Does God roll dice? Neutrality and determinism in evolutionary ecology

Ale, Som B.; Halloway, Abdel H.; Mitchell, William A.; Whelan, Christopher J.

doi:10.1007/s10539-018-9657-8

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Neutrality alone is not the neutralists's starting point, first, because it is not a process, and second, because neutralists are far more inclined to relax neutrality before they remove drift, immigration, or speciation from their theory or models. Granting their strong Lakatosianism (which both Lloyd's and this paper implicitly challenge),Ale (2019) and colleagues crucially misidentify the "hard core" of the neutrality program as neutrality and their argument for neutralism being a degenerate program fails because of it. SeeBausman (2019) for the extended version of this argument.6 The history of neutral theorizing and modeling in ecology is complicated and somewhat controversial.…”

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confidence: 85%

The Role of Starting Points to Order Investigation: Why and How to Enrich the Logic of Research Questions

Bausman

2022

Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology

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What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd’s Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the researchers ask and causal factors they consider. She uses the Logic of Research Questions Framework to criticize adaptationist programs in evolutionary biology for dogmatically assuming selection explanations of the traits of organisms. I argue that Lloyd’s general criticism of methodological adaptationism is an artefact of the impoverished LRQ. My Ordered Factors Proposal extends the LRQ to characterize approaches with sequences of questions and factors. I highlight the importance that ordering one’s investigation plays in approaches at the level of adaptationism by analyzing two research programs in community ecology: competitionists and neutralists. Competitionists and neutralists take opposed starting points and use explanatory and developmental heuristics to consider more factors in due time. On the Ordered Factors Proposal, these approaches are not only the ecological factors they are open to considering but also the order in which they will consider them. My disagreement with Lloyd’s over how to characterize methodological approaches reflects different views about methodological monism and pluralism.

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confidence: 85%

The Role of Starting Points to Order Investigation: Why and How to Enrich the Logic of Research Questions

Bausman

2022

Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology

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“…As in nature, these different cancer species fill different ecological niches. 16 - 18 In this regards, the niche of a cancer species is the set of environmental conditions within a tumor under which it can proliferate and successfully persist.…”

Section: Useful Concepts and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cancer Community Ecology

Kotler

Brown

2020

Cancer Control

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Here we advocate Cancer Community Ecology as a valuable focus of study in Cancer Biology. We hypothesize that the heterogeneity and characteristics of cancer cells within tumors should vary systematically in space and time and that cancer cells form local ecological communities within tumors. These communities possess limited numbers of species determined by local conditions, with each species in a community possessing predictable traits that enable them to cope with their particular environment and coexist with each other. We start with a discussion of concepts and assumptions that ecologists use to study closely related species. We then discuss the competitive exclusion principle as a means for knowing when two species should not coexist, and as an opening towards understanding how they can. We present the five major categories of mechanisms of coexistence that operate in nature and suggest that the same mechanisms apply towards understanding the diversification and coexistence of cancer cell species. They are: Food-Safety Tradeoffs, Diet Choice, Habitat Selection, Variance Partitioning, and Competition-Colonization Tradeoffs. For each mechanism, we discuss how it works in nature, how it might work in cancers, and its implications for therapy.

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“…Recently, some ecologists even argued for why Neutral Theory is at the center of a degenerate Lakatosian research programme while Competition Theory's programme is progressive (Ale et al 2019).…”

Section: Others Focus On the Conflict Between What Neutral Theory Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See (Bausman 2019) for the expanded version of this argument. 5 A recent paper argues that the Neutralist research programme is degenerate (Ale et al 2019). Beyond uncritically using Lakatos' view, the authors misidentify the hard core of the neutralist programme as the neutrality assumption.…”

Section: Forth Having Accepted That the Tension Arises From The Relamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Aims and Structures of Ecological Research Programs

Bausman¹

2019

Philosophical Topics

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Neutral Theory is controversial in ecology. Ecologists and philosophers have diagnosed the source of the controversy as: its false assumption that individuals in different species within the same trophic level are ecologically equivalent, its conflict with Competition Theory and the adaptation of species, its role as a null hypothesis, and as a Lakatosian research programme. In this paper, I show why we should instead understand the conflict at the level of research programs which involve more than theory. The Neutralist and Competitionist research programs borrow and construct theories, models, and experiments for various aims and given their home ecological systems. I present a holistic and pragmatic view of the controversy that foregrounds the interrelation between many kinds of practices and decisions in ecological research.

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Does God roll dice? Neutrality and determinism in evolutionary ecology

Cited by 5 publications

References 76 publications

The Role of Starting Points to Order Investigation: Why and How to Enrich the Logic of Research Questions

The Role of Starting Points to Order Investigation: Why and How to Enrich the Logic of Research Questions

Cancer Community Ecology

The Aims and Structures of Ecological Research Programs

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