Natural and human economies compared

Abstract

Abstract. Human economies and natural ecosystems (natural economies) share fundamental properties.Both are adaptive, cooperative systems where agents-individuals and groups-compete for locally limiting resources needed to live and reproduce. Successful competitors differentially propagate better knowledge and technology for making a living. Competition has favored innovations, diversification (of species or human occupations), higher productivity, greater interdependence among economic agents, and the emergence of more powerful, interactive individuals and groups, so productivity, diversity, and scales of activity have tended to increase over time. Because economic innovations accumulate, these trends have accelerated over time in both natural and human economies.The shift from mainly genetic origin and transmission of adaptation in natural economies to mainly cultural adaptation among human beings has accelerated these trends dramatically, and made the modern human economy extraordinarily dependent on nonrenewable resources and much more vulnerable to monopolies and tragedies of the commons, internally generated threats less common or less destructive in natural economies. In nature, these internal disruptions are overcome by the advent of new agents, often not involved in causing these disruptions, that compete in new ways. We argue that a comparable shift in societal norms, which govern individual and group status in human society, is needed to keep monopolies and tragedies of the commons from harming both the human economy and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

“…Problems or challenges occur within the current niche and include unfavourable abiotic conditions and difficulties in obtaining resources. Realizing opportunities may involve operating in other niches, and include access to more favourable abiotic conditions and the availability of novel resources (for biology and technology, see [114]; for behavioural innovations, see [115,116]). To the extent that unsolved problems severely limit population size (and the associated likelihood of inventions), does this also stymie innovation (e.g.…”

“…Many authors have compared and contrasted evolutionary frameworks for innovation between biology, culture and technology (e.g. [48,51,106,114] There are considerable challenges in evaluating competing hypotheses to explain macroevolutionary patterns in innovation. Rabosky [28] addresses some of the main issues in statistically evaluating the impact of key innovations on adaptive radiation.…”

Ecology and the Tragedy of the Commons

“…Similarly, if the fishery is dangerously depleted, shift some users to an alternative species. An analogy can be drawn here with nature, where ecological niches have multiplied over broad spans of geological time as species have come to exploit an increasing number of habitats and other species, and in an increasingly diverse number of ways [23]. Rich biological communities today comprise easily more than a thousand species and tens of thousands of consumer-resource interactions.…”

“…It is precisely at the level of the ecosystem, however, that tragedies occur in nature. Ecosystem-level tragedies have occurred in the past under two sets of circumstances; first, when there have been transformational evolutionary innovations, such as oxygenation of the atmosphere as a consequence of the first photosynthesizers, or the development of the first forests as the result of competition among plants [23]. Those circumstances must be viewed historically, however, and while the consequences may have set boundaries for subsequent ecosystems, similar situations today do not necessarily constitute tragedies.…”

The Limits of Adaptation: Humans and the Predator-Prey Arms Race

“…The spread of modern humans represents one of the great ecological and evolutionary transformations in the history of life. As culture amplified or replaced genes as the primary medium of change in our species, humans achieved global economic dominance in the biosphere (Vermeij and Leigh 2011). Initially, Homo sapiens and its immediate ancestors were largely terrestrial omnivores, but intertidal resources were already being used by Neanderthals as early as 200,000 years ago (Morales‐Muniz and Roselló‐Izquierdo 2008) and 164,000 years ago by modern humans in South Africa (Marean 2011).…”