Excerpt

In this deceptively short 1972 paper, Robert (“Bob”) May set a new foundation for how researchers understood and explored the relationships between diversity, complexity, and stability in large, dynamic systems composed of interacting components. That modest paper and a related monograph published the following year had implications that challenged and transformed understanding at the time and whose impact, influence, and inspiration continue to reverberate today.

May, a physicist by training and profession, had reached a critical transition in his career in the late 1960s when he became interested in ecological research, in part due to his concern for the social responsibility of science. Two key features of ecology at that time set the stage for his 1972 paper: 1) most ecologists were unconvinced of the value of mathematical approaches, which were thus vastly underutilized; and 2) conventional wisdom suggested that “complexity begets stability” in ecosystems, a longstanding notion that dated back at least to the origins of ecology as a distinct area of research (e.g., Forbes 1880).

Bibliography

Anderson, R. M., and R. M. May. 1992. Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Forbes, S. A. 1880. “On Some Interactions of Organisms.” Bulletin of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History 1 (3): 3–17.

Gardner, M. R., and W. R. Ashby. 1970. “Connectance of Large Dynamic (Cybernetic) Systems: Critical Values for Stability.” Nature 228: 784. https://doi.org/10.1038/228784a0.

Haldane, A. G., and R. M. May. 2011. “Systemic Risk in Banking Ecosystems.” Nature 469: 351–355. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09659.

MacArthur, R. 1955. “Fluctuations of Animal Populations, and a Measure of Community Stability.” Ecology 36: 533–536. https://doi.org/10.2307/1929601.

May, R. M. 1972. “Will a Large Complex System Be Stable?” Nature 238:413–414. https://doi.org/10.1038/238413a0.

—. 1973. Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. 1st. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—. 1974. “Biological Populations with Nonoverlapping Generations: Stable Points, Stable Cycles, and Chaos.” Science 186: 645–647. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.186.4164.645.

—. 1975. “Deterministic Models with Chaotic Dynamics.” Nature 256: 165–166. https://doi.org/10.1038/256165a0.

—. 1976. “Simple Mathematical Models with Very Complicated Dynamics.” Nature 261:459–467. https://doi.org/10.1038/261459a0.

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