Oddly, the flow of numbers begins to misbehave, quite a nuisance for anyone calculating with a hand crank. The numbers still do not grow without limit, of course, but they do not converge to a steady level, either. Apparently, though, none of these early ecologists had the inclination or the strength to keep churning out numbers that refused to settle down. Anyway, if the population kept bouncing back and forth, ecologists assumed that it was oscillating around some underlying equilibrium. The equilibrium was the important thing. It did not occur to the ecologists that there might be no
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