Darwin and Ecology

I’d forgotten all about it. Back in 1992 I wrote an article for a minor journal, “Charles Darwin’s Influence on Ecological Theory.” The editor accepted it for publication, but wanted revisions. I was going through a job change right then, and chose to drop the project. The article itself is outdated, and not well written. I am unwilling to revise and post it. But in this essay I will summarize some of its main points.

Here is the abstract:

“Prior to Charles Darwin, ecological relationships between organisms and their environments, and among organisms, were interpreted in terms of the Great Chain of Being, of bidirectional adaptation, and of the Balance of Nature. Darwin made valuable contributions to ecology through his careful measurements of plant and animal populations, and his understanding of the complexity of interactions among plant and animal species. But his major contribution to ecological theory was that natural selection, the evolutionary mechanism he proposed, made the Great Chain of Being and Balance of Nature concepts obsolete.

Many twentieth century ecologists believed that communities of plants and animals were superorganisms and functioned as organisms in their own right. The superorganism concept was irreconcilable with Darwinian natural selection, and only recently has ecological theory come to terms with this. For the Darwinian view of ecology to be fully successful, a response must be made to the recent proposal of a modified superorganisms concept, the Gaia Hypothesis.”

This is all interesting, even though not too original, even in 1992. You can read a lot about pre-Darwinian ecology in Ernst Mayr’s book The Growth of Biological Thought and many essays by Stephen Jay Gould.

Here is a summary of the article, which I have made as interesting as possible, but which remains (fair warning) somewhat heavy going compared to most essays on this blog.

The term ecology was first used, apparently, by Reiter in 1885 and Haeckel in 1886. St. George Jackson Mivart came up with his own version of it, which he called hexicology. (I used to think Mivart was a Catholic saint, but St. George is just his first name. He got in trouble with the Catholic church when he wrote “Happiness in Hell”.)

Even in the twentieth century, ecologists (who, like Frederic Clements, considered themselves Darwinians) thought the natural world functioned as an organism and therefore kept itself “in balance” the way your physiology stays in balance. Another example is Victor Shelford. Arthur Tansley quickly pointed out that an ecological community was a super-organisms but does not resemble an individual organism. Nevertheless the super-organism concept has led to some humorous examples. Some of its practitioners liked to walk through a Pinetum (a pine woodland) or a Quercetum (an oak forest). This approach continued until at least 1991. The idea that plant communities are discrete and nameable like organisms was eclipsed largely by Robert Whittaker’s vegetation studies starting in 1956.

For centuries, thinking about the natural world was constrained by the Scala Naturae and what I call a bidirectional view of adaptation.

First, the Scala Naturae was like a great ladder of life that included not only organisms but was a seamless fabric that included minerals (such as the fibrous asbestos) at its base. Because all of the links in the chain must exist, even pre-Darwinian scientists such as Linnaeus accepted human-ape intermediates such as Homo troglodytes and Homo sylvestris. Darwin’s research shattered the Chain.

Classification schemes were based on almost anything other than Darwin’s branching tree of life. Some were based on mathematical symmetry, such as the quinarian systems proposed by MacLeay in 1819 and Swainson in 1835. Strickland wrote in 1846 that these patterns reflected God’s pattern of thought during creation. Darwin’s research shattered these ideas. These systems had an artistic, rather than functional, completeness: species existed because the symmetry demanded them, not because of ecological opportunity, much less evolution.

Second, by bidirectional adaptation, I mean the idea that organisms fitted their environments, and the environment fitted the organisms. Edward Blyth’s 1837 example (cited in Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century) was that the ptarmigan was adapted to the mountaintop and the mountaintop to the ptarmigan. Blyth’s idea was in such contrast to Darwin that Eiseley’s assertion (Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X) that Darwin got the idea of natural selection from him seems unbelievable. No scientist believes now that the environment adapts itself to organisms.

