Oh, and to shoehorn in a point of politics, it might be argued, on the basis of the above, that philosophies of rugged individualism are thus philosophies of ecological infantalism, or else ecological sickness.

I wonder how you can reconcile rational self-interest with the above.

In other words, how much is enough?

I'm not sure what you mean with your question. Like, what exactly would need reconciling, and why? Could you elaborate?

I'm not sure what you mean with your question. Like, what exactly would need reconciling, and why? Could you elaborate? — StreetlightX

Well, the issues you present that are pertinent today with such cases as not accounting for the negative externalities of excessive carbon dioxide levels being raised by the working of the economy. It would seem that unrestrained economic growth has thus deleterious effects on the world. So, how do you address that issue manifest by the guiding principle of liberalism and neoliberalism that what is rational is to do what is best for one's self-interest?

Oh, and to shoehorn in a point of politics, it might be argued, on the basis of the above, that philosophies of rugged individualism are thus philosophies of ecological infantalism, or else ecological sickness. — StreetlightX

This requires extending the metaphor from ecology to biology to sociology with life and complexity being points in common. Individualism and collectivism are types of cultural bias, not stages in cultural development or symptoms of cultural health.

The reproductive behaviour of organisms can also be considered as part of an ecosystem though. This is why colony collapse disorder for bees is terrifying, no mo' bees is no mo' trees.

The image of ecological succession in terms of discrete developmental stages of the distribution of plant matter over an area is outdated. The most dated bit of it is the idea of ecological climax, which contains within it a sense of ecological equilibrium (self regulating/homeostatic interdependence), there's no evidence for this. The preferred view atm is one of dynamism and flux, focussing on the possible disturbances and potentials for the ecosystem than rather arbitrary categorisation of stages of plant development. What can be said of the wolves in YellowStone park? Should they be called part of the series?

As a historical note, the idea of succession actually predates the idea of ecosystem. Ecosystem as a concept was proposed to solve some of the conceptual problems associated with plant succession:

It is now generally admitted by plant ecologists, not only that vegetation
is constantly undergoing various kinds of change, but that the increasing
habit of concentrating attention on these changes instead of studying plant
communities as if they were static entities is leading to a far deeper insight
into the nature of vegetation and the parts it plays in the world. A great part
of vegetational change is generally known as succession, which has become
a recognised technical term in ecology, though there still seems to be some
difference of opinion as to the proper limits of its connotation; and it is the
study of succession in the widest sense which has contributed and is contributing
more than any other single line of investigation to the deeper knowledge
alluded to. — Tansley

You can read the amazing article from Tansley, where the word 'ecosystem' comes from, here.

So, how do you address that issue manifest by the guiding principle of liberalism and neoliberalism that what is rational is to do what is best for one's self-interest? — Posty McPostface

By rejecting such ideas as among the most deleterious and damaging ones ever peddled by anyone, anywhere. Or more specifically, by rejecting the incredibly impoverished and anemic understanding of 'self-interest' that undergrids such horrible notions.

Or more specifically, by rejecting the incredibly impoverished and anemic understanding of 'self-interest' that undergrids such horrible notions. — StreetlightX

Well, as long as such behavior counts as what is 'rational', according to economic theory and such, and produces the maximum amount of utility, then the whole issue is a non-starter.

I'm not sure what is referred to here by 'such behaviour'. Neither is it clear to me which 'economic theory' you're referring to, given that the so-called 'rational economic actor' is, at best, a contestible model of human action even within economic theory, with economists themselves increasingly recognizing the abstract and entirely divored-from-reality idea that it is.

Oh, and to shoehorn in a point of politics, it might be argued, on the basis of the above, that philosophies of rugged individualism are thus philosophies of ecological infantalism, or else ecological sickness. — StreetlightX

If you are interested in the best account of this, try Stan Salthe’s story on the immature-mature-senescent arc of living systems. And it would account for social systems as well.

But your hope to tie rugged individualism to sick or infantile ecology is lefty nonsense.

A senescent ecology is just one so well adapted to a particular life that it becomes brittle, lacking in degrees of freedom to recover from perturbations.

