After all this time, I guess I at least have a quick and rough way now of putting it! ... :

I'm just looking at the assumptions carried over from neodarwinist theory into conservation practice ... best to say I'm a post-Darwinist, coz if I say 'biological structuralist' or that I just think Darwinism can often be too functionalist as an explanatory mode.. good grief ... stand back and wait for the fallout. Of course natural selection is occurring, of that I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever - of course it feels silly to even have to state that. It feels very silly in light of how this is often contrasted in public with things not of any consequence in my field of study.

Click here to go back to where you really should have come from ... !

But selection often reduces into an ad hoc, a posteriori mode of explaining that may suffice ... it um, however, also avoids exploration/elucidation of the contexts which make the precepts of many a functionalist interpretation valid.

I'd argue that understanding those contexts would help in understanding the scope of possibilities and the way things can change (perceptually, if not ecologically - but we'll try for both!). OK maybe not at all in detail, but I think conceptually in the back of our mind, at least by entertaining that change comes about by how intelligible general laws become manifest, this may inform some hypotheses better.

Groan... this still sounds perverse and pedantic...shit.....!

So I began by hanging around over the murid rodent spp in NZ sorta using the ideas of "competition" as a case study ... and what can we do about anecdotal stuff carried thru in the litt about their beh, how that has gone into management ideas without questioning, how to use piecemeal data responsibly and never giving it more credence than we should.

Platitudes Meanwhile...