The Balance of Nature was also an old idea. Herodotus believed that a superintending providence kept predators from eating all of their prey, mainly because the prey had high reproductive rates. Similar ideas are found in Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus. Linnaeus wrote in 1759 that “…all natural things…lend a helping hand towards preserving every species…” Herbivores, for example, kept any one plant species from crowding out the others. Buffon had similar beliefs. Perhaps the most famous and extensive defense of this idea was in Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), one of the most famous pre-Darwinian science books. “Perhaps there is no species of terrestrial animals whatever, which would not overrun the earth, if it were permitted to multiply in perfect safety; or of fish, which would not fill the ocean…” Superfecundity, he explained, had two advantages: “first, that it tends to keep the world always full; whilst…it allows the proportion between the several species of animals to be differently modified …as different situations may afford them room and food…One species of insects rids us of another species…” Anticipating chapter 3 of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Paley wrote, “An elephant produces but one calif; a butterfly lays six hundred eggs…In the rivers, we meet with a thousand minnows for one pike; in the sea, a million herrings for a single shark.” Paley, and most pre-Darwinian scientists, believed that the relationships among species were designed by God just as were their bodily characteristics. You can read more in the Egerton article [].

Darwin not only passed on these concepts of ecological complexity, but painstakingly counted the number of plant seedlings that emerged from a cleared plot of land, and how many of them died. John L. Harper described this as Darwin’s “preoccupation with numbers” in “A Darwinian approach to plant ecology” (1967). Most famously, Darwin linked the abundance of clover to that of house cats, via mice and bumblebees. His metaphor of the Entangled Bank depicted the impossibility of explaining all the ecological interactions. You might as well, he said, throw up a handful of feathers and try to predict where each would fall using only the laws of physics.

Alfred Russel [one L] Wallace found examples in his extensive travels that the world was not made for man’s benefit, for example birds of paradise that live in tropical mountains inaccessible to humans, and durian fruits which can kill people when they fall from the tree. Later in life, during his period of spiritualism, Wallace asserted that the world was made for man, a view ridiculed by (who else) Mark Twain.

Popular nature writing is still filled with pre-Darwinian views. Most people believe that flowers and pollinators help each other out, as a law of nature. But in a Darwinian view, flowers that can trick their pollinators into servicing them without having to provide any benefit might prevail, and pollinators will steal nectar if they can get away with it. Ecologists use terms such as “larcenous” insects and “deceptive” flowers.

And the idea that ecology must have been designed by God persists in creationist literature.

The Gaia hypothesis was not intended to be anti-Darwinian but invokes a planetary-level homeostasis that is difficult to reconcile with Darwinian natural selection. I concluded in 1992, “Thus ecologists are left with the question of whether the earth just happens to remain in apparent homeostasis, because of Darwinian natural selection acting on individuals, or whether the earth keeps itself in real homeostasis…” As I understand, this is still the case.

A Modest Proposal: How Trump and Musk Can Save the World from Global Warming

The only truly effective way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is for all of us to quit producing so much of it: buying less, traveling less. This is my personal solution. But never in all of human history have a large group of people ever cut back on consumption and waste, except recently in the European Union, and then only mildly.

Big-thinking engineers have offered high-tech, expensive, and risky solutions generally called geoengineering, that is, engineering the entire Earth. Two examples are huge carbon-absorption towers and spewing reflective particles into the stratosphere.

The huge towers would collectively breathe in the entire atmosphere, sponge the excess carbon dioxide out of it (leaving only what plants need for photosynthesis), and then exhale the neutralized atmosphere. Such towers, even if there could possibly be enough energy to run them, would have to be huge and incredibly numerous. Proponents of this type of geoengineering are not too clear about what to do with the waste products of these towers. The cost of this kind of project would start in the hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The other solution would be to inject hundreds of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it would produce a suspended white haze that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface. The particles could be released from a fleet of special aircraft. The everlasting gloom might be a small price to pay for release from global warming. This solution would actually not remove carbon from the atmosphere. No one is sure if the toxic particles might settle and pollute the entire planet. Once again, the cost would start at hundreds of billions of dollars and could reach a trillion.

The Trump II administration would clearly be unwilling to spend this kind of money to solve a problem they refuse to admit exists—global warming.

Unless.

