[Coral-List] the need to know natural history

[Charles Birkeland]

It was nice of Doug to tout my old paper, but a much better paper is by
Paul Dayton (1973. ……….making the right prediction for the wrong reason.
American Naturalist 107: 662-670). I think you can get it by just calling
it up by Google. Paul gives an example of a controlled field experiment and
a quantitative testing of a model. Both hypotheses were “proven”, but were
actually found to be incorrect when one knows the natural history.  I have
always included this paper as reading for any ecology course.


Chuck