ABSTRACT
The naturalists were silenced by the theorists, but all along it was the naturalists who had observation on their side, even if they could not articulate a theory to explain their observations. The theorists understood that the implications of evolved population regulation would be deep and broad and they were understandably reluctant to re-think the foundations of their science. They could not have known that the key to a new understanding was already seeded with the concurrent dawn of a computer age. Quantitative science before computers was rooted in the ability to abstract simple rules about average behavior, and long habit had made a virtue of necessity. After computers became commonplace, theorists were able to model the complex and to highlight those situations in which the predictions of individualbased models differed markedly from calculations based on averages alone. Gilpin’s model was not difficult or sophisticated, but it already demonstrated a new kind of evolutionary dynamic.
