Lotka-Volterra #2

[nik-bro]

Great video Andy! It's funny - as you were showing the math you have to do to get the 'K' term it struck me that you would have to be approaching the problem with the specific goal of including carrying capacity as a feature in order to consider that the most intuitive way of writing the equation. Little did I know that the whole second part of the video would address the history leading up to that mindset.

I knew someone years ago who had a similar objection to the concept of 'fitness' - his outlook being that fitness is a fundamentally abstract concept that can't be measured or distinguished from stochasticity without imposing one's own assumptions onto the study system. Kind of interesting to think about what other terms of convenience we have in biology that carry the weight of implicit assumptions. If we can't avoid ideology in biological thinking, should we be setting out to create an explicitly ideological biology?