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Causal and Mechanistic Explanations in Ecology

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Abstract

How are scientific explanations possible in ecology, given that there do not appear to be many—if any—ecological laws? To answer this question, I present and defend an account of scientific causal explanation in which ecological generalizations are explanatory if they are invariant rather than lawlike. An invariant generalization continues to hold or be valid under a special change—called an intervention—that changes the value of its variables. According to this account, causes are difference-makers that can be intervened upon to manipulate or control their effects. I apply the account to ecological generalizations to show that invariance under interventions as a criterion of explanatory relevance provides interesting interpretations for the explanatory status of many ecological generalizations. Thus, I argue that there could be causal explanations in ecology by generalizations that are not, in a strict sense, laws. I also address the issue of mechanistic explanations in ecology by arguing that invariance and modularity constitute such explanations.

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Notes

  1. The account is also called the manipulationist account, although interventionist account is a better name for it. The term manipulation seems to be associated with the idea that there is an agent carrying out the intervention. However, any process that fulfills the criteria discussed in Sect. 2 counts as an intervention, regardless of whether it is based on the agency or the activities of humans. For instance, there are natural experiments in which the interventions are those of nature, not of experimenters. In other words, “intervention” is not only broader in scope as a term than “manipulation,” but also it is a more accurate term. Finally, with the name “interventionist,” I want to distance Woodward’s non-reductive account of causal explanation from reductive accounts of causation that are called manipulationist accounts.

  2. Of course, stability does not depend only on the number, but likewise on the nature of the background conditions. There are background conditions to which some generalizations (or rather regularities) are very sensitive to in their holding, whereas other conditions have milder impacts on their holding. Likewise, in certain sciences and disciplines certain background conditions are deemed as more important than others.

  3. According to the intraspecific pattern of abundance and distribution, abundance is highest at the center of each species’ range and declines gradually and usually symmetrically toward the boundaries. According to the interspecific pattern of abundance and distribution, the abundant species tend to be widely distributed, while the rare species tend to have restricted ranges. The canonical distribution of abundances of species (also known as the approximately lognormal distribution of abundances of coexisting species, the canonical distribution of commonness and rarity, the distribution of abundance among species, and Preston’s lognormal distribution) claims that there are more moderately rare species than moderately common ones. In other words, ecological communities contain many relatively rare species and only a few very abundant ones. Finally, according to the hollow curve (also known as the distribution of range sizes among species), there is a right-skewed species range size distribution, that is, most species have moderate to small range sizes and only a few have large range sizes.

  4. I have omitted error terms that represent variation in the dependent variable, owing to other possible independent variables and measurement errors in the independent variable.

  5. In particular I have argued against recent views that regard allometries and scaling laws as representing biological laws. Although allometries and scaling laws appear to be generalizations applying to many taxa, they are neither universal nor exceptionless. In fact there appear to be exceptions to all of them. Nor are the constants in allometries and scaling laws truly constant, stable, or universal in character, but vary in value across different taxa and background conditions. Moreover, these equations represent evolutionary contingent generalizations, which threaten their lawlike status.

  6. See, for instance, Brown (1995: 119–187), Gaston (1996), Blackburn et al. (1999: 170–172), and Ashton et al. (2000: 406–410).

  7. Now, it is true that, for instance, Stuart Glennan (2005) and Carl F. Craver (2007: 107–162) have in their more recent and revised definitions of mechanisms, also defended “Woodwardian” definitions of mechanisms as I do below by emphasizing that the behavior of components of mechanisms should be describable by invariant generalizations. However, neither Glennan nor Craver have defended Woodward’s modularity condition and neither of them discuss mechanistic explanations in the context of ecology as I do here. However, there is one paper that discusses mechanisms in ecology as well as their modularity, namely, Viorel Pâslaru’s (2009). Pâslaru claims that Woodward’s definition of mechanisms (to be defended in this section) is not sufficient for ecologists. Instead, he suggests, ecologists seek something similar to the definition of Machamer et al. (2000) as the correct description of their mechanisms. This observation may be correct. However, there is one problem in Pâslaru’s paper. Pâslaru also seems to confuse the description or definition of mechanisms (and/or the fact that mechanistic explanations need to be “anchored” in entities, activities, and their organization) with the normative account of mechanistic explanation. The latter is discussed here, not the former.

  8. By constitutive explanations I refer to explanations of property instantiations in which an explanation of a property of a system is given by its underlying nature. An example is an explanation of solubility of salt by reference to its molecular structure in which the latter explains and determines non-causally but asymmetrically the former. Anatomy and histology are biological disciplines that are looking for constitutive explanations. Although in the case of constitutive explanations, there is a determination relation between “macro” and “micro” properties of a system, this determination relation is different from causal determination relation. Constitutive relations are synchronic and componentially related to their phenomena-to-be-explained, whereas causal relations are diachronic and non-componentially related to their phenomena-to-be-explained.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported financially by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation. I am grateful to Markus Eronen, Petri Ylikoski, and referees for this journal that provided helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40 A), 00014, University of Helsinki, Finland

    Jani Raerinne

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Raerinne, J. Causal and Mechanistic Explanations in Ecology. Acta Biotheor 59, 251–271 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-010-9122-9

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