Ecology

Philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to ecology (compared to other areas of biology like evolution and genetics), but ecology poses many interesting foundational and methodological problems. For example, the problems of clarifying the differences and causal connections between the various levels of the ecological hierarchy (organism, population, community, ecosystem…); the issue of how central evolutionary biology is to ecology; long-standing issues concerning the extent to which the domain of ecology is more law-governed or more a matter of historical contingency, and the related question of whether ecologists should rely more on laboratory/manipulative versus field/comparative methods of investigation.