I aim at analyzing it philosophically.

The following considers the role of historical fidelity in habitat reconstruction efforts. To what extent should habitat reconstruction be guided by the goal of recreating some past state of a damaged ecosystem? I consider Sarkar’s “replacement argument,” which holds that, in most habitat reconstruction efforts, there is little justification for appealing to historical fidelity. I argue that Sarkar does not provide adequate grounds for deprecating historical fidelity relative to other natural values such as biodiversity or wild nature.

This study aimed to survey wild species voluntarily received or rescued in the Lake District, State of Rio de Janeiro, in 2011. The research aimed to identify endangered species, quantify the groups and know the destination given to specimens. The records were obtained from the Instituto Ecológico Búzios Mata Atlântica, an NGO responsible for the Environmental Protection Area named Pau-Brasil and for the Lake District. The analysis showed that 181 animals were seized, 51% mammals (13 species), 25% reptiles (13 species), (...) 24% birds (11 species) and 1% fish (1 species). Amongst those animals, 12 species are included in the List of Endangered Brazilian Fauna Species. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the perspective of intra-organismal ecology by investigating a family of ecological models. We consider two types of models. First order models describe the population dynamics as being directly affected by ecological factors (here understood as nutrients, space, etc). They might be thought of as analogous to Aristotelian physics. Second order models describe the population dynamics as being indirectly affected, the ecological factors now affecting the derivative of the growth rate (that is, the population acceleration), possibly (...) through an impact on non-genetically inherited factors. Second order models might be thought of as analogous to Galilean physics. In the joint paper, we apply these ideas to a situation of gene therapy. (shrink)

This research was carried out in order to verify by simulation Mendel’s laws and seek for the clarification, from the author’s point of view, the Mendel-Fisher controversy. It was demonstrated from: the experimental procedure and the first two steps of the Hardy-Weinberg law, that the null hypothesis in such experiments is absolutely and undeniably true. Consequently, repeating hybridizing experiments as those showed by Mendel, it makes sense to expect a highly coincidence between the observed and the expected cell frequencies. By (...) simulation, 30 random samples were generated with size equal to the number of observations reported by Mendel for his single trait trial, in this case, seed shape; assuming complete dominance, with genes A and a; likewise, it was simulated the results for the experiment with two traits, segregating in separate chromosomes, in this case seed shape, as before, and albumen color, with genes B and b, both loci with complete dominance. In the case of a single trait, the data only showed evidence for rejecting the null hypothesis (Ho ) in 1/30 samples, with (P<0.05). In the case of the 30 samples of the two traits experiment, (Ho ) was rejected only on 3/30 times, when it was set a = 0.05. In both simulations there was a high correspondence between the observed and expected cell frequencies, which is simply due to the fact that (Ho ) is true, and under these conditions, that is what would to expect. It was concluded, that Mendel had no reason to manipulate his data in order to make them to coincide with his beliefs. Therefore, in experiment with a single trait, and in experiments with two traits assuming complete dominance, segregation ratios are 3:1; and 9:3:3:1, respectively. Consequently, Mendel’s laws, under the conditions as were described are absolutely valid and universal. (shrink)

Evolutionary, ecological and ethical studies are, at the same time, specific scientific disciplines and, from an historical point of view, structurally linked domains of research. In a context of environmental crisis, the need is increasingly emerging for a connecting epistemological framework able to express a common or convergent tendency of thought and practice aimed at building, among other things, an environmental policy management respectful of the planet’s biodiversity and its evolutionary potential.

