ARISTOTELEAN CAUSALITIES IN ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

The positivist view of change in nature as due exclusively to material or mechanistic causes appears to be insufficient to describe the development of ecosystems. Positive cybernetic feedback possesses attributes that recommend it as a natural example of Aristotelean formal cause imparting some order to ecosystem flow networks. When positive feedback acts at hierarchical levels above the scale of observation, its effects at the local level appear as the result of a final cause. Ascendency, a mathematical property of any network of ecosystem flows, measures the combination of system size and organization. The observed directions of unperturbed ecosystem development appear to coincide with increases in the system's ascendency, which simultaneously serve to measure the effects of positive feedback when it acts as a formal or a final cause. -Author