During much of the 1940s the all-too-real battles of World War II eclipsed the academic fray between mechanists and ecological thinkers. That period nonetheless saw the arrival of another major player in the debate. The sophisticated weapons systems developed for the war effort, and for the Cold War that followed, showed Washington the importance of science and technology. From then on, U.S. government funds would flow increasingly to the research community.

Among the many scientists riding that tide was mathematician Norbert Wiener. He was a prodigy who had begun to read at age three, earned his doctorate from Harvard by the time he was eighteen, and a year later was studying with Bertrand Russell. At Harvard Medical School he went on to study brain structure.

Wiener was interested in feedback loops. These self-correcting elements of nature had, in various forms, held the attention of Darwin, Malthus, Ampère, and Maxwell—who did the math for the early steam engine governors. Wiener’s great insight was to show how rough, elemental feedback loops could be used to create precise self-correcting systems. His original work was funded by the Army, and used to improve artillery targeting during the war. Wiener called his theory “cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek term for “steersman,” and his book Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine later became a modest bestseller that spurred the introduction of electronic control circuits in manufacturing.

By mid-century, ecologists had learned their cybernetic feedback lessons from Wiener, along with the more complex lessons of systems theory. During that time, G. Evelyn Hutchinson fitted notions of metabolism more elegantly into ecological studies. And in the 1950s his student Howard Odum would begin the work of actually mapping energy flows through natural systems. Odum’s brother, Eugene, made a study of “succession”—those higher levels of organization that emerge in living systems over time. Soon the population biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven would coin the term “coevolution” to describe how reciprocal changes evolve among interacting species.

As the modern synthesis was attacked at its heart by scientists like McClintock and Sonneborn, and pressured by outside developments in ecology, the definition of nature seemed to be loosening up. At about this time the ghost of Frederic Clements’ ecological superorganism also drifted back into view. It had since become clear that ecosystems weren’t organisms. But complex natural systems clearly did have qualities, like metabolism and intricate energy paths, that are common to all life forms. Who was to say that natural selection wasn’t at work on ecological systems, too?

George Williams, for one. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Williams published his Adaptation and Natural Selection in 1966. In it he argued forcefully for the view—later reflected in popular books by zoologist Richard Dawkins—that there’s little sense in looking for the effect of natural selection on large-scale systems if all of their characteristics can be explained through the evolution of individuals. The study of natural selection, he said, is the study of genes. Williams’ “ultra-Darwinist” argument had a chilling effect on the idea that evolution worked on ecosystems in the same way it did on organisms. And it was the beginning of a larger swing as the mechanical view of nature once again gained force.

It was supported by a curious development. By this time the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, had become the largest funder of ecosystem research in the United States. There were a number of reasons: Ecologists like Howard Odum, with their emphasis on energy flows through complex natural systems, were thought to be on a parallel path with the AEC engineers, who were then at work on complex engineering systems. Ecologists also promoted AEC research tools like radionuclides, by using them as tracking devices in their research. Those studies then showed the way to tracking exposures from nuclear power plants and weapons. More generally, the AEC had a notion that “ecosystem engineering” could contribute to its goal of a technological, nuclear-powered society.

The International Biological Program, with its “big ecology” and with its hierarchical ranks of researchers structured into corporate or military-style organizations, followed soon after. Its goal was to develop a unified theory of ecology, using computer models that could predict the behavior of ecosystems and assist in their management. In the late sixties the U.S. government poured more than $40 million into ecosystem studies.

Tags: Cold War, cybernetics, Ecology, energy flows, history, Hutchinson, mechanical view, Odum, Wiener, World War II

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Posted on April 21st, 2006 @ 6:00 am