Naturalists, Natural History, and the Nature of Biological Diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this essay, I argue that natural history--observing the natural world and deciphering its patterns--is as essential today as it was during Darwin's lifetime to the continuing development of ecology and evolutionary biology. This tradition, which I illustrate through the example of E. O. Wilson's discovery of the taxon cycle 50 years ago, is still very much alive, but there is a growing tendency for observation to serve theory rather provide new insight or to test the predictions of theory. This tendency manifests itself in the failure of ideas about the diversity, distribution, and abundance of species to be informed by patterns in nature that are readily apparent. On the one hand, supporters of neutral theory have sidestepped the unrealistically slow dynamics of random processes in large metacommunities, and they have failed to note global correlations in species numbers and population sizes within taxa. On the other hand, proponents of niche theory have disregarded the implications of variation in distribution and abundance among close relatives, which implies population regulation largely by species-specific agents, such as pathogens. Nor has community niche theory addressed the independence of distribution and abundance with respect to number of close relatives (and presumed competitors). The diversity, abundances, and distributions of species represent the unfolding of many processes over a historically and geographically contingent landscape, for which experimental methods of scientific inquiry are poorly suited. To interpret patterns of diversity, we must continue to depend on inductive reasoning inspired by the data of natural history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".