Ecology: The Biology of Interaction. I-02. History of Ecology
There is a view that ecology as a science might have been born at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century, owing to the work of Antoine Lavoisier. In 1792, Lavoisier presented a report «The Cycle of Elements on the Surface of the Globe», in which he described the carbon cycle and laid the conceptual groundwork for three functional groups of organisms (later termed producers, consumers, and decomposers).
I-2. History of Ecology
A monkey that was unable to accurately assess the branch onto which it intended to leap does not belong to our ancestry.
George Gaylord Simpson
Humankind’s ecological knowledge is the most ancient of all, rooted in its evolutionary history. Homo sapiens emerged as a generalist hunter-gatherer of the African savannas. Innate and acquired knowledge of the properties of surrounding organisms was an indispensable condition for survival. The earliest cultural monuments (beginning with the Egyptian “Pyramid Texts,” more than four thousand years old) contain a wealth of ecological facts relevant to human interaction with diverse organisms. For instance, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (ca. sixth century BCE) record information on the way of life, reproduction, seasonal characteristics, and behaviour of approximately fifty animal species.
With the emergence of biology as a discipline (in European culture, from Aristotle in the fourth century BCE and Theophrastus in the third century BCE), ecological knowledge began to accumulate within its framework. Aristotle clearly posed the central problem of biology — the problem of purposiveness. Recognising that the structure of a fin reflects the properties of water and the structure of a wing reflects those of air, Aristotle considered organisms in their relationship with their environment — that is, ecologically. It should be noted that the problem of biological purposiveness has not yet received an exhaustive resolution in modern science.
The first ecological experiment was conducted by the chemist Robert Boyle in 1670, when he studied the effects of low pressure on various animals. The first ecological regularity expressed in quantitative form belongs to the physicist René Réaumur, who established in 1735 that the sum of mean daily shade temperatures is constant for each seasonal period in the life of many plant species. The dissertations of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) were devoted to problems now classified as ecological (“The Economy of Nature,” 1749, and “The Polity of Nature,” 1760). Linnaeus proposed the idea that the survival of some organisms is made possible by the death of others. He was also the first to organise systematic phenological observations.
A substantial body of ecological facts was collected by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (in his thirteen-volume “Natural History,” 1749–1769), Peter Simon Pallas (“Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica,” early nineteenth century), and other naturalists.
There is a view that ecology as a science might have been born at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century, owing to the work of Antoine Lavoisier. In 1792, Lavoisier presented a report “The Cycle of Elements on the Surface of the Globe,” in which he described the carbon cycle and laid the conceptual groundwork for three functional groups of organisms (later termed producers, consumers, and decomposers). The Great French Revolution sent Lavoisier to the guillotine not for counter-revolutionary activity, but because he belonged to a particular social stratum. (“The Revolution has no need of scientists, citizen!” — these words are attributed to the man who dispatched Lavoisier to the guillotine in the name of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.)
The name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is associated with the development of the theory of adaptation. Lamarck introduced the concept of the biosphere as the ultimate product of living organisms transforming inorganic matter. Alexander von Humboldt laid, in the mid-nineteenth century, the foundations of the doctrine of geographic zonality and life forms. He made an unparalleled attempt to construct a unified scientific picture of the cosmos in his multi-volume work “Kosmos.” The name of Karl Ernst von Baer (apart from his embryological achievements) is associated with the development of the theory of fish population dynamics, while Thomas Malthus’s work “An Essay on the Principle of Population” marked the beginning of the study of population and resource dynamics, and even contributed to the discovery of the idea of natural selection.
Karl Roulier, a professor at Moscow University, came very close to founding ecology as a discipline. His understanding of the nature and objectives of ecology was remarkably similar to the modern conception, yet Roulier lacked the authority of Haeckel and, unlike Haeckel, did not propose a term that could serve as a “brand.”
“No organic being lives by itself; each is called into existence and lives only insofar as it stands in relation to a world that is relatively external to it” (K.F. Roulier, 1850).
