Ecology

Dobzhansky’s sweeping generalization, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (1964, 449), provocatively captures the centrality of evolutionary theory in contemporary biological science (see also Dobzhansky 1973). But his indelible rally call is also revisionist history, and grievously partial. Although the term “ecology” was not coined until 1866 (Haeckel 1866), most of what would be deemed biological investigation that did not concern the interior of organisms since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, and long before a nascent awareness of evolutionary forces, falls squarely within the purview of ecology. The biological understanding that laid the groundwork out of which evolutionary theory emerged was largely ecological. Ecology therefore casts the same indispensable light in biology, and particularly on evolution. Ecological insights were an integral part of early evolutionary thinking; they are at the core of Darwin’s original theory; and they will remain crucial to theorizing about how evolutionary dynamics shape the biological world. Consider evolutionary theory’s central concept, natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is traditionally thought to depend on three population-level factors: phenotypic variation, heritability, and differential fitness (see Lewontin 1970). All three are biologically crucial components, and at least the latter two have garnered significant attention from philosophers of biology (on heritability, see Tabery 2014 and Downes and Matthews 2019; on fitness, see Rosenberg and Bouchard 2015).