Ecology and Population

This article disusses ecology and its contribution to population studies. The primary contribution is the formulation of the population-environment problem in organizational terms; adaptation is necessarily an organizational process. The bioecologist might ignore this approach from time to time without getting into serious difficulty and the social scientist may set it aside for certain analytical purposes; however neither will gain a very full understanding of population change and structure apart from the organizational context in which they occur. Thus human ecology although it may start with an interest in the similarities among all life forms converges upon and becomes identified with social science. It becomes however a synthetic social science; that is the nature of the ecological problem is of such breadth that it cannot be adequately treated from the standpoint of sociology economics political science or any other similar abstraction. Human ecology constitutes a different abstraction 1 that pertains to the interrelations among institutions rather than to a single class of institutional behavior. As a synthetic social science human ecology seems well suited to population study for population belongs to no 1 discipline.(AUTHORS MODIFIED)