As science, ecology is often accused of being weak because of its basic lack of predictive power (Peters 1991) and the many ecological concepts judged vague or tautological (Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993). Also, important paradigms that dominated the ecological scene for years have been discarded in favor of new concepts and theories that swamp the most recent ecological literature (., the abandoning of the island biogeography theory in favor of the metapopulations theory; Hanski and Simberloff 1997). The apparent ease with which such changes seem to be accepted could be taken as an intrinsic weakness of ecological disciplines; in fact, many ecologists seem to have an inferiority complex with.
