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1 On Earth as It Is in the Heavens 3
1.1 How Planets Move 4
1.2 How Populations Grow 6
1.3 Metaphors and the Language of Science 8
1.4 Inertial Population Growth 9
2 Does Ecology Have Laws? 11
2.1 Ecological Allometries 12
2.2 Kepler's Laws 21
2.3 What Is a Law of Nature? 26
2.4 Laws in Ecology 30
3 Equilibrium and Accelerated Death 34
3.1 Accelerated Death 35
3.2 Galileo and Falling Bodies 36
3.3 The Slobodkin Experiment 39
3.4 Falling Bodies and Dying Populations 42
3.5 The Meaning of Abundance Equilibrium 43
3.6 The Damuth Allometry 46
3.7 A Harder Question 48
4 The Maternal Effect Hypothesis 49
4.1 Inertial Growth and the Maternal Effect 50
4.2 The Missing Periods 52
4.3 The Calder Allometry 57
4.4 The Eigenperiod Hypothesis 59
4.5 What Can Be Done in the Laboratory 62
5 Predator-Prey Interactions and
the Period of Cycling 64
5.1 An Alternative Limit Myth 65
5.2 Prey-Dependent versus Ratio-Dependent
Models 66
5.3 The Fallacy of Instantism 70
5.4 Why Period Travels Bottom Up 74
5.5 Competing Views on Causes and Cyclicity 78
6 Inertial Growth 83
6.1 The Implicit Inertial-Growth Model 83
6.2 Parametric Specification 90
6.3 Malthusian Invariancy 95
6.4 What Is and What Is Not Analogous 100
7 Practical Consequences 104
7.1 Theoretical and Applied Ecology 104
7.2 Managing Inertial Populations 106
7.3 Rates of Evolution 111
7.4 Risk Analysis 113
7.5 The Moral 114
8 Shadows on the Wall 117
8.1 Plato's Cave 118
8.2 Evidence and Aesthetics 120
8.3 Overfitting 123
8.4 A Simplified Picture of Population Ecology 125
Appendix A: Notes and Further Reading 133
Appendix B: Essential Features of the Maternal
Effect Model 143
Bibliography 151
Index 161
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Population biology, Ecology