Linquist, Stefan (2015) Against Lawton’s contingency thesis, or, why the reported demise of community ecology is greatly exaggerated. In: UNSPECIFIED.
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Abstract
Lawton’s contingency thesis (CT) states that there are no useful generalizations (“laws”) at the level of ecological communities because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. I argue that this influential thesis has been grounded on the wrong kind of evidence. CT is best understood in Woodward’s (2010) terms as a claim about the instability of certain causal dependencies across different background conditions. A recent distinction between evolution and ecology reveals what an adequate test of Lawton’s thesis would look like. To date, CT remains untested. But developments in genome and molecular ecology point in a promising direction.
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| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED) | ||||||
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| Keywords: | ecological laws, contingency, historical explanation | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Ecology/Conservation General Issues > Laws of Nature |
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| Depositing User: | Dr Stefan Linquist | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 02 Jan 2016 13:22 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 02 Jan 2016 13:22 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 11845 | ||||||
| Official URL: | http://www.jstor.org.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/stabl... | ||||||
| DOI or Unique Handle: | 10.1086/684024 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Ecology/Conservation General Issues > Laws of Nature |
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| Date: | 19 December 2015 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11845 |
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Against Lawton’s contingency thesis, or, why the reported demise of community ecology is greatly exaggerated. (deposited 10 Aug 2014 15:02)
- Against Lawton’s contingency thesis, or, why the reported demise of community ecology is greatly exaggerated. (deposited 02 Jan 2016 13:22) [Currently Displayed]
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