A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)

(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)

The organism is a key to decoding its environment.