An immature one by contrast can exuberantly spend degrees of freedom to recover from knockbacks, yet is rather wasteful in being not yet well adapted to some particular life.

You can cash that out in sociological and political terms. But not so crudely as you seem to want to suggest.

The image of ecological succession in terms of discrete developmental stages of the distribution of plant matter over an area is outdated. The most dated bit of it is the idea of ecological climax, which contains within it a sense of ecological equilibrium (self regulating/homeostatic interdependence), there's no evidence for this. The preferred view atm is one of dynamism and flux, focussing on the possible disturbances and potentials for the ecosystem than rather arbitrary categorisation of stages of plant development. — fdrake

This makes a heap of sense, and is a really nice corrective. Thanks.

The reproductive behaviour of organisms can also be considered as part of an ecosystem though. This is why colony collapse disorder for bees is terrifying, no mo' bees is no mo' trees. — fdrake

True, true. I guess it's more that living things have a 'dedicated' 'in-built' hereditary system (even though it's not the only hereditary system that living things have - i.e. the epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems charted by Jablonka and Lamb), whereas ecologies are more modular and not fixed by any particular system like that of DNA.

This requires extending the metaphor from ecology to biology to sociology with life and complexity being points in common. — Galuchat

I think this is not only perfectly desirable, but has in fact an already-established legacy: the psychiatrist/ecologist Gregory Bateson, for instance, was perfectly happy to speak about 'ecologies' of legal systems, ideas, and even - in his famous phrase - 'an ecology of mind'. Basically any self-relating system composed of networks can be treated in ecological terms. Elsewhere, it's perfectly possible to treat something as abstract as an economy in ecological terms.

Thanks for that.

True, true. I guess it's more that living things have a 'dedicated' 'in-built' hereditary system (even though it's not the only hereditary system that living things have - i.e. the epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems charted by Jablonka and Lamb), whereas ecologies are more modular and not fixed by any particular system like that of DNA.

There's also the question of (eco)system boundaries. Hereditary mechanisms are embodied at the organismal level but operate above and below it; prosaically, nature has its own notions of scope. Ecosystems are no different, and their boundaries can even be distinct ecological units, arising from both the continuous variation of landscape properties (such as soil moisture content) and discrete variation in terms of presence/absence of communities. At the level of population genetics, you can obtain continuous variation as a result of discretising gene-flow regulators like mountain ranges and archipelago.

But, studying genetic and phenotypic variation along one side of a mountain range doesn't necessarily make use of the mountain range as a gene-flow regulator since the methodological assumption of studying one side of it pre-individuates the gene flows on either side and picks one. Unless it generates a hybrid zone, in which case what was once a continuous variation from base-species to its genetic modifications is reflexively re-introduced to the process at a later time in its development (interbreeding of 'transitional' species). Prosaically, nature unfolds in terms of the continuous, the discrete and their inter-relation. And what is a boundary for one analysis is an irrelevance for another.

As an interesting side note, this emphasis on perturbations and transient dynamics in ecosystem theory is finding an expression in differential geometry and topology, and the view of ecosystems as dynamical systems with flows seems to be serving as a basis for ecology's mathematisation at a theoretical level (like what happened with population genetics and statistics).

The distinct features of flows in population genetic terms and flows in ecological terms could serve as a poetic inspiration for treating an organism as an ecosystem, but nothing is really gained from this taxonomy that wasn't already pregnant in the idea of the organism as composite system embedded in composite systems.

Edit: though maybe it's a useful pedagogical tool to get people thinking about humans in less individualistic terms!

I guess it's better if I try and detail the kinds of boundaries that ecosystems have.

Natural boundaries:

Spatial - subtended land area.
Temporal - duration since inception, events can insert different regimes of biomass accumulation (think of an opportunistic shrub's series after a forest fire) and otherwise disrupt ecological flows.
Functional - what the ecosystem does, what flows constitute and regulate it, what perturbations disrupt and change it.

Can view ecotones as 'sharp' spatial/functional/temporal boundaries and ecoclines as 'fuzzy' spatial/functional/temporal.

