Environs: Relativistic Elementary Particles for Ecology

Corpuscular theories have a favored place in science. The power of physics, chemistry, and biology can be correlated with the extent of particulate conceptions in these subjects. Elementary particles, atoms, molecules, genes, cells, and organisms are all familiar examples of powerful particles. Ecology lacks an elementary particle of its own, with discoverable properties that can clarify the nature of environment and its relationship to life. The purpose of this paper is to suggest such a particle and indicate what is known about it and some directions for learning more. Ecology, the biological science of environment, has not produced a synthesis of environment from its broad technical knowledge of the influence of external parameters on organisms. Before Darwin (1859), environment was considered an organic whole. Everything in it made some contribution and had some meaning with respect to everything else. Darwin subscribed to this view, but his emphasis, and that of his followers, on the evolving organism struggling to survive, suppressed the exploration of holistic aspects of the origin of species that might have been developed. After Darwin, the organism came into great focus, first as a comparative anatomical entity, then later with physiological, cellular, molecular, behavioral, and genetic detail. In contrast, the organism's environment blurred through relative inattention into a fuzzy generality. The result was two distinct things (dualism), organism and environment, supplanting the original unified organismenvironment whole (synergism). So separated from environment, the organism had to adapt back in. Thus, the main activity of existence portrayed in evolutionary ecology literature, for a variety of improbable biological objects from genes (Waddington 1957; Dawkins 1978) to ecosystems (Odum 1969), is the pursuit of "adaptive strategies." An overworked metaphor is the signal of a strained paradigm, and in this case it is clear that environment must become more than a nonspecific selector of traits according to advantages to individuals, or in response to strategies laid down by all sorts of implausible units. The leaving of offspring, Darwin's criterion of success in adaptation, came to be called "fitness." This first principle of evolution has nothing to do with the degree of fit, in Leibniz' (1949) sense of mutual conformity, between many things in a large system of interrelationships. Fitness is a local