The applied discipline of agroecological design provides a useful case study for examining broader philosophical questions about the existence and importance of ecological generalizations or “laws.” Recent developments in the availability and use of formal meta-analyses have led to the discovery of many resilient generalizations in ecology (Linquist et al. 2016). However, these “laws” face numerous challenges when it comes to their practical application. Concerns about their reliability and scope might stem from unclear logical and epistemic connections to more foundational or “unifying” generalizations (Lean in Philos Top 47(1), 2019) which, in ecology, tend to be derived from first principles and in association with highly abstract models. This raises questions about the nature of those foundational generalizations themselves. In particular, how resilient are they compared to the generalizations uncovered by empirically driven methods? Here we propose a procedure for evaluating the resilience of generalizations across five ecologically relevant dimensions. This procedure was applied to seven well known foundational generalizations in ecology. Surprisingly, it turned out to be impossible to estimate the resilience of these foundational generalizations based on the available literature. This points to the need for a more centralized repository of information about ecological generalizations, created with the explicit aim of evaluating such important dimensions as causal mechanism and predictive power.

中文翻译：

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农业生态设计的生态法则：需要在生产，评估和更新生态概论方面进行更有组织的合作。

农业生态设计的应用学科为研究有关生态概论或“法律”的存在和重要性的更广泛的哲学问题提供了有用的案例研究。形式上的荟萃分析的可用性和使用的最新发展导致发现了许多生态学上的弹性概括（Linquist等人，2016）。但是，这些“法律”在实际应用中面临许多挑战。对它们的可靠性和范围的担忧可能源于逻辑和认识上的不清楚的联系，以及更基础或“统一”的概括（Leos in Philos Top 47（1），2019），在生态学上，它们倾向于源于第一原理并与之相关。高度抽象的模型。这引起了关于这些基础概括本身的性质的疑问。尤其是，他们将其与经验驱动方法发现的概括进行了比较？在这里，我们提出了一个评估五个生态相关维度的概化弹性的程序。该程序被应用于生态学中的七个众所周知的基础概括。令人惊讶的是，事实证明不可能根据现有文献来估计这些基础概括的弹性。这表明需要建立一个更加集中的有关生态概论的信息，其明确目的是评估因果机制和预测能力等重要方面。