  Nevertheless, an important limitation of IBMs should not go unnoticed: models of this type—that is, all models that have to be analyzed by computer simulation—have the shortcoming that they often fail to provide theoretical insight in the sense of identifying the critical heuristics or principles that are responsible for a type of behavior. Are the dynamical rules responsible for some behavior? Or the structural constraints, such as the initial conditions? Or the precise parameter values? To answer such questions—which is at least part of what theoretical understanding consists of—minimally requires the simulation of a large class of related models, often hard to achieve in practice. It remains the case that these questions can often easily be answered using traditional mathematical models: an ounce of algebra may well be worth a ton of computer simulation. Thus any defense of reductionism in ecology based on IBMs must be very limited.