The Red Queen hypothesis, or the ability organisms have to control and regulate the available trophic energy, is a recently proposed parameter for measuring fitness. Firstly, this hypothesis is analysed in terms of its heuristic power. Secondly, the claimed causal dependence between this parameter and a, still controversial, law of constant extinction is judged to be unjustified, however reasonable such a claim appears to be. Finally, the ubiquity of competition in nature which is seemingly required by the Red Queen and (...) supposedly realized at the expense of a mutualistic alternative, is deemed to be a questionable assumption. (shrink)

Historians of science generally consider that Darwinism has played an important part in the birth of scientific ecology. Now most 19th century seminal works of the new discipline have been elaborated within a Lamarckian framework. The source of this paradox lies in the double-content of the adaptation concept, considered as a static phenomenon by the ecologists and as a dynamic process by the evolutionists. Although closely related nowadays, as shown by modern evolutionary ecology, the problematics of the fields of research (...) at issue were initially separated. (shrink)