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  • 10 - The Species–Area Relationship: Idiosyncratic or Produced by ‘Laws Acting around Us’?

  • from Part III - Theoretical Advances in Species–Area Relationship Research
  • Edited by Thomas J. Matthews, University of Birmingham, Kostas A. Triantis, Robert J. Whittaker, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Species–Area Relationship
    Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 March 2021, pp 227-258

  • Summary

    Ecologists generally hold out hope that a unified understanding of ecosystems is possible because, in Darwin’s words, they are governed by 'laws acting around us'. But at the same time, ecologists take delight in the idiosyncrasies of nature, in the features that are unique to an organism or an ecosystem, in the phenomena that resist general theory. Sometimes this duality leads particularists to condemn the search for laws and universal theory and theorists to denigrate natural history as stamp collecting. Such conflicts are foolish. Here I demonstrate that the search to understand the species–area relationship (SAR) and the other patterns studied by macroecologists as well, exemplify how a well-defined boundary can be drawn between two legitimate domains: the phenomena that are unified by theory and those that are idiosyncratic.