When assessing this quotation, particular attention should be paid to the word “relatively.” Having taken a first step towards appreciating the importance of the organism’s relationship with its environment, Roulier already had in mind the next step of cognition — one requiring an understanding of the indissoluble unity of the organism and the external world.
Of paramount importance to ecology were the works of Charles Darwin: “The Voyage of the Beagle” (1839), “On the Origin of Species” (1859), and his ecological studies on earthworms, the pollination of orchids, and insectivorous plants. Darwinism prompted a reinterpretation of all biological data and offered a highly persuasive resolution of the age-old problem of purposiveness. The theory of evolution stimulated the development of all the biological sciences by providing the possibility of a causal-historical explanation of observed phenomena. One of the first responses to this scientific revolution was Ernst Haeckel’s attempt to rewrite all of biology from scratch. In his work “Generelle Morphologie der Organismen” (1866), he attempted to divide biology into branches and assign a specific task to each. It was in this work that the concept of ecology was introduced.
Edward Suess in 1875 employed the term “biosphere” for the second time (after Lamarck) in his work on the geological structure of the Alps. Karl Möbius in 1877, using the example of oyster banks, discovered the existence of biocenoses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevsky pioneered paleoecological research, while Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev laid the foundations of soil science, elaborated the concept of soil-forming factors, and proposed a classification of soils. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky created biogeochemistry, describing the planetary significance of living matter.
During the 1930s, the Soviet school of ecology enjoyed considerable international prestige. Vladimir Vladimirovich Stanchinsky came very close to substantiating the concept of the ecosystem. The Soviet leadership destroyed the nature conservation movement within ecology (which was accused of protecting nature from the people!). Stanchinsky was arrested twice and died in prison in 1942. During the period of dominance of the ideas promoted by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, many ecological facts were ideologically distorted (for instance, Lysenko denied intraspecific competition, drawing a parallel between the relationships among individuals within a population and those among people belonging to the same social class).
The concept of the ecosystem was introduced in 1935 by Arthur Tansley, and that of the biogeocenosis in 1944 by Vladimir Nikolaevich Sukachev. The concept of the ecological niche was developed by Charles Elton and George Hutchinson. The development of mathematical models of population growth is associated with the work of Raymond Pearl, who rediscovered the logistic equation proposed in 1838 by the Belgian mathematician P.F. Verhulst, as well as with the ideas of Alfred James Lotka and Vito Volterra (1860–1940).
It is sometimes maintained that mathematical biology has its origins in Volterra’s work “Lezioni sulla teoria matematica della lotta per la vita” (“Mathematical Theory of the Struggle for Existence”), published in 1931. Volterra was a distinguished Italian mathematician and a committed anti-fascist: of all Italian senators, he was the only one who voted against the transfer of power to Benito Mussolini. Because Volterra refused to collaborate with the fascist regime, he was severely restricted in his scholarly activities and emigrated to France.
Widespread renown was achieved by the competitive exclusion principle, proposed by the young Moscow biologist Georgii Frantsevich Gause as a result of his experiments with protozoans (ciliates).
One of the achievements of recent decades is the formulation in the 1970s, by the British chemist James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis, of the Gaia hypothesis, which regards the entire Earth as a self-regulating system.
The end of the twentieth century became a period of widespread introduction of mathematical modelling into ecology.
“The ‘omnipotent’ computer in a number of cases has not improved but rather worsened the situation, because it has become <...> the cause of a ‘computer opium in ecology’ — that is, the loss by ecologists of intuition in assessing ecological regularities of nature, and an obvious overestimation of the possibilities of their mathematical description. All this has led to the creation of the appearance of ‘big science’ where none exists” (M.B. Mirkin, L.G. Naumova, 2005).
Disillusionment with the search for universal “laws of ecology” analogous to those of physics has led to more thorough study of individual biosystems. It has become clear that the particular features of each complex biosystem are not an unfortunate impediment obscuring its true essence, but rather a reflection of a fundamental property of life: the uniqueness of its constituent units.