3 What If Ecological Communities Are Not Wholes?

摘要

There seems to be an assumption that ecological communities~1 are wholes. The assumption is that networks of or ecological interactions among populations and among individual organisms arrange themselves into what Odenbaugh (2007) calls "Hutchinsonian Communities": "group[s] of species that at least weakly interact with one another and not others at a time and through time."~2 Communities are thus supposed to be "more or less closed network[s] of interacting populations" (Sterelny 2006).3 This chapter addresses the question How important to community ecology is the assumption that ecological communities are wholes?