Australian ecologist Robert May writes a short article for Nature highlighting and demonstrating that the equations commonly used to (correctly) model changes in animal and plant populations in nature can, and quite often do, exhibit chaotic behavior. The main tool May uses is the logistic equation. This is a remarkable discovery: a deterministic system can lead to random behavior, in a rigorous and verifiable sense. This had already been verified in cosmology for the (chaotic) dynamics of bodies in the Solar System, governed by Newton’s deterministic laws.
