Yes! There are Resilient Generalizations (or “Laws”) in Ecology

Abstract

It is often argued that ecological communities admit of no useful generalizations or "laws" because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. Detractors respond that this argument assumes an overly stringent definition of laws of nature. Under a more relaxed conception, it is argued that ecological laws emerge at the level of communities and elsewhere. A brief review of this debate reveals an issue with deep philosophical roots that is unlikely to be resolved by a better understanding of generalizations in ecology. We therefore propose a strategy for transforming the conceptual question about the nature of ecological laws into a set of empirically tractable hypotheses about the relative re- silience of ecological generalizations across three dimensions: taxonomy, habitat type, and scale. These hypotheses are tested using a survey of 240 meta-analyses in ecology. Our central finding is that generalizations in community ecology are just as prevalent and as resilient as those in population or ecosystem ecology. These findings should help to establish community ecology as a generality-seeking science as opposed to a science of case studies. It also supports the capacity for ecologists, working at any of the three levels, to inform matters of public policy.

Generality and Causal Interdependence in Ecology

“…This line of the debate continues to the present, with increasingly refined (but arguably more relevant and useful) conceptualizations of "general laws" (Colyvan and Ginzburg 2003;Linquist et al 2016). …”

Indexically Structured Ecological Communities

“…The robustness of the causal structure of populations allows for us to explain how system-level properties are produced. It provides a bridge between the study of single populations and the resilient generalizations in community ecology catalogued by Linquist et al (2016). To explain how the assemblage produces a particular system-level property, be it the resilience of community composition or a community output like fire likelihood, we need to identify which counterfactual interventions affect that systemlevel property.…”

“…2 The implication is that ecological communities are largely ephemeral compositions of populations. This debate drives considerations whether there are law-like regularities in community ecology (see Lawton 1999;Linquist et al 2016). If ecological communities have shared properties, then we can make robust generalizable inferences about how they act.…”

Laws in Ecology: Diverse Modes of Explanation for a Holistic Science

“…A quantitative study along these lines has in fact recently appeared: Linquist et al. () analyzed the prevalence of “resilient generalizations” in ecology by comparing published meta‐analyses concerning the three areas of population, community, and ecosystem studies. Statistically significant effects were registered in around eighty percent of the 187 meta‐analyses used, and the finding that average sample sizes, numbers of taxa, and numbers of biomes were broadly similar was taken to indicate comparable levels of generality for candidate laws in the three areas of ecology.…”