The organic in ecology

Rober E. Ulanowicz

Resumen


Organicism, or the analogy by which various organized living communities are likened to individual discrete organisms, is rejected in many quarters by those who object to the notion of a larger entity forcing the behavior of its smaller constituents. The connections one may draw from organicism to vitalism and oppressive social regimes are all too obvious and unsavory. It is conceivable, however, that organic behavior may exist independently of the nearly deterministic confines of ontogeny. In ecosystems, for example, the configuration of processes among the community appears to influence the fates and behaviors of component populations in a non-deterministic fashion. Popper’s generalization of deterministic forces as “propensities,” when coupled with the notion of autocatalyic feedback, leads to a wholly natural and quantitative description of such organic behavior. There even exists a perspective from which the organic metaphor for living phenomena satisfies Occam’s criterion for simplicity better than the prevailing mechanistic metaphor for evolution. Judiciously reconstituted, organicism affords a highly useful and acceptable natural framework to help guide the scientific investigation of living systems.

 

Key words: Autocatalysis, causality, contingency, development, ecosystem, evolution, feedback, neo-Darwinism, Newtonianism, Occam’s razor, organicism, organization, propensities, stochasticism.

 


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Referencias


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