1 Samuel M. Scheiner and Michael R. Willig, eds. 1. A General ...

among these … deadly foes”. Second, by emphasizing the relative autonomy of lake biotic and
abiotic processes, he identified another important aspect of ecology - patchiness or partial
discreteness of ecological phenomena. These ideas were later pursued in ecosystem (Golley
1993), patch dynamics (Pickett and White 1985), and succession studies (Clements 1916),
among others. I note here that Scheiner and Willig’s framework (Chapter 1) does not explicitly
address the discreteness of ecological things and processes. Perhaps this is not necessary or
perhaps the proposed framework will find room for such aspects of nature later on.
Clements’ ideas of a community of species acting as a superorganism are now deemed a
failure (Hagen 2003). However, Clements’ ideas had a considerable pre-theoretical and
theoretical content, which provoked and inspired ample empirical work that, ironically, largely
intended to disprove his superorganism perspective. Ultimately, a more individualistically
oriented interpretation of species assemblages won (now also known as the Gleasonian view).
Nevertheless, Clements infused into ecology notions that continue to raise their head for good
reasons. Although ecological systems do not behave like organisms, they have features that they
share with organisms, even if the expression of these features is much less prominent. Forbes
preceded Clements in emphasizing interdependence of components, boundedness, and the
equilibrial nature of the ecological systems. Clements’ and Forbes’ perspectives on communities
were pre-theoretical. However, it is Clements who made as strong a case as it was then possible,
and who left ecologists thinking about these issues for a good while. Most recently, Loreau et al.
(2003) returned to some of the issues (e.g., component interdependence, conceptualization of
ecosystems as interacting entities) in a modern way, thus completing another cycle of refinement
of theoretical thinking. Evolutionary ecologists (e.g., Wilson 1997) emphasize that coevolved
species have the potential to form communities with meaningful integration (and thus a degree of
entitization). Thus, while the ideas of Clements on the organismal nature of communities may
not be applicable to a single trophic level such as assemblages of plants, they are far from
irrelevant as noted by Tansley (1935).
However the argument about integration may unfold, it is rather clear that a meaningful
consideration of many ecological processes requires system identification. Often such
identification remains as an implicit assumption as it has been, for example, during much of the
development of theory of succession. Only recently (Pickett et al. Chapter 9; Pickett et al. 2009)
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