Abstract
Sean B. Carroll’s new book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why it Matters, is a well-written mix of history of science and philosophy of biology. In his book, Carroll articulates a set of ecological generalisations, the Serengeti Rules, which are supposed to make salient the structures in ecosystems that ensure the persistence of those ecosystems. In this essay review, I evaluate Carroll’s use of the controversial concept of regulation and his thesis that ecosystems have a natural balance comparable to that of human bodies. My conclusion is optimistic. Carroll’s generalisations provide a tool-kit for building relatively simple models that are accurate enough to be widely applied in experimental ecology and conservation science, guiding interventions upon unhealthy ecosystems.
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Notes
It is also very obvious in organisms from the Cambrian period, such as Sanctacaris and Opabinia regalis. The Cambrian explosion demonstrates why we would build our artificial organisms with the principle of modularity in mind—modularity increases evolvability (for a discussion of evolvability see Sterelny 2007).
Of course, it is not without some notable exceptions, like metamorphosis and pregnancy, in which organisms undergo rather dramatic internal changes.
Carroll actually calls it “double-negative logic.” Although the term make sense in light of EFMB, in which Carroll makes extended use of such terms, I think the reference to logic is a little misleading in this context, so will avoid using it.
This is not the first time someone has attempted to articulate a set of ecological rules that were, in many ways, not properly rule-like. In 1975, Jared Diamond proposed his “assembly rules,” which caused a great-deal of controversy (see Sanderson and Pimm 2016). It’s somewhat strange that Carroll doesn’t mention Diamond’s work, especially since he has written popular books on similar topics (e.g. Diamond 2005).
Number of links alone is not likely to be a good measure of species influence (Maclaurin and Sterelny 2008: Box 6.1).
As Carroll shows, the truth behind this myth is far worse.
Of course, it’s possible that these random walks to extinction may happen over timescales that are to us imperceptible. Furthermore, a recent large-scale study of different ecosystems across the planet revealed that species go extinct fairly frequently (Dornelas et al. 2014). Of course, humans have undoubtedly played a role in this, but other factors like periodic climatic variation may be disruptive enough to produce similar effects.
What is internal and what is external to an ecosystem is not a simple matter (see Lean and Sterelny forthcoming).
We need not commit to the full semantic view or even a strong version of it restricted to this or that specific science. Instead, we could just adopt the deflationary version of this view (Downes 1992), simply acknowledging that models are central to scientific progress.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kim Sterelny, Christoper Lean, and all those who attended the 2016 Sydney-ANU Philosophy of Biology Meeting at Bundanoon for your valuable comments. Funding was provided by Australian Research Council (Grant No. ARC FL13).
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Walmsley, L.D. Mother nature kicks back: review of Sean B. Carroll’s 2016 The Serengeti Rules . Biol Philos 32, 133–146 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9549-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-016-9549-8