Robert Ulanowicz

Discussion

Arran Gare:

Robert Ulanowicz has argued that ecology should replace physics as the pre-eminent discipline for defining and advancing science.

As he put it in his book Ecology, The Ascendent Perspective (1997, 6):

- Ecology occupies the propitious middle ground. ... Indeed ecology may well provide a preferred theatre in which to search for principles that might offer very broad implications for science in general. If we loosen the grip of our prejudice in favour of mechanism as the general principle, we see in this thought the first inkling that ecology, the sick discipline, could in fact become the key to a radical leap in scientific thought. A new perspective on how things happen in the ecological world might conceivably break the conceptual logjams that currently hinder progress in understanding evolutionary phenomena, development biology, the rest of the life sciences, and, conceivably, even physics.

Ulanowicz has further developed this argument in A Third Window (2009).There are a number of elements being integrated in recent developments in theoretical ecology. The most important of these elements are non-linear thermodynamics, hierarchy theory (according to which emergence occurs through the interpolation of enabling constraints) and other developments in complexity theory, including second-order cybernetics, field theories of morphogenesis, and biosemiotics, including biohermeneutics and eco-semiotics."

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1061/1691)