 Philosophers of science have thought of the core questions of the discipline as these. What is the structure of scientific theories? What is the logic of confirmation of theories by evidence? What is a scientific explanation? What is scientific objectivity and does the presence of values in science thwart that objectivity? With regard to the Lande’s metapopulation model and MacArthur and Wilson’s equilibrium model, we can ask the first three questions. First, we can recognize that these are models that abstracted and idealized representations of objects like northern spotted owls and fauna on Mangrove islands in Florida. Likewise, we can look at evidence that confirms and disconfirms them. Lande argues that the assumption that northern spotted owls were at a demographic equilibrium was supported by the available evidence; Simberloff argued that measures of species turnover rates disconfirmed the equilibrium model as applied to the fauna on the Mangrove islands. We can argue whether there is sufficient evidence that the assumptions of the equilibrium model apply to mountain tops as opposed to islands. One might also argue that the equilibrium model explains the species area effect. For those case studies the traditional questions are present and philosophical answers to them can be articulated. We can also ask whether Lande’s work was sufficiently objective given that he did the analysis for “political” purposes. However, when we consider SCP, things look very different. Consider place prioritization procedures and multi-criteria analysis. The former considers a set of cells, surrogates, and targets and tries to solve to find the smallest set of cells such that every surrogate is met at their target and find those places subject to a constraint for which coverage exceeds the target. These are optimization problems to be solved by an algorithm via a computer program. The latter considers a set of alternatives and using a suite of criteria representing our values, which determines a non-dominated set of alternatives to inform design of conservation networks. This brings tools from economics, policymaking, and operations research to help identify solutions to problems. In fact, much of the work that is done in systematic conservation planning is done using software packages like the following: