Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how
size and isolation determine how many species an island can support.
Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary,
calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.
Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford University said the word “ecology”
— which describes the interaction between an organism and its
environment — was coined just a little more than a century ago. By the
1960s, he said, the science of ecology was still mainly a descriptive
one, lacking theories to tie together the observations by scientists in
the field.