Generalisations/composites

Communal/community based - the composition of organisms in an ecosystem is often a flow regulator and flow-type distinguisher (eg: biomass going from predator to prey species being a distinct flow category from soil gradients and plant community density/composition gradients despite the possibility of their coupling like Yellowstone), can have an abstract boundary in terms of not functioning the same once perturbed far enough away from its current state. Communities are emergent properties of organism/physical arrangements that are spatio-temporally subtended and functionally active and constrained. The action of a community in an ecosystem can be coupled to the subtended areas and dissolve ecosystems entirely (changing their dynamics irrevocably, think non-endemic crop-parasite behaviour), or promote the growth and stability of the ecosystem in general (wolves of Yellowstone a good example here too).

Zonation - variation of a community or assemblage's properties or its organismal composition along a spatial/temporal gradient. Can be the relationship of the spatial distribution of an organism to an ecological gradient over space.

Non-natural/methodological

Operational Zonation - picking out relevant areas for study of a particular theme, can coincide with natural boundaries but need not.

Curtailing - picking out relevant flows and processes in an ecosystem to study it.

____________________________________________________________________________________

All of these have the idea of parametrisation in common. A quantity varies, a change occurs. Certain ranges of changes are compatible with current ecosystem behaviour (perturbative stability of a state within an amount of perturbation), certain ones aren't ( [localised] extinction, inhabitability, niche destruction). Operational specification of ecological parameters can be fortuitous or occlusive in the process of revealing ecological dynamics; for an example see the discussion on edge effects and whether the increases in biodiversity towards ecosystem edges are illusory, unique to ecosystem operation at the boundary or a result of habitat patch overlap.

Nature seems to care about the parameters since we can study ecosystems using them and learn things, but I don't think nature 'sees', say, the distinction between altitude's effect on the spatial distribution of soil bacteria (propensity-to-change) and the functional form we specify. Nor the specific way we measure ecological parameters.

Another question entirely is the generative process that gives rise to the appropriate parameter spaces for studying ecological dynamics. How does nature learn what to care about?

As trees reach a certain size, they do not keep growing, they simply self-maintain at a certain size. — StreetlightX

This is not strictly true; trees may reach a maximum sustainable height but unlike us they never stop growing until they die.

(hey guys, been a minute)

@StreetlightX What's the affective oomph you got when [encountering->considering->incorporating] this new (?) idea [self qua ecology]? I'm assuming, here, that you had some older model for self that this new ecological idea upturned (or, less dramatically, modified in some significant way.)

Part of me wants to read something into the fact you hastily appended a brief political moral ('individualism is [for babies]') in quasi-spenglerian terms.

I think individualism is [for babies] too, of course, but what's the freudian term for when:

(i) you send an email, and realize maybe you suggested the wrong thing (which, granted, is what you meant (tho maybe you didn't realize it) but definitely not what you want to be seen as having meant)

and then

(ii)send a follow up like: [but all in all, i think the faculty really is great here, i didn't mean...]

@fdrake

Nature seems to care about the parameters since we can study ecosystems using them and learn things, but I don't think nature 'sees', say, the distinction between altitude's effect on the spatial distribution of soil bacteria (propensity-to-change) and the functional form we specify.

In all seriousness, I think this is an elegant way to sum up the difference between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself'.

It reminds me a little of a passage from that blog Slate Star Codex reviewing a David Freidman book.

Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

This is great, and it’s important to fight the temptation to think of foreign cultures as completely ridiculous idiots who do stuff for no reason. But it all works out so neatly – and so much better than when anyone else treats the same topics – that I’m always nervous if I’m not familiar enough with the culture involved to know whether they’re being shoehorned into a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing than other anthropologists (or they themselves) would recognize. — Slate Star Codex

Another question entirely is the generative process that gives rise to the appropriate parameter spaces for studying ecological dynamics. How does nature learn what to care about? — fdrake

Maybe we could get a better grip on how nature learns to care by looking at the gap between the ways in which 'pre-rational'* peoples acted (rational in-themselves, were there someone observing from a distance) and how those peoples experienced and made sense of the ways in which they were acting (probably a big confusing blend of the emotional/spiritual/aesthetic/pragmatic).

