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Howard T. Odum: Stability Teleology Systems Natural Selection Empirical

Howard T. Odum was an ecologist who defined ecology in his 1950 PhD thesis as the study of large entities like ecosystems at their natural level of integration. Odum aimed to both recognize and classify large cyclic entities like ecosystems, as well as make predictive generalizations about them. He viewed the world as a large, highly stable revolving cycle. Odum believed the principle of natural selection had a teleological component of stability over time that was equally applicable to both large and small biological entities.

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Reshma Georgi
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84 views

Howard T. Odum: Stability Teleology Systems Natural Selection Empirical

Howard T. Odum was an ecologist who defined ecology in his 1950 PhD thesis as the study of large entities like ecosystems at their natural level of integration. Odum aimed to both recognize and classify large cyclic entities like ecosystems, as well as make predictive generalizations about them. He viewed the world as a large, highly stable revolving cycle. Odum believed the principle of natural selection had a teleological component of stability over time that was equally applicable to both large and small biological entities.

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Reshma Georgi
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Howard T.

Odum

In his 1950 Ph.D. thesis, H.T.Odum gave a novel definition of ecology as the study of
large entities (ecosystems) at the "natural level of integration".[12] Hence, in the traditional
role of an ecologist, one of Odum's doctoral aims was to recognize and classify large
cyclic entities (ecosystems). However another of his aims was to make predictive
generalizations about ecosystems, such as the whole world for example. For Odum, as a
large entity, the world constituted a revolving cycle with high stability. It was the presence
of stability which, Odum believed, enabled him to talk about the teleology of
such systems. Moreover, at the time of writing his thesis, Odum felt that the principle
of natural selection was more than empirical, because it had a teleological, that is a
"stability over time" component. And as an ecologist interested in the behavior and
function of large entities over time, Odum therefore sought to give a more general
statement of natural selection so that it was equally applicable to large entities as it was
to small entities traditionally studied in biology.[13]

Energy Diagram: energy and matter flows through an ecosystem, adapted from the Silver Springs
model.[24] H are herbivores, C are carnivores, TC are top carnivores, and D are decomposers.
Squares represent biotic pools and ovals are fluxes or energy or nutrients from the system.

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