Evolution into ecology? The strategy of warming's ecological plant geography

✍ Scribed by William Coleman

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 896 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5010
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00138875

✦ Synopsis

From an ecological point of view, probably the major feature of Darwin's account of natural selection is the critical shift of perspective that marked his work after 1856. Having discovered the intimate connection between population pressure and species multiplication or divergence, Darwin moved the emphasis of his argument toward biotic factors and away from abiotic factors in evolutionary change. There remains, however, a widespread presumption that the Darwinian scheme was intrinsically ecological and that ecology, after prolonged gestation, was brought forth in the image of its perhaps inadvertent sire, Charles Darwin.

I too begin with Darwin, but only in order to define a problem domain; my principal subject is the ecological reasoning of the influential Danish botanist Eugenius Warming. My focus is the strategy of Warming's all-important assessment of what he in 1895-1896 began to call "ecological plant geography." In the course of the discussion I offer the suggestion that Darwin's formulation of natural selection diminished his influence on the development of concrete, empirical ecological inquiry.

Darwin's mature conception of natural selection appears to have been bought at a high price. Both the basic notion of descent with modification and the outlines of an explanatory mechanism of descent (namely, natural selection) were in Darwin's hands by 1840. But natural selection was not a static concept. From the outset D~ used it to explain adaptation, the adjustment and continuing readjustment of plant and animal forms to a changing, abiofic environment. The late Dov Ospovat has shown us that Darwin long held the view that natural selection molded the biological species to changing environmental conditions, the latter in turn being caused by incessant climatic and geological changes. 1