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Indexically Structured Ecological Communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
Ecological communities are seldom, if ever, biological individuals. They lack causal boundaries as the populations that constitute communities are not congruent and rarely have persistent functional roles regulating the communities’ higher-level properties. Instead we should represent ecological communities indexically, by identifying ecological communities via the network of weak causal interactions between populations that unfurl from a starting set of populations. This precisification of ecological communities helps identify how community properties remain invariant, and why they have robust characteristics. This respects the diversity and aggregational nature of these complex systems while still vindicating them as units worthy of investigation.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association
Footnotes
Thanks to Justin Bruner, Carl Brusse, John Matthewson, Roberta Millstein, Jay Odenbaugh, Ron Planer, Kim Sterelny, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article.
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