That may be a little too schopenhauerian though, idk, but ( a very qualified sort of )panpsychism makes more and more sense to me these days



----------------------
*in the sense of 'not reflexively taking their own society as a scientific field of study'

Isn't this:

Now, one cool way of looking at a single animal - in this case you or I - is precisely as a kind of bounded ecology: bound by skin, we are walking, talking, systems of internalised cycles and metabolic processes. — StreetlightX

an example of rugged individualism? To think of an individual as a bounded ecology is to totally ignore the importance of the larger community. And when you discuss ecology in terms of closed ecological systems, you miss out on an important aspect of ecology, leaving yourself no premise for real growth.

@Metaphysician Undercover from where I'm sitting, everything in the op points to a poetic defense of conservatism. What's being conserved is open to debate ( tenured profs double down on the ideas that tenured them and the department follows suit) but the concept is the same. Now of course traditional conservatism also values the social over the individual, but 'conservatism' in the 'west' today connotes the [infantile, babyish] idea of individual rational actors and free markets etc etc.

So why the non sequitur about individualism and politics?

I have some ideas but im bitter and broke and as suspect as anyone else ressentiment-wise.

Hey! Long time so see!

The point that really resonated with me, I think - and it's hardly new - is that idea that well-established, richly functioning ecologies are rich in networks: things rely on everything else, but also and importantly in ways that are cyclic. The focus on cycles in the OP wasn't incidental, I think it's really important: cycles establish both temporality and spatiality, they 'fill out' ecosystems and give them specific spatio-temporal characteristics that individuate them, dimensionalize them so it's not just a matter of plotting individual organisms on a flat 2D map; you get an irreducible dimension of depth, differance, if you will.

I like even more @fdrake's correction that an ecology can't be seen as one monolithic system, but one composed of an entire assemblage of local, regional and global systems that interact with each other such that "overall system patterning must be understood in terms of a balance reached between extinctions and the immigration and recolonization abilities of the various species." So you don't just have this single trajectory from neonate ecology to legacy ecology constrained solely by geographic region, but, as it were, a whole slate of 'options' in-between that depend on local contingencies, and which, even more importantly, are patterned across time.

So I guess the socio-political point is that this whole gamut of complexity is lost when or if we simply attempt to treat organisms in the abstract apart from these cycles of interconnection and mutuality. One imagines a fresh field of soil, with sprouting saplings planted a meter apart from each other: that's the philosophy of individualism. And moreover, that's what it sees when it looks at a forest. From a policy perspective, you can see just how disastrous this is: if you can't even 'see' the dynamics that encourage growth and suppleness ... or rather, if the only dynamics you can 'see' are cellular growth and base your environmental policy no that alone... well, you're going to end up with an impoverished ecology.

One way to understand it, is to see that SX's "single animal as a kind of bounded ecology", for MU translates to "a single animal as a closed ecological system" — Πετροκότσυφας

Yep! Bounded does not mean closed - I was going to reply with this exact same distinction, but you got there first.

@StreetlightX I try to come in here with an an empty fifth and a bad attitude, and I'm still welcomed with open arms. Makes it hard, you know?

But what I was trying to point out, sort of, way too elliptically, is that:

So I guess the socio-political point is that this whole gamut of complexity is lost when or if we simply attempt to treat organisms in the abstract apart from these cycles of interconnection and mutuality. One imagines a fresh field of soil, with sprouting saplings planted a meter apart from each other: that's the philosophy of individualism. And moreover, that's what it sees when it looks at a forest.

that ^ is, basically, the traditional conservative argument in a nut shell (upstart lefty idealists think they know better than whats worked for billion of years, want to rationally organize things, plant this there, and that there)

Nothing wrong with that criticism by any means. I think its quite good, actually.

wait @StreetlightX you've used 'see' a lot - maybe we're drawing on the same sources, here. Are you referencing Scott?

Well, I am a little cross that you haven't really provided an argument for what you've said but I think I can reconstruct where you're coming from any reply anway: I think there's something to what you're saying but the difference is this - the conservative insists upon community for the sake of 'conserving': 'this is the way things are done, this is the way things should be done'. But I'm not interseted in conserving things - I think the whole point of a rich ecology is that is allows for - and you might glower at me here - lines of flight.

