In school, we learn about some of these laws—gravity, inertia, and entropy, to name a few. But there are also laws of the motions of cells, bodies, ecosystems, and even minds. These are the biological laws that we need to have in the front of our mind if we are to make any sense of the years ahead.
Some of the laws of biological nature are laws of ecology. The most useful of these are universal. These biological laws of nature, like the laws of physics, allow us to make predictions. However, as physicists have pointed out, they are more limited than the laws of physics because they only apply to the tiny corner of the universe in which life is known to exist. Still, given that any story that involves us also involves life, they are universal relative to any world we might experience. Knowing about these laws helps us understand the future into which we are—arms flailing, coal burning, and full speed ahead—hurling ourselves.
Most of the laws of nature are well known to ecologists. Though many were first studied more than a hundred years ago, they have been elaborated and refined in recent decades with advances in statistics, modeling, experiments, and genetics. These laws predict which species are likely to move around the Earth in response to climate change, how species will evolve in response to our ever-growing cities, the sorts of behaviors that will allow species to thrive in an ever more variable world, and much more. They govern the response of life to each of our individual or collective actions. Because these laws are known and even intuitive to ecologists, they often don’t mention them: “Of course that is true. Everyone knows. Why talk about it even?” But these laws are often not intuitive if you haven’t spent recent decades thinking and talking about them. Those that are aware of them ignore them out of the belief in humanity’s own power, the hubris of thinking we are fully in control. As a result, their consequences have a tendency to surprise ecologists and non-ecologists alike, to catch us with our collective guard down and punish us, whether with global pandemics, resistant weeds, or persistent changes in the ecosystems on which we depend.Charles Darwin’s elegant revelation of the way life evolves, natural selection, is one such law. Darwin imagined this to be a slow process, but we now know that it can happen very quickly. Evolution by natural selection has been observed in real time in many species, which is not surprising. What is surprising is the river-like inevitability with which the consequences of this simple law flow into our daily lives each time we, for example, try to kill a species.