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Planktonic biodiversity: Scaling up and down
Author(s) -
Kerfoot W Charles.,
Mittelbach Gary G.,
Hairston, Nelson G.,
Elser James J.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
limnology and oceanography
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 197
eISSN - 1939-5590
pISSN - 0024-3590
DOI - 10.4319/lo.2004.49.4_part_2.1225
Subject(s) - jargon , nature versus nurture , biosphere , discipline , ecology , epistemology , philosophy of science , sociology , environmental ethics , cognitive science , psychology , biology , social science , philosophy , linguistics , anthropology
In 2001, Simon Levin remarked at a National Science Foundation meeting on biocomplexity that scientific disciplines are belief systems that progressively nurture memes by establishment of societies and journals (a meme being a unit of intellectual or cultural information—a key idea—that passes from mind to mind, spreading through colleagues and over generations [Dawkins 1976]). Levin also noted that an inevitable consequence of knowledge expansion is the development of specialized jargon, which, unfortunately, creates language barriers that impede the free exchange of ideas. Occasionally, we therefore need to pause, cut through the jargon, and attempt to integrate ideas across disciplinary boundaries. According to Levin and Pacala (2003), “… it is essential to develop ways to relate processes at the level of individual organisms to the populations of which they are members, and to the communities and ecosystems in which they reside. We must learn to scale from the small to the large, from the individual to the collective to the community, from the … plant to the biosphere.”