In ecological or evolutionary terms, one can think of this in terms of robustness: robust ecosystems, those that can best handle 'perturbations', are also those that can best accommodate diversity and change; in evolution, phenotypic robustness actually allows for a maximum of genotypic change, change that cannot be 'seen' by natural selection because it takes place below the level at which selection can exert pressure on it. I've not studied the ecological analogs of this (perhaps @fdrake will have more to say), but I can only imagine the same applies.

In short, the interconnectivity I'm after is precisely for the sake of maintaining maximum change or variability. Apo earlier in the thread chided me for not distinguishing between senescent ecologies and immature ones: a conservative ecology would be precisely a senescent one, one that, yes, acknowledges the need for 'community' and so on, but that doesn't valorize the changes that such community fosters (correlatively, a philosophy of individualism lies on the other side of the spectrum). The 'best' ecosystems are precisely those perched halfway between immaturity and senescene, insofar as they can accommodate change in the best way.

wait StreetlightX you've used 'see' a lot - maybe we're drawing on the same sources, here. Are you referencing Scott? — csalisbury

Nah, I think I picked it up from some texts on evolution re: what natural selection can and can't see. Who's Scott? ... Fitz?

upstart lefty idealists think they know better than whats worked for billion of years, want to rationally organize things, plant this there, and that there) — csalisbury

Eh, this is a question of strategy no? Perhaps we need a new ecology entirely rather than fixing this one...

Nature seems to care about the parameters since we can study ecosystems using them and learn things, but I don't think nature 'sees', say, the distinction between altitude's effect on the spatial distribution of soil bacteria (propensity-to-change) and the functional form we specify. Nor the specific way we measure ecological parameters. — fdrake

The question of paramatizaion is facinating to me - like, what is the exact status of a 'parameter'? Is it simply 'epistemic', 'merely' a way to gain a handle on things? But it can't be merely that because it has to in some way 'track' a real change occuring in the 'thing/process' itself. So what exactly is happening when you see an 'optimization' of a parameter along a certain dimension in a time series?

My intuition - probably along the lines of Csal's distinction between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself' - is that most parameters are 'emergent'; I mean, thinking of certain rate-regulating chemical reactions, there are 'loops' which only ever kick in after chemical levels fall above or below a certain threshold: if 'above', you have an inhibatory reaction (slows rates of growth), if 'below', you get a catalytic reaction (speeds up rate of growth). Of course you can ask how a certain process 'knows' if the level is too high or too low, but it's all just mechanism: because these systems are 'looped', the end product itself influences the rate at which that product is produced. Thus - at another analytic level - the usual alternating-periodic 'sine wave' pattern of certain preditor-prey cycles, which I'm sure you're well, well farmilar with:



But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way.

Methadologically, I suppose, the ecological question is always: does the system see itself in the way I'm describing? And if not, how careful must I be with respect to the conclusions I'm trying to draw with my data? And of course one can relate all of this to Heidegger's 'ontological distinction' and the so-called horizon of intelligibility where beings appear as beings, and animals with are 'without world' etc etc. I think a really interesting project would be to try and think these two things together, but I'm not ready to pursue that here! And yeah, all of this should indeed be linked to your other question: "How does nature learn what to care about?"

Lots to think about here.

In ecological or evolutionary terms, one can think of this in terms of robustness: robust ecosystems, those that can best handle 'perturbations', are also those that can best accommodate diversity and change; in evolution, phenotypic robustness actually allows for a maximum of genotypic change, change that cannot be 'seen' by natural selection because it takes place below the level at which selection can exert pressure on it. I've not studied the ecological analogs of this (perhaps @fdrake will have more to say), but I can only imagine the same applies.

