{"id":895,"date":"2022-09-09T15:02:19","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T14:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/?post_type=seminar&#038;p=895"},"modified":"2022-09-12T09:34:29","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T08:34:29","slug":"diversity-is-not-heterogeneity-and-the-difference-matters","status":"publish","type":"seminar","link":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/?seminar=diversity-is-not-heterogeneity-and-the-difference-matters","title":{"rendered":"Diversity is not heterogeneity, and the difference matters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Noticing differences is fundamental for building our most basic categories, including socioecological and political systems, models, and their causal explanations. We explicate and formalize two different meanings of \u2018difference\u2019: \u2018diversity\u2019 and \u2018heterogeneity\u2019. The statement \u201ca zoo is diverse whereas an ecosystem is heterogenous\u201d encapsulates our point. The same number of species and individual animals could exist in the same spatial proximity in either a zoo or an ecosystem, but&nbsp;<em>interactions<\/em>&nbsp;among species or individuals affects only an ecosystem. We argue that \u2018diversity\u2019 does not describe well collectives\u2014including ecological communities or ecosystems\u2014whereas \u2018heterogeneity\u2019 more appropriately describes collectives and should be limited to describing them. We further argue that ignoring this distinction in the meaning of \u2018difference\u2019 and sufficing with measures of \u2018diversity\u2019 for models of collective phenomena (e.g., ecologic, epistemic, social, or evolutionary groups) is a value-laden choice with non-trivial epistemic, moral, and environmental results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":902,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-895","seminar","type-seminar","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"speaker":"Aaron M. Ellison","speakers_institution":"Harvard University, Sound Solutions for Sustainable Science","host":"University of St Andrews","date_and_time":"2021-11-09 13:00:49","location":"Teams","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/seminar\/895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/seminar"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/seminar"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biology.st-andrews.ac.uk\/biodiversity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}