Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some ideas about nature owe more to our historical beliefs than to current theories or data. Because nature has been seen as an expression of the mind of the divine, it is particularly prone to be interpreted in light of prior beliefs. As it was once a heresy to suggest that the earth circles the sun, so in many quarters it is still taboo to suggest that the natural state of our global ecosystem is not one of stability. We will argue that this belief is something rooted more in our religious past than in our scientific present. Adopting a common usage of the term “biodiversity” to mean the total number of species in an area, we address Darwin's ideas on biodiversity and the claims of modern interpreters of the fossil record. We claim that these ideas are influenced by older prescientific concepts regarding the bounty and balance of nature. Darwin firmly rejected the idea that the existence of particular identities of species was fixed. He claimed that species went extinct and others came into being. Yet, Darwin and modern authors have interpreted the fossil record as supporting the hypothesis that the total number of species will reach an equilibrium value. We shall demonstrate that the basis of this claim, and a similar claim presented by modern authors, is weak. This emphasis on equilibrium interpretations may be due to an idea prevalent in the seventeenth century regarding the state of nature.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".