Beyond the limit: carrying capacity (K) and the holism/reductionism debate.

Publisher: Springer International Publishing Country of Publication: Switzerland NLM ID: 8003052 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1742-6316 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 03919714 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Hist Philos Life Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: 2014- : Cham : Springer International Publishing
Original Publication: Firenze : Olschki, 1979-

Conservation of Natural Resources/*history ; Philosophy/*history; History, 19th Century ; History, 20th Century ; History, 21st Century

As the debate about holism and reductionism in ecology has ebbed in the last twenty years, this article aims to reassess the traditional opposition between holistic and reductionist epistemologies during the development of population biology. The history of the notion of carrying capacity, the upper demographic limit of a viable population, will be analyzed as a paradigmatic case of the progressive imposition of reductionist strategies, from both an epistemological and a semantic point of view, since the middle of the twentieth century. Then, Richard Looijen's reduction of the carrying capacity concept to the niche partitioning theory will be assessed and rebuked for both empirical and logical reasons. Eventually, some recent "weak" and "hard" emergent conceptualizations of the notion of carrying capacity, in logistic map models or in coupled niche-population systems, will be presented in order to show how they call into question the nature and the use of the notion of carrying capacity as a predefined ecological limit.
(© 2021. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

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Keywords: Carrying capacity; Holism; Logistic curve; Population ecology; Reductionism

Date Created: 20210713 Date Completed: 20210726 Latest Revision: 20211020

20221213

10.1007/s40656-021-00440-4

34254193