tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2839922450198375320.post808453291287929540..comments2023-03-27T10:17:22.922-05:00Comments on 10 Things Wrong With Environmental Thinking: Is your climax a super-organism? The complexity of nature. Or, on being made of little partsDublinSoilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12746847572672641393noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2839922450198375320.post-50124761242734104872011-09-23T03:13:09.376-05:002011-09-23T03:13:09.376-05:00When pioneers of a science do research much of the...When pioneers of a science do research much of their pioneering work lies in describing what exists. Without derogating descriptive science, they generally have two options: (1) they coin neologisms, (2) they use metaphors and analogies. Take any of Clements's publications and you will find a mind benumbing diversity of "paleologimsm", that is, neologisms gone extinct. (I hereby reserve this term for a post on my own blog, but you as a philosopher can probably tell me whether it is also a paradox being, as it is, a neologism:-) In 1905, for example, Clements publishes a book called 'Research Methods in ecology' and its chock full with paleologisms but contains only one small paragraph (15 lines) sugesting the analogy between ecological succession and organism development. <br /><br />My impression is that everybody now gets hooked on this one paragraph (and an equally short passage in his 1916 book), because it is the only one that has not become gibberish to us in the meantime.Joachim Dagghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00985198925581721229noreply@blogger.com