Dan Simberloff on Theory in Ecology.

David Quammen interviewing Dan Simberloff:

“I’m sort of viewed as a professional crank,” he says truly. “I’m disenchanted with lots of community ecology. And my disenchantment to some extent with equilibrium theory stemmed from the same source. That is: Modeling is fun, sometimes it produces elegant structures, but there is a tendency to reify models. To take them as nature, when really all they are is proposed abstractions of nature. I’m concerned when a literature begins to develop on the models themselves, rather than on nature.” There’s a long history of such airy theorizing in the journals of ecology, he says. Too much conceptual scat singing, too little observed data. Far too little experiment. “And the equilibrium theory, it seemed to me, was increasingly that sort of beast. That is, Ed [Wilson] and I did that experiment to try and test it directly.” They went to the mangroves. They censused real arthropods on real islands under the real Florida sun. They not only tested theory against reality; they did it with data from a controlled, focused, carefully manipulated situation. They found a way to convert small bits of functioning ecosystem into a rigorous experiment. :Not many other people did.”

David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo.. (Scribner, 2004) pp. 482-3.