Abstract - Evolutionary, ecological and ethical studies are, at the same time, specific scientific disciplines and, from an historical point of view, structurally linked domains of research. In a context of environmental crisis, the need is increasingly emerging for a connecting epistemological framework able to express a common or convergent tendency of thought and practice aimed at building, among other things, an environmental policy management respectful of the planet’s biodiversity and its evolutionary potential. -/- Evolutionary biology, ecology and ethics: at (...) first glance, three different objects of research, three different worldviews and three different scientific communities. In reality, there are both structural and historical links between these disciplines. First, some topics are obviously common across the board. Second, the emerging need for environmental policy management has gradually but radically changed the relationship between these disciplines. Over the last decades in particular, there has emerged a need for an interconnecting meta-paradigm that integrates more strictly evolutionary studies, biodiversity studies and the ethical frameworks that are most appropriate for allowing a lasting co-evolution between natural and social systems. Today such a need is more than a mere luxury, it is an epistemological and practical necessity. -/- In short, the authors of this volume address some of the foundational themes that interconnect evolutionary studies, ecology and ethics. Here they have chosen to analyze a topic using one of these specific disciplines as a kind of epistemological platform with specific links to topics from one or both of the remaining disciplines. Michael Ruse’s chapter, for instance, elucidates some of the structural links between Darwinismand ethics. Ruse analyzes the Evolutionism vs. Creationism debate, emphasizing the risks run by scientists when they ideologize the scientific content of their studies. In the case of the contributions of Jean Gayon and Jean-Marc Drouin, which respectively deal with the disciplines of evolutionary biology and ecology, some central connections have been developed between these two disciplines, while reserving the option to consider in detail their topic in order to discover essential features ormeanings. Gayon analyzes the multilayered meanings of “chance” in evolutionary studies and the methodological implications that accompany such disparatemeanings. Froma similar analytical perspective, Drouin’s contribution focuses on the identification and critical evaluation of the different conceptions of time in ecology. Chance and time, factors of evolution in species and ecological systems, play a very important function in both disciplines, and these chapters help to capture their polysemous structure and development. Bryan Norton’s chapter, on adaptive environmental management, is set within an epistemological context where the Darwinian paradigm, ecological knowledge and ethical frameworks meet to give rise to practical, conservationist policies. In his contribution, Patrick Blandin pleads for the necessity of an eco-evolutionary ethics capable of fully encompassing humanity’s responsibility in the future determination of the biosphere’s evolutionary paths. Our value systems must recognize the predominant place that humanity has taken in the evolutionary history of the planet, and integrate the ethical ramifications of scientific advances in evolutionary and ecological studies. The chapter by J. Baird Callicott introduces us to a metaphorical ecological reversion with direct consequences for our moral conduct. If ecology showed that ecosystems are not organisms, recognizing organisms as a kind of ecosystem could be the basis for a new post-modern ecological ethics that lays the foundation for a better moral integration of humans with the environment. The contributions of Robin Attfield and Tom Regan delve into some of the classical issues in environmental ethics, situating them within a broader ecological and evolutionary context. Attfield’s chapter tackles the confrontation between individualistic and ecologically holistic perspectives, their different approaches to the issue of intrinsic value, and their tangled relation to monism and pluralism. Regan’s contribution ponders the criteria that allow individual beings, human and non-human, to own moral rights, the role of the struggle for existence in the relationship between species, and the logical difficulties involved in attributing intrinsic value to collective entities (species, ecosystems). Catherine Larrère’s chapter discusses the opposition between two environmental and ethical worldviews with very different philosophical centers of gravity: nature and technology. These opposing perspectives have direct consequences not only for the perception of the problems at hand and for what entities are deemed morally significant, but also for the proposed solutions. -/- To set out some foundational events in the history of evolutionary biology, ecology and environmental ethics is a first necessary step towards a clarification of their major epistemological orientations. On the basis of this inevitably nonexhaustive history, it will be possible to better position the work of the different contributors, and to build a meta-paradigm, i.e. a connecting epistemological framework resulting from one common or convergent tendency of thought and practice shared by different disciplines. (shrink)

