Information Concept in Ecology 167 



demand that the success or failure of species be related to and 

 interpreted in a broader sociological context. Acceptance of such 

 a context carries with it the important advantage of making some 

 of the elegant formalisms (9, 23) developed in connection with the 

 study of situations of conflict available for ecological analysis. The 

 theory of games and decisions is, however, notoriously teleological 

 in basis: litigants come to odds through mutual impairment of 

 purposive behavior. This objection can be ameliorated to a very 

 large extent by regarding community goal-adapted behavior in 

 a teleonomic, not teleological, sense; i.e., the community is 

 "programmed" for goal achievement though possessing no "con- 

 scious" knowledge of the goal. This kind of thinking is widely 

 accepted in connection with the problem of DNA coding, and 

 it has been formalized in Bellman's (40) concept of information 

 pattern. In such a framework, the mechanism of natural selection 

 may still be construed to operate at an infraspecies level; for 

 example, by acknowledging" that the information pattern of a 

 species (a program containing the accumulated history of its past 

 and rules for decision making) can enable the latter to make, in a 

 completely mechanistic manner, a choice between alternative 

 strategies such as those embodied in a recent theorem (41) due 

 to Rashevsky: If two individuals work on the production of some 

 object of satisfaction (utility) and if their cooperative efforts result 

 in an increased overall productivity, then each individual will 

 have less of the object of satisfaction if each adopts a strategy of 

 maximizing his own satisfaction (egoism, competition) than if each 

 tries to maximize the sum of the satisfactions of both individuals 

 (altruisin, cooperation). 



The importance of epistemological bearing in determining the 

 character of questions which one may ask of biosystems and, 

 consequently, that of the answers elicited can be illustrated as 

 follows. Consider a proposition of the form, "The organism 

 (species, community) is adapted to . . . ." This is completely 

 acceptable biological rhetoric. Constructed in the passive voice, 

 the statement carries the implication that it is the fortuitous 

 environment which does the selecting. If we go to the active form, 

 "The organism adapts to . . .," we provide the biological sub- 

 ject with a degree of initiative in the process. This is still quite 



