Foreword

When we started to plan our course “Dynamic Models in Biology”, and the textbook of the same name to go with it (Princeton University Press, 2006), my co-author and co-instructor John Guckenheimer observed that “the best books are often the most personal books”. That is: books aiming for even-handed, comprehensive coverage of a subject are useful as reference books -- I have a few such on my bookshelf, many with “encyclopedia” or “handbook” in their titles, and some of them really have been very useful. But books that very selectively highlight one person’s idea of what is important in a subject area, one person’s interpretation of current knowledge, and their projections about the future – those are the books that get read from cover to cover, which can divert a reader into a different line of inquiry, and even change the direction of an entire field.

Vikas Rai has written a very personal book about ecology. The viewpoint is modern. Classically an ecosystem was typically conceptualized as stocks and flows of various molecules (C, N, P, etc.). That view is not without value when our goal is to summarize global biogeochemistry. But we now know how crucial it is that those molecules are clustered into individual organisms, who attend to the world around them and make intelligent decisions, shaped by natural selection. The fundamental events in ecosystems are then births and deaths, that is: consuming, being consumed, and converting consumed resources into offspring. Accordingly, the book opens with the study of these interactions and the competition that results when there are multiple consumers for one food item. The subsequent chapters broaden from this fine scale to networks of interacting species, and then to the level of global biodiversity. Individual actions – in particular human individual actions – again take center stage in the next three chapters, exploring how human decisions now determine the state and fate of planet Earth. The last chapter concerns sustainable development goals; the agenda set by Comity of Nations; UNO.

So will this book teach you about all of ecological science? No, not even close. But it will tell you how one person views those topics after decades of thinking about them and contributing to them, and what he thinks is most important. And maybe it will help you choose how you want to make your own contributions.