The complexity and heterogeneity of causes influencing ecology’s domain challenge its capacity to generate a general theory without exceptions, raising the question of whether ecology is capable, even in principle, of achieving the sort of theoretical success enjoyed by physics. Weber has argued that competition theory built around the Competitive Exclusion Principle (especially Tilman’s resource-competition model) offers an example of ecology identifying a law-like causal regularity. However, I suggest that as Weber presents it, the CEP is not yet a causal (...) regularity. Instead, I argue that the scientific understanding in Tilman’s theory takes a different form. The theory explains through a structure I call “channeling explanation” which does not depend on deduction from general laws, but rather builds on constraints and trade-offs represented in state-space. Recognizing this structure supports the more general point that ecology and other so-called special sciences can reveal novel theoretical approaches to philosophy of science when approached with openness to their uniqueness. (shrink)

A community, for ecologists, is a unit for discussing collections of organisms. It refers to collections of populations, which consist (by definition) of individuals of a single species. This is straightforward. But communities are unusual kinds of objects, if they are objects at all. They are collections consisting of other diverse, scattered, partly-autonomous, dynamic entities (that is, animals, plants, and other organisms). They often lack obvious boundaries or stable memberships, as their constituent populations not only change but also move in (...) and out of areas, and in and out of relationships with other populations. Familiar objects have identifiable boundaries, for example, and if communities do not, maybe they are not objects. Maybe they do not exist at all. The question this possibility suggests, of what criteria there might be for identifying communities, and for determining whether such communities exist at all, has long been discussed by ecologists. This essay addresses this question as it has recently been taken up by philosophers of science, by examining answers to it which appeared a century ago and which have framed the continuing discussion. (shrink)

James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, argues that global climate destabilization could totally destroy the conditions for life on Earth, and further, that politicians are not taking effective action. Instead, they are using their power to cripple science. This situation is explained in this paper as the outcome of the successful alliance between a global class of predators and people who must be recognized as idiots taking over the institutions of government, research and education and transforming governments into governments (...) of occupation. The predators are either indifferent to the suffering they will cause, or have an agenda to use the effects of global warming to cull the world’s human population. In either case, their views are legitimated by social Darwinism. By revealing their true nature, this alliance has exposed a rift in the civilization of modernity, revealing the suppressed tradition and trajectory of the Radical Enlightenment. With its roots in the Renaissance, the Radical Enlightenment is opposed to reductionist materialism and committed to truth, liberty, justice and democracy. To revive the grand narrative of the Radical Enlightenment it will be necessary to reemplot this grand narrative as a project for creating an Ecological Civilization. This will be a civilization based on process metaphysics and a fusion of science and the humanities in human ecology. The goal projected by this narrative should be to save life on Earth from this alliance of predators and idiots. (shrink)

Issues of nature conservation, and socio-cultural movement called ecologism, are vivid becouse of it’s many controvertions and actual validity in terms of sustainable development. This paper presents contemporary motives of preserving the nature, scientific ways of it’s realization, and chosen issues of so called „ecological spirituality”. Reflection on the abilities and perils of science and spirituality, with reference to philosophy and practical conservation activity, will be led. Finally, there will be an attemption to answer the question about relation between nature (...) preservation, science and ecological spirituality, and to define the spiritual condition and trends in contemporary ecologism. (shrink)

methods that have shown promise for improving extreme risk analysis, particularly for assessing the risks of invasive pests and pathogens associated with international trade. We describe the legally inspired regulatory regime for banks, where these methods have been brought to bear on extreme ‘operational risks’. We argue that an ‘advocacy model’ similar to that used in the Basel II compliance regime for bank operational risks and to a lesser extent in biosecurity import risk analyses is ideal for permitting the diversity (...) of relevant evidence about invasive species to be presented and soundly evaluated. We recommend that the process be enhanced in ways that enable invasion ecology to make more explicit use of the methods found successful.. (shrink)

Natural selection [Darwin 1859] is perhaps the most important component of evolutionary theory, since it is the only known process that can bring about the adaptation of living organisms to their environments [Gould 2002]. And yet, its study is conceptually and methodologically complex, and much attention needs to be paid to a variety of phenomena that can limit the efficacy of selection [Antonovics 1976; Pigliucci and Kaplan 2000]. In this essay, I will use examples of recent work carried out in (...) my laboratory to illustrate basic research on natural selection as conducted using a variety of approaches, including field work, laboratory experiments, and molecular genetics. I also discuss the application of this array of tools to questions pertinent to conservation biology, and in particular to the all-important problem of what makes invasive species so good at creating the sort of problems they are infamous for [Lee 2002]. (shrink)

