Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Science & Its Conceptual Foundations Series)

The first history of population ecology traces two generations of science and scientists from the opening of the twentieth century through 1970. Kingsland chronicles the careers of key figures and the field's theoretical, empirical, and institutional development, with special attention to tensions between the descriptive studies of field biologists and later mathematical models. This second edition includes a new afterword that brings the book up to date, with special attention to the rise of "the new natural history" and debates about ecology's future as a large-scale scientific enterprise. Darwin was wonderfully struck by how the presence of the most complex forms of creation could be explained by referring to the common processes continually in action and open to our view.