Who among the following Scientists coined the term "Ecology" ?

Question

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Correct — option (2), Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. The word was coined in 1866 by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who built it, as he built several of his terms, out of Greek: oikos, a house or dwelling place, and logos, the study of — so ecology is literally the study of organisms in their household, the place where they live and the conditions they live among. Haeckel introduced it in his 'Generelle Morphologie der Organismen' as the name for the science of the relations of an organism to its surrounding environment, at a time when no such science had a name and Darwin's 'Origin of Species', published seven years earlier, had made the relations between organisms and their conditions the central question of biology. Haeckel was a prolific coiner of scientific vocabulary and several of his other inventions are examined in their own right — phylum, phylogeny and protista are all his — and he is remembered too for the recapitulation theory summarised in the slogan that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and for the beautifully drawn plates of 'Kunstformen der Natur'. The other three names in the option set are all genuine and important figures in ecology, which is what makes the question a real test rather than a giveaway; each of them, though, is attached to a different term or a different contribution. The one most easily confused with Haeckel is A. G. Tansley, because the term he coined — ecosystem, in 1935 — is the word a candidate meets first in any modern textbook, and it is easy to slide from 'the man who named the ecosystem' to 'the man who named ecology'. They are two different men, two different words and sixty-nine years apart. So the coining of 'ecology' belongs to Haeckel in 1866, which is option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Charles J. Krebs, born in 1936, is a Canadian population ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and he belongs to a period more than a century after the word 'ecology' was coined, so he cannot have coined it. His name is on this list because his textbook 'Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance' is among the most widely used in the subject, so students meet his name on a cover before they meet it in a history. His own contributions are experimental rather than terminological: the fence-effect experiment of 1965, in which an enclosed vole population multiplied several times over, and two decades of work in the Yukon on the ten-year snowshoe hare cycle, which showed that predation accounted for the great majority of hare deaths. He received the Ecological Society of America's Eminent Ecologist Award in 2002. Recognising a name from a syllabus is not the same as placing it in time, and a coining question is always a question about when.  (c) This is the option that catches the candidate who knows the most, and it is worth pausing over. Sir Arthur George Tansley coined the term ECOSYSTEM in 1935 — 'These ecosystems, as we may call them, are of the most various kinds and sizes' — giving ecology its central unit of study, the community of organisms together with the physical environment they interact with, treated as one system through which energy flows and matter cycles. He was a British botanist, a founder of the British Ecological Society and the first chairman of the Nature Conservancy in Britain. But 1935 is sixty-nine years after Haeckel named the discipline itself, and the two coinings are distinct events belonging to two different men. The safe way to hold this pair is as a matched line: Haeckel, 1866, 'ecology'; Tansley, 1935, 'ecosystem'. Examiners set them against each other precisely because a candidate who holds only one of the two names has an even chance of attaching it to the wrong word.  (d) Victor Ernest Shelford, who lived from 1877 to 1968, was an American zoologist and one of the founders of animal ecology, and he is remembered for the law of tolerance that carries his name — the principle that the presence and abundance of a species are limited by the range it can tolerate for each environmental factor, so that both too little and too much of a factor exclude it. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, wrote 'Animal Communities in Temperate America' in 1913 and 'The Ecology of North America' in 1963, worked on the concept of the biome, and founded the organisation that became The Nature Conservancy. All of that makes him a central figure in the subject and none of it makes him the author of its name, which was already sixty years old when he began publishing. Like Krebs, he is offered here because his name is genuinely familiar from the syllabus, and familiarity is what a coining question is designed to test against chronology.

Concept: Ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment, including the interactions of organisms with one another, and it is conventionally organised by level: the individual organism, the population, the community, the ecosystem, the biome and the biosphere. Its vocabulary was assembled over about a century and each major term has a name and a date attached, which is why questions of this kind are possible. Ernst Haeckel named the discipline in 1866, out of the Greek oikos and logos, shortly after Darwin had made the relation between organisms and their conditions the central problem of biology. A. G. Tansley named its central unit, the ecosystem, in 1935, insisting that the organisms and their physical surroundings had to be treated as one system rather than as a community set against a backdrop. Victor Shelford's law of tolerance, following Liebig's earlier law of the minimum, established that a species is limited by the ranges it can bear of each environmental factor, too much being as excluding as too little. Later workers gave the field its quantitative core — Charles Elton the food chain, the ecological niche and the pyramid of numbers; Raymond Lindeman the flow of energy through trophic levels and the ten per cent rule; Eugene Odum the textbook synthesis of ecosystem ecology. The reason MPSC and other commissions ask who coined what is that these names double as an index to the ideas: a candidate who can attach Haeckel to ecology, Tansley to the ecosystem, Shelford to tolerance and Elton to the food chain has, in effect, listed the field's four foundational concepts.

State PCS 2021 Q58 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q58 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer