ABSTRACT
While individual conspecifics of course come and go, the continuation of a species attests to the overall fitness of its members. This suggests that such organisms are interacting with their environment in a statistically adaptive fashion, that is, in a manner that maintains the repro ductive integrity of the species as a whole. By hypothesis, then, members of surviving species are in the aggregate successfully negotiating their sometimes cluttered environs, locating and acquiring sustenance, and avoiding threats to fitness (e.g., predators or toxins), among other tasks. Evidently such organisms possess a ca pacity for tailoring their actions with respect to the opportunities (for good or ill) they encoun ter; they are attuned to, and in tune with, their environment; they have, it seems, solved the problem of perception and action.
