This morning, I was curious why GoogleScholar alerted me that two of my keywords, "termite"+"vegetation" were in a book about "Analyzing and Managing Business Networks". Dealing with "Software Ecosystems". So I had a look and it turned out they used the savannah ecosystem as an example for stable communities. I don't want to think about this as a metaphor for software in detail, but one of the next pages (p. 49) contained a table which every biologists should be interested in.
Biology, and especially evolutionary biology, produces the perhaps most influential metaphors and images of our time. People often get it wrong, but these authors here are walking on a very sophisticated thin line: they make use of the Diversity-Stability hypothesis, of the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, and of equilibrium state assumptions or maybe even Equilibrium Theory. I think they read their share of papers and are not referring to naive assumptions of the "balance of nature". To make my point: the hypotheses mentioned are still under discussion, yet they develop a strong impact in other disciplines. What we are doing as biologists does matter. However, we are not in control what people will make of it.
