Ecology

James Justus (Florida State University)
Perhaps no concept has been thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it, technically sophisticated and well-regarded accounts of character displacement, ecological equivalence, limiting similarity, and others would seemingly never have been developed. The niche is also widely considered the centerpiece of the best candidate for a distinctively ecological law, the competitive exclusion principle. But the incongruous array and imprecise character of proposed definitions of the concept square poorly with its apparent scientific centrality. I argue this definitional diversity and imprecision reflects a problematic conceptual indeterminacy that challenges its putative indispensability in ecology.

Makmiller Pedroso (Towson University)
Groups can dynamically respond to multiple types of environmental cues, such as disturbance events, even when they are composed by 'simple' microbial cells. The theory of group selection provides a useful account of how groups shape social evolution, but it omits how environmental factors cause fitness differences between individuals. This paper proposes that the concept of threshold effects is particularly useful in explaining how certain groups respond to environmental cues. Accordingly, combining group selection with the concept of threshold effects yields a more complete picture of how group living impacts evolution.

Max Dresow (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Ecology has long been in the grips of a discipline-wide inferiority complex. This can be characterized by three worries: that the subject matter of ecology fails to 'hang together' (the coherence worry), that the discipline lacks a theory to determine and delimit its subject matter (the control worry), and that the field has failed to progress. Attending to the structure of ecological problems provides a way of alleviating the coherence and control worries by revealing the organizational infrastructure of ecological knowledge and practice. In addition, it provides useful traction on the difficult topic of progress in ecology.

Aaron Wells (University of Notre Dame)
Recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's contributions to debates in the life sciences, but comparatively little attention has been paid to his engagement with Linnaeus's 'Economy of Nature' program. As this paper explores, Kant argues that there is no need, even in a merely 'regulative' sense, to posit teleological relationships between species in a community. Unlike some contemporary arguments, Kant's does not proceed from a priori reductionism but attempts to show that living collectivities fail empirically to meet key conditions of teleological organization - especially mutual causal determination - in any non-accidental way.

Viorel Pâslaru (University of Dayton)
I examine in this article the role of descriptions of recurrent mechanisms in explanation and prediction. I show that the new mechanistic philosophy is committed to the symmetry explanation-prediction. Contrary to this thesis, I examine the work of ecologist D. Tilman on the mechanism of competition and show that: descriptions of mechanisms for explanation are different from descriptions for predictions; descriptions of mechanisms for predictions allow novel predictions, while descriptions of mechanisms for explanation do not; and predictions are improved not by adding details to the descriptions of mechanisms for explanation, but to descriptions of mechanisms for predictions.