Functionalism without Selectionism: Charles Elton's "Functional" Niche and the Concept of Ecological Function
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THEMATIC ISSUE ARTICLE: CONCEPTUALIZING THE ENVIRONMENT IN NATURAL SCIENCES
Functionalism without Selectionism: Charles Elton’s "Functional" Niche and the Concept of Ecological Function Antoine C. Dussault1 Received: 1 November 2019 / Accepted: 6 August 2020 © Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 2020
Abstract This article offers an analysis of ecologist Charles Elton’s “functional” concept of the niche and of the notion of function implicitly associated with it. It does so in part by situating Elton’s niche concept within the broader context of the “functionalist-interactionist” approach to ecology he introduced, and in relation to his views on the relationship between ecology and evolution. This involves criticizing the common claim that Elton’s idea of species as fulfilling functional roles within ecological communities committed him to an idea of communities as units of selection. While such a claim implicitly attributes to Elton an understanding of function along the lines of the selected-effects theory of function advocated by many biologists and philosophers of biology, Elton’s use of the niche concept, I maintain, involves an understanding of function more along the lines of alternative nonselectionist theories such as the causal-role, goal-contribution, and organizational theories. I also briefly discuss how ecologists after Elton also tend to have typically adopted a nonselectionist understanding of the function concept, similar to his. Keywords Community ecology · Ecological function · Ecological niche · Charles Elton · Multilevel selection · Selectedeffects theory
Introduction
* Antoine C. Dussault [email protected]
his understanding of niche is reflected, in part, in the analogy he drew between species’ niches and “trades or professions or jobs in a human community.” This functional understanding of the niche contrasted with Grinnell and many later ecologists’ use of the concept to refer primarily to a species’ ecological requirements—that is, to the biotic and abiotic conditions that enable it to thrive in a given ecological context (see Alley 1985, pp. 414–415; Leibold 1995, pp. 1372–1373).1 Despite the tendency to attribute to Elton a functional understanding of niches (i.e., an understanding of niches as ecological functions or functional roles), the notion of ecological function underlying Elton’s niche concept has never been closely analyzed by historians and philosophers of science. A clear understanding of Elton’s niche concept and of its place in the history of ecology, however, would seem to require such an analysis. Biologists are known to have used the function concept in a plurality of ways (see Wouters 2003), such that, in itself, saying that Elton understood
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Animal-community ecologist Charles Elton (1900–1991) is renowned, among other things, for his popularization of concepts now central to ecological science, such as food chain, food cycle (essentially what we now call a food web), the pyramid of numbers, and the ecological niche. It is c
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