ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a system in which everything affects everything else, and the complexity of the system of interlocking cause-effect pathways confronts the readers with a superficially baffling problem in scientific analysis. As Watt’s volume suggests, systems models have long been part of the biologist’s standard arsenal for the analysis of living communities of organisms. The fact is that the kind of systems analysis outlined in Watt’s volume is something much less ivory-tower: the modeling of “recurrence relationships” and “mutual-causal processes” in ecological systems. All ecosystems are characterized by exchanges of matter, energy, and information among their components. Most ecological studies monitor the transfer of matter or energy, but leave aside the information exchanges that regulate such transfers. The Valley of Oaxaca looked promising because its large early urban center, Monte Albán, had presumably been supported by successful agriculture.
