for http://www.oneclimate.net

I’ve been studying the puzzles of natural systems, how they all have their own individually divergent behaviors, and individual reactions to their environments. Then I noticed that that aspect of nature entirely conflicts with the idea of ‘determinism’, that everything (except human free will) is controlled by its surroundings.

Last year I read a paper written by one of my great grandfathers, Steven A Forbes, an early ecologist, and it struck me how he tried to describe the amazing stability of predator prey relationships in fresh water ponds. He noted the prey would need to show restraint or the relationship would be naturally unstable if their behavior required them consume as much of their prey as they could.

Any advantage would then precipitate a ‘tragedy of the commons’ for themselves. He was describing the necessity of a learning process to avoid local environmental collapses that would apply to every organism in the system. That’s very odd, that that insight would have been missed by later ecologists.

It does appear when you watch organisms that their main activity is making use of what is uncontested and skillfully staying out of trouble, not destabilizing maximization. Then I found out what seems to be the reason why the need for organisms to learn as they go was lost.

It happened, it seems, when ecology adopted the model of physics.

That was in the 1920’s, treating populations as statistical pressures in an equation, rather than individuals interacting with their own behaviors. Continue reading The mystery of misunderstanding the obvious →