Of course, not everyone will be bothered by this, and some people may not play long enough at one time for it to be an issue. And again for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s a constant environment and there’s no particular time at which organisms reproduce or die (e.g., there’s no "mating season"), so reproduction and mortality are always happening, albeit at per-capita and total rates that may vary over time as prey and predator abundances vary. Predators convert consumed prey into new predators, and they die. You’ve got some prey that reproduce and die, and some of those deaths are due to predators. 3: And to clarify further, no, I’m not trying to argue against the notion that population dynamics are ultimately a matter of individual organisms giving birth, dying, and moving around. Now, you could try to drill down even further, down to the underlying physiological (or whatever) causes of individual births and deaths, and the underlying mechanisms linking per-capita birth and death probabilities to species’ abundances.

The toy car is pushed into a line of dominoes, the last of which falls onto another toy car, which rolls down a ramp and runs into a ball, what is billiards which rolls down another ramp… In shot 499 the butler leads Bill down this hall to the closed door of the pool room. But, it’s no longer a big hassle to add insulation to the garage door itself. For many people, the garage is the best (or only) place for a home pool table. On average, this grade is about 1 inch over 8-feet. Since the most common home pool table is 7.5-feet long, this makes for about an inch slope when the table is placed lengthwise in the garage. The sticks used in pool and long, slender and lean. Tables are usually 7-foot (2.1 m) long, and feature pockets with rounded cushion openings, like snooker tables. "The prey go up, which causes the predators to go up, which causes the prey to crash, which causes the predators to crash." In lecture, even I’ve been known to slip and fall back on talking this way, and when I do the students’ eyes light up because it "clicks" with them, they feel like they "get" it, they find it natural to think that way.

When humans think about causality, they find it natural to think in terms of sequences of events. That is, SEMs mesh with and reinforce our natural tendency to think about causality in terms of colliding billiard balls. Using a cue stick, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to pot other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each time the opposing player or team commits a foul. In the real world one could in principle write down, in temporal order of occurrence, all the individual birth and death events in both species. A prey individual was born, which caused prey abundance to increase by one, which caused… No. What that increase in prey abundance did was slightly change the expected time until the next birth or death event, by increasing prey abundance and (in any reasonable model) feeding back to slightly change the per-capita probabilities per unit time of giving birth and dying.

For instance, let’s say the system is at equilibrium, meaning that predator and prey abundances aren’t changing over time. You knock over the first domino, which knocks over the second, which knocks over the third. At the start of a frame, the object balls are positioned on the table as shown in illustration A. Starting with the cue ball in the "D", the first player executes a break-off shot by striking the cue ball with the tip of their cue, aiming to hit any of the red balls in the triangular pack. That’s why colliding billiard balls are a paradigmatic example of causality in philosophy. There are no sequences of events here. But you’re never going to find something that lets you redescribe predator-prey dynamics in terms of sequences of events, each causing the next. Your cue strikes the cue ball, causing it to roll into another ball, causing that ball to roll into the corner pocket.