745
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_82
Chapter 82
Shifting Balance
82.1 Multiple Scales Within Evolution
“The resilience of nature”: Hundreds of millions of loopholes, pitfalls, gap analysis
intimating any number of null-hypotheses. It begins in differing contexts, such as
P. J. den Boer’s classic 1968 paper treating of the “spreading of risk” in evolution;
“the statistical outcome of selection varying from generation to generation within a
heterogeneous population”
1
. The larger point, for our purposes, combines such data
on local populations as the discovery by G. F. Edmunds and D. N. Alstad in 1978
that a single but entire population of black pineleaf scale existed “on a single ponderosa pine tree…”
2
. The implications become immediately clear with massive conflagrations and their consequences for local populations, as in the case of the
Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. But also in terms of shifting focus from a sylvan
glen to a single tree in a biodiverse-rich setting like Yasuní National Park, wherein
a single tree becomes the host of multiple, endemic generations of populations. It
not only changes our perception but our deliberations regarding the critical legal
standing of a single tree.
Other relevant mathematical “shifting balance” examples—the curious case of
differing mouse genomes within adjoining mouse communities living within barns
on a farm; even among separate mouse families within a single barn—were brought
into focus with respect to the realization that a “multipartite population in a multipartite environment is also genetically multipartite”
3
. In such instances—and they
likely span the full hypergamut of earth’s biodiversity—the identities, robustness,
and simultaneous vulnerability of small groups in evolving patterns within fixed
1 Cited on p. 260 of The Ecological Web – More on the Distribution and Abundance of Animals, by
H. G. Andrewartha and L. C. Birch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois 1984.
2 See Edmunds and Alstad, “Coevolution in insect herbivores and conifers, Science 1999:941–45.
P. 261, cited in Andrewartha and Birch, ibid., pp. 261, 472.
3 ibid., Edmunds and Alstad, p. 262.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_82
Chapter 82
Shifting Balance
82.1 Multiple Scales Within Evolution
“The resilience of nature”: Hundreds of millions of loopholes, pitfalls, gap analysis
intimating any number of null-hypotheses. It begins in differing contexts, such as
P. J. den Boer’s classic 1968 paper treating of the “spreading of risk” in evolution;
“the statistical outcome of selection varying from generation to generation within a
heterogeneous population”
1
. The larger point, for our purposes, combines such data
on local populations as the discovery by G. F. Edmunds and D. N. Alstad in 1978
that a single but entire population of black pineleaf scale existed “on a single ponderosa pine tree…”
2
. The implications become immediately clear with massive conflagrations and their consequences for local populations, as in the case of the
Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. But also in terms of shifting focus from a sylvan
glen to a single tree in a biodiverse-rich setting like Yasuní National Park, wherein
a single tree becomes the host of multiple, endemic generations of populations. It
not only changes our perception but our deliberations regarding the critical legal
standing of a single tree.
Other relevant mathematical “shifting balance” examples—the curious case of
differing mouse genomes within adjoining mouse communities living within barns
on a farm; even among separate mouse families within a single barn—were brought
into focus with respect to the realization that a “multipartite population in a multipartite environment is also genetically multipartite”
3
. In such instances—and they
likely span the full hypergamut of earth’s biodiversity—the identities, robustness,
and simultaneous vulnerability of small groups in evolving patterns within fixed
1 Cited on p. 260 of The Ecological Web – More on the Distribution and Abundance of Animals, by
H. G. Andrewartha and L. C. Birch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois 1984.
2 See Edmunds and Alstad, “Coevolution in insect herbivores and conifers, Science 1999:941–45.
P. 261, cited in Andrewartha and Birch, ibid., pp. 261, 472.
3 ibid., Edmunds and Alstad, p. 262.