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The ‘niche’ in niche-based theorizing: much ado about nothing

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Abstract

The niche is allegedly the conceptual bedrock underpinning the most prominent, and some would say most important, theorizing in ecology. We argue this point of view is more aspirational than veridical. Rather than critically dissect existing definitions of the concept, the supposedly significant work it is thought to have done in ecology is our evaluative target. There is no denying the impressive mathematical sophistication and theoretical ingenuity of the ecological modeling that invokes ‘niche’ terminology. But despite the pervasive labeling, we demonstrate that niche talk is nothing more than a gloss on theory developed without it, that doesn’t need it, and that doesn’t benefit from it.

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Notes

  1. Chase and Leibold (2003, 2), for instance, claim the niche “can help to solidify the conceptual synthesis that ecology so desperately needs.” And other champions of the concept claim its role in niche construction is on a par with natural selection (Scott-Phillips et al. 2014, 1232). Laland et al. (2009, 195) similarly assert that neglecting the niche would pose a “major conceptual barrier” to evolutionary and ecological theory, and Vandermeer (2004, 474) states that “niche-based” theorizing may constitute “a major breakthrough.”

  2. Although Schoener (1989) lauded Hutchinson’s niche definition as “revolutionary,” he also detailed many of its serious empirical shortcomings. Contra his positive evaluation, but prefiguring the critical line in the next section, he also observed that the “concept of the niche nearly always used in the body of concepts known as ‘niche theory’ … is not Hutchinson's” (Schoener 1989, 91).

  3. On the latter in philosophy of science, see Wilson (2006), Thagard (2012), and Sohlberg and Leiulfsrud (2016). Within the literature on concepts and conceptual engineering, see Burgess et al. (2020).

  4. According to Worster (1994, 374), MacArthur was “an ecologist who had the kind of ‘superbrain’ charisma commonly enjoyed by celebrities in physics.”

  5. The history of the niche in ecology is vast, intricate, and very difficult to address comprehensively. Our objective is supplying compelling evidence for a strong inductive argument against the scientific utility of the niche concept. Careful examination of the text and key equations from the first and most influential publications propelling the development of niche-theorizing therefore yields a weighty evidentiary basis for our induction. Other works adopt a wider scope of analysis, and although we don’t have the space to present it here, what those works uncover complements and enhances, rather than diminishes, the strong evidence driving our critical induction (see Schoener 1989, 2009; Pocheville 2015).

  6. See especially Kingsland’s (1995, 203–204) discussion of the work of Nelson Hairston among other critics.

  7. The fifth occurs in the last sentence: “The failure of Hypotheses II and III suggests that, at least as a rough approximation, niches do not overlap much and are more continuous than discrete.” As with its role labeling hypotheses, ‘niche’ was given no independent sense.

  8. See https://library.cshl.edu/symposia/1957/participants.html, accessed January 3, 2021.

  9. And in 1960 MacArthur thanked Hutchinson for providing “a continuous stream of good ideas on the subject for 7 years since he first drew the author's attention to it” (1960, 33).

  10. The scale of the independent variable R can represent any properties of resources that affect their utilization, such as location or size.

  11. This is a specific Gaussian function centered at R = 0 and peaking at U = 1.

  12. There are, moreover, many other measures of variation displaying similarly appealing statistical properties, such as the interquartile range and mean absolute deviation measures. But if resource use is more accurately represented with curves other than Gaussian functions, even these closely related measures can diverge. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this important fact.

  13. Even some niche loyalists seem to concede this priority. Schoener (2009, 5), for example, says, “Indeed, the resource-utilization niche is nothing more than a precisely formulated description of the natural history of a species: its habitat, food types, and activity times, among other things … Thus, we have a niche concept that precisely encapsulates what ecologists measure anyway” (italics added). The superfluous supervience couldn’t be clearer.

  14. For example, Tilman’s (1982) impressive manuscript, which integrated and expanded on several prior papers, contains exactly four instances of ‘niche’ and in each case the word is simply being used to refer to labels chosen by others. We thank an anonymous reviewer for stressing this point.

