The question of whether there are laws of nature in ecology has developed substantially in the last 20 years. Many have attempted to rehabilitate ecology’s lawlike status through establishing that ecology possesses laws that robustly appear across many different ecological systems. I argue that there is still something missing, which explains why so many have been skeptical of ecology’s lawlike status. Community ecology has struggled to establish what I call a General Unificatory Theory. The lack of a GUT causes problems (...) for explanation as there are no guidelines for how to integrate the lower-level mathematical and causal models into a larger theory of how ecological assemblages are formed. I turn to a promising modern attempt to provide a unified higher-level explanation in ecology, presented by ecologist Mark Vellend, and advocate for philosophical engagement with its prospects for aiding ecological explanation. (shrink)

The applied discipline of agroecological design provides a useful case study for examining broader philosophical questions about the existence and importance of ecological generalizations or “laws.” Recent developments in the availability and use of formal meta-analyses have led to the discovery of many resilient generalizations in ecology (Linquist et al. 2016). However, these “laws” face numerous challenges when it comes to their practical application. Concerns about their reliability and scope might stem from unclear logical and epistemic connections to more foundational (...) or “unifying” generalizations (Lean in Philos Top 47(1), 2019) which, in ecology, tend to be derived from first principles and in association with highly abstract models. This raises questions about the nature of those foundational generalizations themselves. In particular, how resilient are they compared to the generalizations uncovered by empirically driven methods? Here we propose a procedure for evaluating the resilience of generalizations across five ecologically relevant dimensions. This procedure was applied to seven well known foundational generalizations in ecology. Surprisingly, it turned out to be impossible to estimate the resilience of these foundational generalizations based on the available literature. This points to the need for a more centralized repository of information about ecological generalizations, created with the explicit aim of evaluating such important dimensions as causal mechanism and predictive power. (shrink)

The distinction between causal role and selected effect functions is typically framed in terms of their respective explanatory roles. However, much of the controversy over functions in genomics takes place in an investigative, not an explanatory context. Specifically, the process of component-driven functional investigation begins with the designation of some genetic or epigenetic element as functional —i.e. not junk— because it possesses properties that, arguably, suggest some biologically interesting organismal effect. The investigative process then proceeds, in a bottom-up fashion, to (...) search for those effects. I argue that this process encounters a problem reminiscent of one that Gould and Lewontin associated with the adaptationist program. Just as their stereotypical adaptationst became trapped in the myopic pursuit of one selectionist hypothesis after another, so can the investigation of CR functions in genomics lead to an unending series putative organism-level CR functions for junk DNA. This is an acute problem for genomics, because eukaryotic genomes are littered with transposable elements and their deactivated descendants which often masquerade as interesting CR-functional components and it is experimentally onerous to determine whether they lack such a function. I further argue that selectionist reasoning about TE-host coevolutionary dynamics can greatly streamline the investigative process. Importantly, selectionist hypotheses need not be well confirmed to be illuminating in this context. Informed selectionist reasoning about the strategic roles of TEs in the genome offers a corrective to the idea that most of our DNA is somehow CR functional for the organism. (shrink)