The structure of the two ecological paradigms

Ecological theory is built upon assumptions about the fundamental nature of organism-environment interactions. We argue that two mutually exclusive se ts of such assumptions are available and that they have given rise to alter native approaches to studying ecology. The fundamentally different premises of these approaches render them irreconcilable with one another. In this p aper, we present the first logical formalisation of these two paradigms. The more widely-accepted approach - which we label the demographic paradigm - includes both population ecology and community ecology (synecology). Dem ographic ecology assumes that the environment is relatively stable and that biotic processes, governed predominantly by resource availability, are the most important of ecological and evolutionary influences. Moreover, ecolog ical processes are assumed to translate into directional selection pressure s that drive significant evolutionary change on a local scale through the p rocess of optimisation. Serious deficiencies in aspects of the demographic approach have been ident ified over the past few decades by various ecologists, including Gleason, A ndrewartha and Birch, White, Den Beer, Strong, Simberloff, and others. Shor t-term evolutionary optimisation has also been seriously questioned. The development of the alternative approach (autecology) has been subverted by the prominence of demographic ecology. Moreover, it has not been recogn ised that autecology is underpinned by robust principles and that they are independent of the underlying demographic principles. Components of the aut ecological approach have been developed to some extent, but they have not b een integrated with ancillary fields of study. We therefore articulate the assumptions from which autecology is derived, and use this as a basis for i ntegrating the various spheres of autecological research. We add to the ongoing development of autecology by linking autecological un derstanding, in so far as it is developed, with the evolutionary justificat ion for species' characteristics being stable in an environment that is con tinuously dynamic in space and time. The ecology of organisms is essentiall y an ongoing matching of their species-specific characteristics to the prev ailing environmental factors and dynamics. We thus provide a consistent log ic through the following subject areas; climate and climate change, spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity and dynamic theory, physiology, b ehaviour, migration, and evolution. We demonstrate why adaptation cannot be an ongoing process, but takes place only when organisms are prevented, by incidental influences, from matching the overall dynamics of the environmen t.