A Little About Myself...
John Lawton, current Executive Divector of the UK National
of steel string guitar and the sports of mountain
biking and ultimate Frisbee, life keeps me fairly
active. Theoretical, aquatic, and applied ecology
keeps me more engaged on the academic front
but music and sports occasionally spill over into my academic
community. My research interests more specifically include
food-web data and theory as well as the results of
catastrophic losses of biodiversity. My teaching interests
include freshwater and theoretical ecology plus the philosophy
and sociology of science.
sciences (e.g., molecular biology, chemistry, physics), our discipline
has not yet become a generally and successfully predictive body of
evolving theory. I'm primarily interested in motivating ecology
beyond its adolescent state towards a more generally predictive
science. This involves a search for patterns common to all
ecological systems and the discovery of the processes responsible
for those patterns. Similar work in other sciences have delineated
the periodic table of elements and reduction/oxidation processes
among chemical systems as well as the structure of DNA and the
transcription/translation processes among biomolecular systems.
My research focuses on some remarkably precise food web patterns
that accurately predict the trophic structure of a wide range of
aquatic and terrestrial systems. Describing these patterns and
discovering the biological mechanisms responsible may
scientifically advance ecology towards a more mature state.
Environmental Research Council is
one of the prominent scientists
that espouse a similar view of food webs and ecology.
Click here to read an interview of
John on the subject including
a reference to my work at the end.
ecological systems. My colleagues and I have found several
generally robust patterns among food webs. For example, there
appears to be a remarkably precise balance of food web complexity
between all species eating all species at one extreme, and all
species eating no species on the other. The balance is that the
average species' diet includes one-tenth of the species within the
food web with trophic generalists eating more and trophic
specialists eating fewer. My lab is currently engaged in several
efforts to understand such patterns including empirical studies of
different systems' webs and the changes in these webs over time.
One of our most exciting areas includes developing DNA based tools
for investigating microbial food webs. We also study differences
between null and observed food webs and the effects of observation
effort on food web structure. These and other efforts have lead us
to
the finding that food webs are highly structured by biological
processes such as natural selection rather than the more
conventionally invoked processes of energetics and population dynamics.
investigating the consequences of catastrophic losses of
biodiversity. A key element of this investigation is defining and
measuring functional aspects of biodiversity. These aspects focus
on what different organisms do in ecological systems as opposed
to structural aspects such as how many types of organisms are
found in ecological systems. Specifically, I have
developed a definition of these aspects that holds the ecological
function of biodiversity to be the interactions that biodiversity has
with ecological processes. Using this and other definitions in the
literature, I've argued that the concept of functional redundancy of
biodiversity is indefensible on scientific grounds as well as
unethical on social grounds. Instead, the most scientists can defend
are assertions of functional similarity.
the philosophy and ethics of science figure very prominently in gaining
new theoretical and empirical insights while great friends and
good music make it all worthwhile.