It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. ---Darwin
If authors sought to please only themselves, most works would
never be written;
the rest would be incomprehensible.
This work is devoted to you, reader.
May we both learn from these efforts.
I am deeply indebted to my mentors, friends, and colleagues, thanks to whom my academic development has been a sublimely rewarding experience. Foremost among these are Jennifer Walsh Weller and Mary Anne Nelson who, with Maria Harrison, Don Natvig, and Maggie Werner-Washburne, have graciously provided the advice, inspiration, and motivation essential to the successful completion of this work.
Throughout my professional development, the wisdom and guidance of past mentors (alphabetically) Jim Brown, Stephanie Forrest, Bruce Milne, Melanie Mitchell, and Bruno Sobral have been invaluable, as have rewarding interactions with countless other teachers.
Tom Kepler graciously provided funding support and access to the scholarly environment in which these investigations were conducted.
Numerous collaborators have helped me to understand the little that I do of living systems and the scientific enterprise. These include, but are not limited to (alphabetically), Mark Gijzen, Sophien Kamoun, Erik Schultes, and Rob Taylor.
Many individuals at the Santa Fe Institute, the University of New Mexico, and the National Center for Genome Resources provided welcome collegial discourse. Particularly, D. Eric Smith was gracious in collaborating to relate an arbitrary distribution of samples to a generalized accumulation curve.
Both of my parents and my two terriers provided emotional support; though they may never understand what I have been doing all these years, they are no less pleasant as friends, companions, and guides.
Most pleasant of all companions, Anna Heiniger provided intellectual
and emotional support, motivation, and boundless understanding.