I want to get "redpilled" on the inner workings of nature. What to read?
I liked "The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth". Stephen J. Gould redpilled me on the role of chance, though he went a bit too far.
I've also read some books that take a contrarian stance towards the policy towards invasive species. These include "Where do camels belong?", "The New Wild" and "Rambunctious garden". I feel it is somewhat imbalanced but those books had interesting insights anyway. And I do read a lot of pro invasive species stuff (but less books, since a negative stance towards invasive species is the mainstream view within conservation).
I am also looking for books that deal with how culture or ideology shapes the way we see nature. Ecocriticism seems exactly what I was looking for but it is very post-modern (=unreadable).
I am now reading "Evolution's rainbow" it is a bit imbalanced and repetitive as I read another book by Joan Roughgarden, but it deals a bit with how ideology shapes how we see nature and I like how it shows that mating is more diverse as we think.
I find it interesting that within the field of evolution you have a group of collectivists and individualists (notable Richard Dawkins with his selfish gene). It seems the individualists sort of won. Though many agree that both competition and cooperation play a role in nature.
>>2168039
Also I am looking for critiques of the romanticism view of nature and rewilding.
Maybe even a complexity science view of nature conservation - if something like that even exists.
>>2168039
Nature is an objective thing, therefore the scientific view would likely be the most accurate.
But on non-scientific viewpoints are primarily related to morality and meaning, which can be objective or subjective but aren't the focus of science.
>>2168039
Origin of species sort of explains it all, though it is a bit old and some things are vague because no genetic info was known back then. As for your competition and cooperation: cooperation is a way to beat the other(bigger) competition. Take army ants as an example : a single ant would not survive a single day yet together these "raiding parties" scourge the bottom of the rainforests they inhabit.
>>2168051
>>2168039
Also this :
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
>>2168043
Conservation, which I am studying, isn't fully objective. There is a lot of how nature "ought" to be, instead of how nature "is". Consider also how humans are usually seperated from nature which is wrong according to a Darwinian view.
Also how some things are interpreted can still be cultural. Another thing is confirmation bias.
I am not someone who thinks that science as a whole is a sort of social construction but partly I think it is. And it depends on the field: there is a reason we divide between hard and soft science.
I think it is all a bit more complex as you like to think.
>>2168043
Here's an example of scientific bias:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/biased-biology-the-case-of-the-missing-vaginas.html
I do not know you but I feel if you would know more about the history of science you would understand that with the scientific method facts will win in the end, but that it doesn't mean there's no biases and so on.
That reminds me of symbiogenesis, which used to be ridiculed but is now considered to be more or less true.
>>2168087
>Conservation, which I am studying, isn't fully objective.
The only non objective thing about that is the basic assumption that biodiversity has some sort of intrinsic value ,which kind of is what the whole field is about, sure, but from there on out it should be purely objective unless you have some bad profs.
The other stuff like ecosystem services is just born out of necessity because convincing people that are not biologists (and therefore usually have a very favorable view of biodiversity) that biodiversity is worth something is hard.
>>2168096
Now that is very interesting but I think it's missing one central point. I don't think it's necessarily the (younger generation of) scientists that are at fault here. You have to get funding for this stuff and the more "controversial" a topic is the harder it is to get funds and the people that you get funds from are often very conservative.
Oh also preparation of male genitalia is a very long standing and very widely used way to distinguish morphologically similar species so there are just way more experts for that naturally.