Biodiversity itself can have a regulatory effect. I think the most extreme example of this is a monocultural crop. If a field consists of a single crop everywhere in it, perturbation through disease can quickly wipe out the whole crop. Diversifying land use in the field can increase both single crop yields and the stability of the crop to disease and other externalities like climate change. There's a nexus of articles on Wiki about similar topics, surrounding polyculture and agro-ecology. This paper is about biodiversity and stability but asks the questions in terms of scope changes (local,regional,global biodiversities) and spatial biodiversity (link totally not biased since it's my old boss' paper). In the latter paper, you can see the effect of fortuitous/unfortuitous ways of thinking about space and locality methodologically (which I mentioned in terms of zonation).

AFAIK the mechanisms that link biodiversity to stability are still being researched, so it's far from 'settled science'.

I should add that thinking about methodological constraints in the same manner as ecological realities as I did in the boundary post is very heterodox and probably needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Next post:

The question of paramatizaion is facinating to me - like, what is the exact status of a 'parameter'? Is it simply 'epistemic', 'merely' a way to gain a handle on things? But it can't be merely that because it has to in some way 'track' a real change occuring in the 'thing/process' itself. So what exactly is happening when you see an 'optimization' of a parameter along a certain dimension in a time series?

Do you mean the time series obtaining a local maximum through 'optimisation' or do you mean an ecological model obtaining a local maximum through optimisation? The relationship of the latter to an ecological model is more a matter of model fitting and parameter estimation than how a parametrised mathematical model of an ecology relates to what it models. The parameters are 'best in some sense' with respect to the data.

Also @csalisbury:

My intuition - probably along the lines of Csal's distinction between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself' - is that most parameters are 'emergent';

But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way

I personally wouldn't like to think about the 'modelling relation' between science and nature in terms of the 'for-itself' acting representationally on the 'in-itself'. Just 'cos I think it's awkward. Will give an example: if you plant a monoculture and it gets destroyed by disease, when the 'in-itself' of the crop gets destroyed, we can say it's because of the 'for-itself' of the vulnerability of the crop to disease in our way of thinking about it. The crop's vulnerability to disease acts as a pattern in nature and a pattern in thought, and there's some kind of functional equivalence of terms. Even if nature sees only the individual plants and their inter-relations, this 'crop through iterated conjunction' still works like the 'crop' which satisfied the properties of monocultures. But this aversion of mine might be because I don't understand Kant very well. Could either of you map the distinction for me insofar as it relates to ecological models?

Of course you can ask how a certain process 'knows' if the level is too high or too low, but it's all just mechanism: because these systems are 'looped', the end product itself influences the rate at which that product is produced. Thus - at another analytic level - the usual alternating-periodic 'sine wave' pattern of certain preditor-prey cycles, which I'm sure you're well, well farmilar with:

I think what allows the aggregation of prey/predators in the model to work like something in nature is that in terms of exchangability. Let's take wolves and rabbits, the specifics of the wolves don't matter too much since availability of food and food amount required operate on each wolf individually in the same way as they operate on the the group (scaled up). Rabbits are the same, the specifics don't matter too much insofar as they need to get food, how much food there is and how many predators there are. A way of putting this might be 'the individual is an aggregate of size 1' in these circumstances.

Methadologically, I suppose, the ecological question is always: does the system see itself in the way I'm describing? And if not, how careful must I be with respect to the conclusions I'm trying to draw with my data? And of course one can relate all of this to Heidegger's 'ontological distinction' and the so-called horizon of intelligibility where beings appear as beings, and animals with are 'without world' etc etc. I think a really interesting project would be to try and think these two things together, but I'm not ready to pursue that here! And yeah, all of this should indeed be linked to your other question: "How does nature learn what to care about?"

I think ecology has some complications that aren't present in simpler relationships between model and world. I'm not sure I could make a list of them all, but there's always a difficulty in measuring properties of ecosystems precisely in a manner useful for modelling. It isn't the same for chemistry.

