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Indexically Structured Ecological Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Christopher Hunter Lean
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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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Type
Research Article
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 501 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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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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