New Species Need Few Competitors
Posted by Neal on January 18, 2011
Gotta blog this now, so I can recycle page G3 of the Sunday paper:
Stigall said new species, which need space and few competitors to establish themselves, didn’t have a chance to develop in an environment domianted by invaders.
(Spencer Hunt, “Driven to extinction? Researcher believes invasive species might have caused biodiversity disaster 370 million years ago.” Columbus Dispatch, Jan. 16, 2011, p. G3)
Let’s simplify this sentence and compare it to another one:
Neal’s fastest time in the 100-yard dash can be beaten by few competitors.
New species need few competitors (in order) to establish themselves.
Now let’s paraphrase each sentence by starting with There are few competitors that. You can do it with the first one, but not with the second:
There are few competitors who can beat Neal’s fastest time.
#There are few competitors that new species need in order to establish themselves.
The meaning is totally changed. With the original sentence (well, the adaptation of the original one), we could conclude that if there are zero competitors, so much the better for new species. But with the attempted paraphrase, we can conclude that zero competitors is no good; there has to be some minimum number of them in order for new species to survive.
What’s going on? It’s another quantifier/state-of-affairs ambiguity. The intended meaning of the adapted original sentence is: “New species need a state of affairs in which there are few competitors in order to establish themselves.”