Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology

by Robert E. Ulanowicz

"What in the ever-loving blue-eyed world do these [U1ano­ wicz's] innocuous comments on thermodynamics have to do with ecology!" Anonymous manuscript reviewer The American Naturalist, 1979 "The germ of the idea grows very slowly into something recognizable. It may all start with the mere desire to have an idea in the first place. " Walt Kelly Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, 1959 "It all seems extremely interesting, but for the life of me it sounds as if you pulled it out of the air," my good friend Ray Lassiter exclaimed to me after enduring about 20 minutes of my enthusiasm for the newly formu­ lated concept of "ascendency" in ecosystems. "It wasn't," I replied, "but it would take a book to show you where it came from. " If such was the reaction of someone usually sympathetic to my manner of thinking, what could I expect from those who viewed biological devel­ opment in the traditional way? After all, I was suggesting that it is possi­ ble to quantify the growth and development of an entire ecosystem. Fur­ thermore, I was maintaining that this development was not entirely determined by events and entities at smaller scales, and yet could influ­ ence these component processes and structures. To be sure, mine was only the latest of many challenges to straight reductionism, but, like everyone else with a new idea, I thought mine was special.

218 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1986

About the author

Robert Edward Ulanowicz is an American theoretical ecologist and philosopher of Polish descent who is best known for his search for a unified theory of ecology.
He was born September 17, 1943 in Baltimore, Maryland.
He served as Professor of Theoretical Ecology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Maryland until his retirement in 2008. Ulanowicz received both his BS and PhD in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and 68, respectively.
Dr. Ulanowicz currently resides in Gainesville, Florida.

Ulanowicz uses techniques from information theory and thermodynamics to study the organization of flows of energy and nutrients within ecosystems. Although his ideas have been primarily applied in ecology, many of his concepts are abstract and have been applied to other areas in which flow networks arise, such as economics.
Though Ulanowicz began his career with substantial successes in modeling of ecological systems using differential equations, he soon reached the limits of this approach[citation needed]. Realizing that any ecosystem is a complex system, he decided to move away from what he saw as the inappropriate use of a reductionist approach, and instead began to work towards development of theoretical measures of the ecosystem as a whole, such as ascendency.

Ulanowicz has authored or co-authored over a hundred articles in theoretical ecology and related areas of philosophy, especially those dealing with autocatalysis and causality. He has authored three books to date.
* A Third Window: Natural Life Beyond Newton and Darwin, Templeton Foundation Press (2009) (ISBN 159947154X)
* Ecology: The Ascendant Perspective, Columbia University Press (1997) (ISBN 0231108281) - Written for a more general audience
* Growth and Development - Ecosystems phenomenology, Springer (1986) (ISBN 0387962654) - A more technical exposition of Ulanowicz's ideas

While living in Maryland, Ulanowicz took up a hobby of cultivating and casually breeding cold-hardy palm trees; he drew attention for a Windmill palm on Solomons Island that grew taller than the one-story building it was planted outside.

Ulanowicz was named the recipient of the 2007 Ilya Prigogine Medal for outstanding research in ecological systems.[4] He participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.
Ulanowicz was a featured speaker at the 2009 Ill STOQ International Conference entitled "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories," which discussed the impacts and effects of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...