An example, the Haber process. It works so long as there's air, hydrogen, a catalyst, and a cooling procedure. The terms in the description of the process aren't abstractions, they're the real thing. The algorithm works on real inputs (air,hydrogen) and produces real outputs (ammonia). Why it works might be conceptually ladened, but procedurally the description it embodies is equivalent to the described, if that makes sense. I don't think the same is true of ecological parameters.

though maybe it's a useful pedagogical tool to get people thinking about humans in less individualistic terms! — fdrake

This, by the way, is definitely part of the motivation here - to think of the human in ecological terms is to think of the human in terms of populations, flows, and rates of change; I mean, even at the level of anatomy, we are, as it were, an anatomical ecology: populations of different cells, cycling through material and energy, hierarchically embedded, and structurally coupled with flows in the environment (a fanciful etymology of 'anatomy' is of course an-atomia; non-atom (non-individual?) - although the root really is more associated with the 'positive' act of dissection or 'cutting up').

And of course, every part of this system is more or less differential: processes will play out differently - will 'do' different things, contribute to different ends - depending on the context. We're basically a series of loops, some only residing 'inside' us, some extending far beyond our skin. Perhaps the best representation of a human - or in fact any 'thing' - is this:



(Will reply to your latest post a bit down the track)..

I like even more fdrake's correction that an ecology can't be seen as one monolithic system, but one composed of an entire assemblage of local, regional and global systems that interact with each other such that "overall system patterning must be understood in terms of a balance reached between extinctions and the immigration and recolonization abilities of the various species." So you don't just have this single trajectory from neonate ecology to legacy ecology constrained solely by geographic region, but, as it were, a whole slate of 'options' in-between that depend on local contingencies, and which, even more importantly, are patterned across time. — StreetlightX

What I'm interested in is how you would relate this description of interconnected systems and cycles to the concept of "growth". Growth appears to be a necessary aspect of an individual living being, and now its very common to judge economies in terms of growth. What is at issue, in my mind, is that if growth may be said to be something "good", then what is the proper description of growth which would best fulfil the conditions of being good.

The op describes "succession" as a growing. However, the end state of the growing, the "climax community" seems to be a well adapted ecology with a lack of growth. This end state is described as the best, such that the growing is not as good as the end state (lack of growing) which the growing brings about. So growth here would appear like a venture into instability, and therefore a bad thing if the climax community is a good state. However, growth is still necessary in order to produce the climax community.

So far, it is implied that growth involves a development of those cycles and systems, which are internal to the ecology. Some sort of boundary is also implied, and the boundary would distinguish between what is within the ecology, and what is outside. To me, the concept of "growth" implies a changing in the boundary. In its simplest form it might be an expansion of the boundary. But an expansion of the boundary is not necessarily "good", because this often leads to stretching oneself too thin. So a truly good growth might be a changing of the boundary in a way which better supports the production and sustenance of the complex inner cycles.

Here's the problem. The boundary, whether it's closed, open, or partially closed, indicates some sort of separation between internal and external. Changes to the boundary which are good for the internal are not necessarily good for the external. And the external must be respected as real, so "good growth" cannot be defined solely on the effects which the growth has within the ecology.

In ecological or evolutionary terms, one can think of this in terms of robustness: robust ecosystems, those that can best handle 'perturbations'.. — StreetlightX

I would assume that a perturbation is something with a cause external to the particular ecology. So I think you need to distinguish at least two distinct types of perturbations, one natural, and one artificial. I think "natural" speaks for itself, but if growth is defined by a changing boundary, then such changes could cause external perturbations, like poking a sleeping bear. So there must be two aspects of good growth, one which allows the ecology to handle perturbations, and one which prevents the ecology from causing perturbations.

Basically any self-relating system composed of networks can be treated in ecological terms. Elsewhere, it's perfectly possible to treat something as abstract as an economy in ecological terms. — StreetlightX

The largest and most complex type of human community is the stratified society, which is composed of nested complex systems (e.g., political, economic, legal, etc.).

Cultures develop over time. Changes in mindset/convention have cascading effects on nested systems, transforming society. Sudden and/or dramatic changes in mindset/convention can cause societal breakdown and collapse.

In terms of Sociocultural Anthropology, the life cycle of a human community (i.e., political economy) consists of: Rise (i.e., success), Dominance (i.e., expansion), Stagnation, Decline, and Fall (i.e., failure).

The life cycle of an organism can be described in similar terms. Can the life cycle of an ecosystem be described in similar terms?