ABSTRACT
Old ideas of information as “neg-entropy” were steeped in the Mechanistic Age thermodynamic notion that the universe is losing organized energy and running down directly toward disorder. In this framework, the occasional outposts where systems swim upstream like salmons against the entropic current were understood to be in some sense unnatural. These recalcitrant systems included living organisms of all types, and evidently ecological systems as well. Today, at the dawn of the Age of Evolutionary Systems (Laszlo, 1987), it is increasing apparent that such salmon-like systems are not only common, but the natural and inevitable result of inherent self-organizing processes grounded in the basic architecture of the cosmos (Fox, 1988; Goerner, 1994).
