Testing The Theory
The theory has provoked much controversy as it "abandons" the role of ecology when modelling ecosystems. The theory has been criticized as it requires an equilibrium, yet climatic and geographical conditions are thought to change too frequently for this to be attained. Tests on bird and tree abundance data demonstrate that the theory is usually a poorer match to the data than alternative null hypotheses that use fewer parameters (a log-normal model with two tunable parameters, compared to the neutral theory's three), and are thus more parsimonious. The theory also fails to describe coral reef communities and is a poor fit to data in intertidal communities. It also fails to explain why families of tropical trees have statistically highly correlated numbers of species in phylogenetically unrelated and geographically distant forest plots in Central and South America, Africa, and South East Asia
Read more about this topic: Unified Neutral Theory Of Biodiversity
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“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
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“A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)