Research in ecology and evolutionary biology (evo-eco) often tries to emulate the “hard” sciences such as physics and chemistry, but to many of its practitioners feels more like the “soft” sciences of psychology and sociology. I argue that this schizophrenic attitude is the result of lack of appreciation of the full consequences of the peculiarity of the evo-eco sciences as lying in between a-historical disciplines such as physics and completely historical ones as like paleontology. Furthermore, evo-eco researchers have gotten stuck (...) on mathematically appealing but philosophi- cally simplistic concepts such as null hypotheses and p-values defined according to the frequentist approach in statistics, with the consequence of having been unable to fully embrace the complexity and subtlety of the problems with which ecologists and evolutionary biologists deal with. I review and discuss some literature in ecology, philosophy of science and psychology to show that a more critical methodological attitude can be liberating for the evo-eco scientist and can lead to a more fecund and enjoyable practice of ecology and evolutionary biology. With this aim, I briefly cover concepts such as the method of multiple hypotheses, Bayesian analysis, and strong inference. (shrink)

Human ecology, it is argued, even when embracing recent developments in the natural sciences and granting a place to culture, tends to justify excessively pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for creating a sustainable world order. This is illustrated through a study of the work and assumptions of Richard Newbold Adams and Stephen Bunker. It is argued that embracing hierarchy theory as this has been proposed and elaborated by Herbert Simon, Howard Pattee, T.F.H. Allen and others enables human ecology to conceive (...) humans both as part of nature and as cultural beings in a way that gives due regard to the ethical development of humanity. That is, ethical constraints need no longer be conceived of as 'unnatural'. Characterizing the nature of such constraints, conceived of as emerging from the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition', this argument is shown to justify some optimism about the future, and to give some idea of how society should be organized if ethical constraints, able to constrain humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature, are to prevail. (shrink)

This is an informal presentation of the theory of niches understood as ecological contexts. The first part sets out the basic conceptual background. The second part outlines the main principles of the theory and addresses the question of how the theory can be extended to aid our thinking in relation to the special types of causal integrity that characterize niches and niched entities.

This dissertation is a work in the philosophy of ecology and environmental philosophy. The central aims of the dissertation are to examine the role that ecological concepts and theories play in environmental philosophy, and to defend a conception of ecological science that is broad enough to address the philosophical and scientific concerns of environmental philosophers. As stated, these aims are consistent with the dominant tradition in contemporary environmental philosophy, but the dissertation is highly critical of the way the ecology-environmental philosophy (...) relationship is conceived and theorized in contemporary environmental philosophy. Rather than view ecology as a conceptual and scientific resource that is relevant to environmental philosophy only insofar as it provides support for the ethical, social and political aims of environmentalism, I argue that the core problems of environmental philosophy are essentially problems for a general science and philosophy of ecology, which I define as "the philosophical and scientific study of system-environment relationships". This definition of ecology is broad, but it is not vacuous. A central aim of the dissertation is to defend the robustness of a conception of ecology that is sufficiently broad to encompass "ecological psychology", "ecological economics", and "ecological anthropology", as well as traditional ecological science. ;The dissertation is divided into three parts, with three chapters in Part One, four chapters in Part Two, and two chapters in Part Three. Part One is a survey and critique of the role of ecology in environmental philosophy. Part Two develops a conceptual framework for a general philosophy of ecology based on developments in complex systems approaches in theoretical ecology and ecological psychology. Complexity and complex systems theories play a large role in the argument of the dissertation, and Part Three explores in greater detail certain issues in the foundations of the complex systems sciences that are relevant to a conception of ecological phenomena as complex systems phenomena. (shrink)

The budding notion of sustainability is analyzed using the notions of an interdisciplinary versus a multidisciplinary field by Lindley Darden and Nancy Maul.