"Epistemic values of historical information in marine ecology and conservation"
J. Coston-Guarini
Supervised by: Laurent Chauvaud (CNRS, UMR 6539-LEMAR)
Defended successfully on 15 Dec 2016, with the felicitations du jury.
French national registration number: 2016BRES0124
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Abstract
Ecology is defined as a science that focuses on interactions between organisms and with their environment. Yet at a time when there is a critical need for globalized, shared information about the state of the biosphere, ecological sciences are still not been able to furnish adequate diagnostics or prognostics relevant for conservation decisions. Beyond the window-dressing of endangered species lists, biodiversity hotspots and occasional protected areas, there has been little concrete conceptual progress in recent decades. How did this situation arise?
The re-examination of the historical origins of ecology, nature protection movements, and the development of theoretical frameworks since the early 18th century revealed that ecology, like biology, has developed a scientific practice without fundamental and general scientific laws. For the better part of a century, ecology developed from observations compiled by individual ecologists tramping across the countryside of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, preservationist, conservation and protection movements wrote a myriad of regulations and legal descriptions attempting to govern the environment yet pre-dating ecological paradigms. It cannot be ignored that modern ecology and biology arose from a mixture of observations and philosophies concerned with explaining not only the purpose of life but also why "lower" organisms exist to serve humanity. In that sense, both nature protection and agriculture can be characterized as vast experiments in ecology, which began long before a science of ecology existed.
Today, under an operating principle that 'complexity cannot be the object of reductionism', ecology and biology try to advance based on formalizing integrated systems and phenomenological principles to describe their dynamics. This practice renders results vulnerable to both misinterpretation and manipulation (whether intentional or not) since conclusions are reached under strict ceteris paribus conditions. In other words, it is accepted as a scientific practice in ecology that results may not be either transposable or comparable. This situation has already had adverse implications for society's demands on ecology because it weakens the value of information provided in legal contexts about everything from effects of climate change and the conservation of species to how we assess the impacts of human activities on the environment. And it also concerns how new fields like synthetic biology and synthetic ecology, or the uncontrolled genetic manipulation of living organisms in their environment through biotechnology (e.g. the CRISPR debates) can apprehend the consequences of their experiments.
Historical ecology offers a means to reconsider past decisions and to delve deeper into the foundational concepts of ecology and the conditions in which they arose. Ecological theory has drawn on and continues to draw on a set of deeply interconnected ideas in science, religion, philosophy and economics for its epistemological development. To understand how earlier historical context affects the science of ecology that is practiced today, the central objects of ecology and theories describing population variations are re-examined using both reconstruction and recursive analyses during this project.