If these geoengineering schemes could be proposed by companies owned by Elon Musk, then Trump would be willing to demand a trillion dollars for them, and Congress would not dare to say no. No amount of money is too much for the federal government to give to Musk. He already owns Space-X. All he would need to do is to produce another hundred thousand aircraft to release the sulfur.

Right now, Musk’s companies are losing money, largely because of the overwhelmingly negative image of Musk Himself. There may not be anything wrong with Teslas, as cars, but when half the world starts calling them Swasticars then the company will start to fail. But Musk’s rockets keep exploding also. So it is possible that Musk’s companies would be unable to competently carry out these geoengineering projects.

But that doesn’t matter. Musk does not need to build cars or rockets that actually work. His market is Donald Trump. Donald Trump can get Musk a trillion dollars of federal money, no problem. The cars and rockets themselves do not matter.

And if one of Musk’s aircrafts explodes, it is no matter, since this too would add reflective particles to the stratosphere.

What could possibly go wrong?

Conservative Christians already worship Donald Trump. Any arguments, in this blog or anywhere else, that addresses any other aspect of Christianity other than the Donald are a waste of time. These geoengineering projects would, moreover, demonstrate that the efforts of conservative Christians to worship Trump would prove to have been correct, for, in this way, Musk and Trump could literally save the world.

Gulf of America: Why Stop There?

It is usually scientists who have the right and responsibility to decide the scientific names of organisms, and in some cases the common names as well. For example, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Now International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants) gets to decide the rules for plant names and the International Code ofZoological Nomenclature for animal names. However, this is scientific convention, not law.

The new Trump Administration singlehandedly decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.” Trump has no legal authority to require this, although he can personally call it anything he wants. However, he has already excluded the Associated Press from press meetings because they continued to use “Gulf of Mexico”. He can, and presumably will, cancel funding for any recipient of federal funds or any government agency that uses the name Gulf of Mexico.

My upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, makes one unnecessary reference to the Gulf of Mexico. I am proofreading the final pages, and I will change this to simply “the gulf” since the meaning is clear: it is where the Mississippi pours its water. I will stand and fight some other time when it is more important.

But such a time might come sooner than later.

Consider the example of the giant sequoia tree. It is the species with the largest trees in the world, and they are trees of incomparable beauty. I have written, and continue to write, a lot about them, including in Forgotten Landscapes. After these trees were discovered in the nineteenth century, the British originally insisted the scientific name be Wellingtonia; Americans countered with Washingtonia. Finally the name that was used was Sequoiadendron giganteum, named after the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah who single-handedly invented the indigenous Cherokee writing system, which allowed the Cherokee tribe to, within decades, achieve the highest literacy rate in the world, in their own language. The common name is giant sequoia, and thus it has been known for over a century.

The Trump Administration, I do not doubt, considers Native Americans to be savages. Or, at least, to have been so in previous centuries. Would Donald Trump and Elon Musk tolerate a savage name for the biggest trees in the world? I can foresee that Trump might want the name changed to Trumpia muskii, or maybe Megalotrumpia muskii. Or maybe Musk, unabashed admirer of the old South African apartheid system, might want Apartheidia muskii. They might just let the common name be “giant redwoods” and let it go at that, because “Trump trees” sounds too silly even for them. I think.

Trump would have no authority to enforce a name change for the giant sequoia tree. But he might have at least provisional authority to require all government agencies to change the name to Megalotrumpia, and to cancel funding for any government project that refuses the name change. Any legal challenges to this would take years, and even then Trump could just ignore the court ruling.

Such a decision would profoundly affect my book, Forgotten Landscapes, not only because of its frequent references to giant sequoia trees but also because of its front-and-center defense of the non-savagery of Native Americans, who transformed the North American landscape by fire, hunting, agriculture, irrigation, and orchards. But by then the book will already be rolling off of the presses. Such a decision might even throw a spotlight on my book, which would mean publicity, probably positive. The only people who would agree with Trump on this matter are those who do not buy or read books. But, all the same, I would prefer my book to stand on its own merits.

At the present time, this essay is written in a spirit of humor rather than alarm. But if the Oval Office proclaims that the plague bacterium, now known as Yersinia pestis, be renamed Obamabacterium bidenii, don’t be totally blind-sided.