What makes Darwinian hydrology "Darwinian"? Asking a different kind of question about landscapes
By C. Harman, Peter Troch. 2014
90 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There have been repeated calls for a Darwinian ap- proach to hydrologic science, or for a synthesis of Darwinian and Newtonian approaches, to deepen understanding of the hydrologic system in the larger landscape context, and so de- velop a better basis for predictions now and in an uncertain future. But what exactly makes a Darwinian approach to hy- drology "Darwinian"? While there have now been a number of discussions of Darwinian approaches, many referencing Harte (2002), the term is potentially a source of confusion because its connections to Darwin remain allusive rather than explicit. Here we suggest that the Darwinian approach to hydrology follows the example of Charles Darwin by focusing atten- tion on the patterns of variation in populations and seeking hypotheses that explain these patterns in terms of the mech- anisms and conditions that determine their historical devel- opment. These hypotheses do not simply catalog patterns or predict them statistically - they connect the present struc- ture with processes operating in the past. Nor are they expla- nations presented without independent evidence or critical analysis - Darwin's hypotheses about the mechanisms un- derlying present-day variation could be independently tested and validated. With a Darwinian framework in mind, it is easy to see that a great deal of hydrologic research has al- ready been done that contributes to a Darwinian hydrology - whether deliberately or not. We discuss some practical and philosophical issues with this approach to hydrologic science: how are explanatory hypotheses generated? What constitutes a good hypothesis? How are hypotheses tested? "Historical" sciences - including paleohydrology - have long grappled with these questions, as must a Darwinian hydrologic science. We can draw on Darwin's own example for some answers, though there are ongoing debates about the philosophical nature of his meth- ods and reasoning. Darwin used a range of methods of histor- ical reasoning to develop explanatory hypotheses: extrapolat- ing mechanisms, space for time substitution, and looking for signatures of history. Some of these are already in use, while others are not and could be used to develop new insights. He sought explanatory hypotheses that intelligibly unified dis- parate facts, were testable against evidence, and had fertile implications for further research. He provided evidence to support his hypotheses by deducing corollary conditions ("if explanation A is true, then B will also be true") and compar- ing these to observations. While a synthesis of the Darwinian and Newtonian ap- proaches remains a goal, the Darwinian approach to hydro- logic science has significant value of its own. The Darwinian hydrology that has been conducted already has not been co- ordinated or linked into a general body of theory and knowl- edge, but the time is coming when this will be possible.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f73c04d14ede3f6858cec3428dec536888364f0
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Citations in the corpus
- A one‐parameter Budyko model for water balance captures emergent behavior in darwinian hydrologic models (2014, unknown): “Hydrological responses, such as evaporation and runoff, across time scales are signatures from the co-evolution of natural systems [Newman et al., 2006; Wagener et al., 2010; Gentine et al., 2012; Wang and Wu, 2013; Harman and Troch, 2014].”
- The evolution of process-based hydrologic models: Historical challenges and the collective quest for physical realism. (2017, unknown): “…humans and the environment shapes the storage and transmission of water across the landscape [Rodríguez ‐ Iturbe et al. 1992; Eagleson 2002; Schymanski et al. 2009; Schymanski et al. 2010; Sivapalan et al. 2012; Harman and Troch 2014; Zehe et al. 2014; Clark et al. 2016; Grant and Dietrich 2017].”
- Understanding the budyko equation (2017, background): “Budyko’s approach is “Darwinian,” as opposed to “Newtonian” [11,12], because it foregoes reductionist explanations based on constitutive equations [13] in favor of establishing universal relationships based solely on the mass and energy balance laws to which any physical system must conform.”