{"id":71805,"date":"2012-07-03T21:59:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T05:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17154"},"modified":"2012-07-03T21:59:08","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T05:59:08","slug":"evolution-not-ecology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/07\/03\/evolution-not-ecology\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution, not ecology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/07\/s-curve.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-17155\" title=\"s-curve\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2012\/07\/s-curve-300x166.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"166\" \/><\/a>One of my major gripes with my friends in ecology is that <strong>there is a tendency to look at every problem through the lens of ecological models.<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Garrett_Hardin\">Garrett Hardin<\/a>, who popularized the term <a href=\"http:\/\/eesc.columbia.edu\/courses\/v1003\/lectures\/population\/Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons.pdf\">&#8220;tragedy of the commons&#8221;<\/a> is an exemplar of this. People in ecology often get irritated by the public confusion between it, a positive scientific discipline, and environmentalism, a normative set of beliefs (it doesn&#8217;t help when some environmentalist groups have names like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ecology_movement\">&#8220;ecology movement&#8221;<\/a>). <strong>But the fact is there are deep commonalities in terms of prior assumptions by both ecologists and environmentalists.<\/strong> Despite <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Evolutionary_ecology\">evolutionary ecology<\/a>, the reality is that ecologists seem to be characterized by a mindset which posits limits to growth and a finite set of responses to the challenges of scarce resources. That is, the Malthusian paradigm.<\/p>\n<p>I bring this up because despite the similarities between ecology and economics it strikes me that ecologists often have a difficult time admitting that the parameters of the model which they think they have a good grasp of may not always be fixed. Incentives and innovation can shift the dynamics radically. Consider George Monbiot&#8217;s about &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my major gripes with my friends in ecology is that there is a tendency to look at every problem through the lens of ecological models. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term &#8220;tragedy of the commons&#8221; is an exemplar of this. People i&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,129,388],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology","category-environment","category-environmentalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71805"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71992,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71805\/revisions\/71992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}