Abstract
Vernadsky and his concept of the biosphere—From biocenose to ecosystem: the establishment of ecology as a science—The 1920s: the arrival of mathematical methods in ecology—The hydrobiologists’ contribution—The ecosystem: birth of a term—Biogeocenose as cell of the biosphere – Nikolay Timofeyev-Resovsky: the biosphere as a factory, manufacturing the environment – James Lovelock and the “Gaia Hypothesis”—Strong and weak points of the Gaia Hypothesis and criticism from evolutionary biologists.
Keywords
- History of ecology
- Alexander Humboldt
- Vladimir Vernadsky
- Biosphere
- Ernst Von Haeckel
- Karl Mobius
- Biocenose
- Henry Cowles
- Frederic Clements
- Biological succession
- Charles Elton
- Ecological niche
- Ecological pyramid
- Alfred Lotka
- Arthur Tansley
- Ecosystem
- Vladimir Sukachyov
- Biogeocenose
- Raymond Lindeman
- Trophic level
- Energy transfer
- Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy
- Nikolay Timofeyev-Resovsky
- Lames Lovelock
- Gaia Hypothesis
- Viktor Gorshkov
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- 1.
Which, by the way, one might attribute to his not winning the Nobel Prize. He entirely could have shared the prize won by his younger colleague Max Delbruk, with whom, at one time in early 1930s Germany, he carried out the work of determining the size of a gene.
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Danilov-Danil’yan, V.I., Reyf, I.E. (2018). The Path to a Systemic Understanding of the Biosphere. In: The Biosphere and Civilization: In the Throes of a Global Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67193-2_9
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