Open AccessThe Question That Launched My Career
Author(s) -
Menge Duncan N. L.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the bulletin of the ecological society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2327-6096
pISSN - 0012-9623
DOI - 10.1890/0012-9623-95.3.218
Subject(s) - variety (cybernetics) , excellence , set (abstract data type) , ecology , epistemology , sociology , computer science , biology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , programming language
Excellent questions are rare commodities. Take, for instance, one of the questions that fascinated Hutchinson (1961): “Why do so many species co-exist?” Approximately 42,042,042,042 papers have been written on this question, so it has clearly fascinated a lot of people. What makes it excellent? Excellence is subjective, of course, but I posit that there are three keys. (1) The empirical pattern is clear and general: Many species do, in fact, co-exist in most ecosystems. (2) It is counter-intuitive, and thus fascinating: Competitive exclusion (Hardin 1960) is one of the oldest and most pervasive principles of ecology, and should limit the number of coexisting species to well below what we actually see. (3) The set of mechanistic explanations to resolve this question (e.g., Chesson 2000) is large, and crosses boundaries of discipline and scale: No single explanation is ubiquitous, and a variety of people can contribute. This makes it a hard question to answer in full, and thus one that has remained interesting for a long time.