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Complex Systems, Trade-Offs, and Theoretical Population Biology: Richard Levin's “Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jay Odenbaugh
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Abstract

Ecologist Richard Levins argues population biologists must trade-off the generality, realism, and precision of their models since biological systems are complex and our limitations are severe. Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober argue that there are cases where these model properties cannot be varied independently of one another. If this is correct, then Levins's thesis that there is a necessary trade-off between generality, precision, and realism in mathematical models in biology is false. I argue that Orzack and Sober's arguments fail since Levins's thesis concerns the pragmatic features of model building not just the formal properties of models.

Type
Models and Modeling
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 70 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2003 , pp. 1496 - 1507
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I thank Marc Ereshefsky, Elaine Landry, Ed McCauley, Bill Nelson, Steven Orzack, Alex Rueger, and Bill Wimsatt for useful discussion and/or comments on earlier versions of this paper. Likewise, I thank the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Indiana University and the Philosophy Departments at the University of Western Ontario and UCSD for useful discussions.

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