Gambling for existence; a discussion of some theoretical problems in animal population ecology.

This is going to be another paper on the well-known controversy about the regulation of the densities of animal populations. When I became interested in the application of mathematical and statistical methods in population ecology, I soon found that it is practically impossible to do something sensible in this direction without having a clear idea about the fundamental logical structure of the controversy because opposing parties do not merely accuse each other of stating hypotheses unlikely in the light of facts known to them; they rather tend to accuse each other of producing unscientific nonsense. With the aim of obtaining a good understanding of what it is that is wrong here; I attempted a kind of logical analysis of the basic features of the opposing theories. The result of this attempt is the present study which, I hope, will provide some contribution towards clarification of ecological thought.