  15. Alternative explanations have been promulgated and Hubbell’s remark above about getting “closer to the truth” indicates there are philosophical undercurrents to the debate. Beyond his speculation that deterministic dispositions might underwrite ecologists’ “resistance” towards neutral theorizing, the last quote broaches another potential philosophical divide: realism versus instrumentalism. Wennekes et al. (2012, 259), for instance, argue that the “niche-based” vs. neutral theory feud ultimately boils down to fundamental disagreements between realists and instrumentalists, respectively, which they strangely claim correspond to “philosophical preference[s] for either general but vague versus specific and detailed models.” Scientific judgments are obviously shaped by folk metaphysical beliefs and tacit assumptions about the limits of epistemic inquiry, but Wennekes et al.’s specific assessment squares poorly with Hubbell’s own words. As the previous quotes manifest, he explicitly endorses the truth-seeking aim of realism. And it’s plausible Hubbell’s predilection for realism prompted his prediction that the two approaches would be “reconciled” and eventually integrated (2001, 26), a prediction born out by the vast majority of research done on the issue in the last 2 decades (Haegman and Loreau 2011; Fisher and Mehta 2014).

  16. “Niche construction should be regarded, after natural selection, as a second major participant in evolution” (Odling-Smee et al. 2003, 2), and others claim its role is “equal in explanatory importance to natural selection” (see Scott-Phillips et al. 2014, 1232, our italics).

  17. Ecological inheritance is defined as “any case in which organisms encounter a modified feature-factor relationship between themselves and their environment where the change in the selective pressures is a consequence of the prior niche construction by parents or other ancestral organisms” (2003, 42).

  18. In fact, NCT advocates are quite explicit about the narrow focus on causality. Despite the proclaimed centrality of the concepts of “environmental niche” and “ecological inheritance” for NCT, in an unobtrusive footnote of Niche Construction within the section “A Definition of Niche Construction” Odling-Smee et al. (2003, 41) disclose, “[o]ur use of the term construction refers to a physical modification of the selective environment or actual movement in physical space.” Intricate conceptual machinery is conspicuously absent.

  19. Moreover, if our critical line is correct, it’s implausible there is such a role even when evaluating higher-order ways concepts can influence scientific practice, but we’re not making that case here. See footnote 3 above.

  20. Prominent examples can probably be counted on two hands: e.g. absolute simultaneity, entelechy, ether, and phlogiston.

  21. Darwinian (and relative) fitnesses of genotypes can also be derived from Eq. (7).

  22. See Justus (2012) for another example of this kind of pluralistic fruitfulness in theoretical ecology, and Wakil (2020) for an example in evolutionary biology.

  23. It’s worth stressing that this critical judgment carries with it no reductionistic pretensions. As the fitness concept indicates, the utility of a concept in science doesn’t depend upon it being reducible to something more fundamental, such as causal relations. A concept may be fruitful because it can be so reduced, or its utility might be clearly ascertainable independent of any reductionistic commitments, such as for fitness or the concept of force in physics, at least since Newton (see Smith 2002).

  24. Chase and Leibold (2003, 19), for example, claim their niche concept successfully combines various definitions into “a single organized conceptual framework” that is “probably valid for almost any situation of ecological interest” (ibid, 2).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to audiences at the University of Minnesota, Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science, conferences Concept Formation in the Natural and Social Sciences (Zurich) and Philosophical Perspectives on the Niche Concept (Münster), and Philosophy of Science Association Meeting (2018) for helpful feedback. In particular, comments from Ulrich Gädhe, Karen Kovaka, Alan Love, Sandy Mitchell, Rose Trappes, and Armin Schulz were especially valuable.

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  1. Samantha Wakil and James Justus have contributed equally to this work.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Samantha Wakil

  2. Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    James Justus

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Wakil, S., Justus, J. The ‘niche’ in niche-based theorizing: much ado about nothing. Biol Philos 37, 10 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09839-0

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