With the new focus came an interest in studying plants and animals and their relationship with the environment. Scientists began to understand animals and plant populations as "communities." By the early 1900s, botanists and zoologists, both in England and the United States, studied plant and animal "communities" independently until a new science, "ecology," emerged that could embrace both fields.
While the new science had some foundation in Darwin's concepts of evolution and natural selection, most historians of ecology cite an indirect rather than direct role for Darwinism in the growth of the science of ecology. They suggestthat internal changes in the fields of biology, botany, and zoology created ecology.
The independent science of ecology began in the 1890s. Many cite the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) as the most likely "father" of ecology, based on his holistic approach to biology. Haeckel's ideas about energy flow in a closed system formed the foundation of modern ecology half a century after his work.
Impact
In the early 1900s, the new science of ecology struggled to establish its independence from biology and zoology.
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