McNamara Fallacy

Biological Parallel

You can count eggs in a nest but not parental attentiveness, yet attentiveness predicts fledgling survival better than egg count. You can measure tree height but not mycorrhizal network strength, yet the network determines drought resilience. The McNamara Fallacy—prioritizing measurable over meaningful—pervades ecology. What's quantifiable (population size, biomass) often matters less than what's hard to measure (relationship quality, network robustness, stress resilience). Biology constantly reveals that the most important variables resist easy quantification.