Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology

The author's vision is that the concepts of growth and development apply in a rigorous way to ecosystems, as well as to organisms. He describes ecosystems in terms of their networks of "who eats whom", and, using the pattern of connections and the strengths of the interactions, derives indices that quantify both system growth and development. The result is what is called the "principle of increasing ecosystem ascendency", which provides a preferred direction for system development, in stark contrast to the conventional neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.