Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2021

Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a renewable resource extended throughout the environment provides the energy necessary to sustain life, including movement and reproduction. Since the resource doesn't regrow immediately, it generates competition between individuals and therefore provides a natural selection pressure from which evolution of the genetic traits is observed. As a result of this, several phenomena characteristic of living systems emerge from this model without having to introduce them explicitly. These include speciation and punctuated equilibrium, competitive exclusion, and altruistic behaviour from selfish rules.

Furth Prize Competition, 1989

The ecosystems of we are part of have been produced by evolutionary forces. These forces, which we have termed natural selection and genetic mutation operate on the genotypes of individuals and are expressed in their specie-characteristic phenotype's ability to adapt to environmental circumstances. The primary environmental characteristics are climate, terrain and food resources. The availability of food is a result of geoclimatic conditions and is then further subject to competition, both intra and interspecie. Success is deemed to have occurred if indivduals propagate another generation, and the macroscopic results are growth and decay of relative populations of the various species. Population growth is indicative of greater "fitness" for the environment of members of that species. The operating principles are localized for the individual, ie., local optimization of food acquisition, offspring and conservation of genetic endowment drive the end results subject to macro processes of geological and climatic changes over which the individuals have no control. Now economic systems bear superficial resemblance to biological ecosystems in that there is competition for scarce resources, growth/decay of employment by economic enterprises and growth/decline in per capita wealth of a social system. Thus, it has been suggested that the paradigm of biological evolution can provide insights into the dynamics of economic systems. Classical economists postulated the principle of maximization of individual benefit subject to climatic and natural resource endowments as the driving force of economic activity, a principle comparable to the biological model of natural selection. Taking this a bit further, genetic endowment would be analogous to technological capability as expressed by the cultural endowment of a society. Cultures mutate over time to adapt to new circumstances. Thus economics is the evolutionary equivalent of food acquisition and consumption in the non-human biosphere. Since, for many millenia, until the Neolithic revolution, human efforts were primarily directed at hunting and gathering, primitive economics is just that, the search, location, capture, distribution and consumption of food. The Neolithic revolution allowed the human species to replace the search, location and capture steps with production through the cultivation of selected plants and the domestication of animals for food, labor and materials. Distribution and consumption steps were still necessary. The communication, command and technology infrastucture needed for capturing or producing food is fundamentally the same for primitive and modern societies; they are the foundations for political and economic relationships. Modern societies are characterized by greater complexity, larger populations and larger production/distribution systems, but the issues are the same. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summarized, exact mathematical model for the dynamics of evolutionary economic systems. That model can be applied to the evidence that is plentiful. It represents a digest of work that has been developed over the last twelve years and incorporated into a number of papers presented at various conferences [Karasik, 1983. 1984, 1985, 1986]. We will also show how the social dynamics intertwine with the economic ones and define the processes of cultural growth and decay, once more bringing the human element into center stage. The basic starting point for this model are two fundamental principles. Starting from the out-growth of economics from biology (and thereby physics), we find that certain relationships are invariant. Invariant principles are known as conservation laws. Conservation of energy is the most famous of these laws. This law operates in the biological realm as well in the guise of the

Ecological Economics, 2010

Ecological economics stands in theoretical and ethical opposition to many aspects of neoclassical economic theory. Despite their sound critiques of that theory, ecological economists have not settled on an alternative theory of human behavior. As a potential alternative, Norgaard’s socioecological coevolutionary framework remains underspecified in terms of variation, heredity, and selection. I review concepts and insights on human behavior from

Bio-economics, a hetrodox integration of economic demand-supply philosophy and thermodynamic entropy-exergy principles, provides a fruitful representation for emergent, self-organizing systems. Darwin’s natural selection in mod- ern synthesis with mutation, gene flow, and genetic drift presents a biological framework of the thermodynamic conflict betweeen entropic dispersion and exergic concentration. In conjunction with the dynamics of the logistic map, Part I demonstrates that nonlinear Hardy-Weinberg-like product interaction of these opposites can induce complex homeosta- sis in the spirit of competitive cooperation that neither of the adversaries, acting in disregard of the other, can emulate. Sustainability emerges as a specialized measure of complexity characterized by a full Cause Effect causal feed- backs, that “supply” of symmetry-breaking genetic and epigenetic variation in conflict with the symmetry-inducing “demand” of natural selection define as antagonistic direct and inverse arrows of the real and its negative world. Our goal in this Part is to interpret neo-darwinism in the light of nonlinearity to account for the acknowledged complex interactions between the environment, phenotype and DNA-genotype. Part II exploring this interaction in relation to the dynamics of the logistic difference equation λ x(1 − x) with its effect-supply of the present feeding as cause-demand of its immediate successor, establishes that under extreme conditions of disequilibria with the direct and inverse feedbacks vigourously exploiting each other for their combined and enduring well-being scripted by the give-and-take of mutual trade-off, the thermodynamics of Second Law of entropy can be integrated with complex-chaotic dynamics of the logistic to uniquely define the parameter λ in terms of thermodynamic temperatures alone. This dynamic-thermodynamic handshake defines (Defn. 2, Sec. 7.2) holistic sustainability as “the art of healthy enduring living from the past into the future, choreographed by the competition- cooperation-adaptation of self-organizing, emergent present” of limit cycles and periodic points. Beyond the reduc- tionist confines of the incomplete and partial feedbacks of fixed and nascent periodic points — neo-classical economics and Gaia Daisyworld of weak and strong sustainability serving as examples of Brundtland sustainable “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” — holistic sustainability of self-organizing emergence defines the essence of life and living in a delicately balanced vulnerable fragility.

Life depends on energy. But how do changes in life, i.e., evolution depend on the available energy? To give an answer requires that the theory of evolution by natural selection, is not communicated only in biological terms, but expressed in general thermodynamic terms so that the energetics of evolution can be rigorously analyzed. Moreover, when evolution is written as an equation of motion, we will learn what evolution and natural selection actually are.

2003

The evolution of a consumer exploiting two resources is investigated. The strategy x under selection represents the fraction of time or energy an individual invests into extracting the first resource. In the model, a dimensionless parameter α quantifies how simultaneous consumption of both resources influences consumer growth; α < 0 corresponds to hemi-essential resources, 0 < α < 1 corresponds to complementary resources, α = 1 corresponds to perfectly substitutable resources, and α > 1 corresponds to antagonistic resources. An analysis of the ecological and evolutionary dynamics leads to five conclusions. First, when α ≤ 1, there is a unique singular strategy x * for the adaptive dynamics and it is evolutionarily stable and globally convergent stable. Second, when α = 1, the singular strategy x * corresponds to the populations exhibiting an ideal free distribution and a population playing this strategy can invade and displace populations playing any other strategy. Third, when α > 1, the strategies x = 0 and x = 1 are evolutionarily stable and convergent stable. Hence, if the populations initially specialize on one resource, evolution amplifies this specialization. Fourth, when α is slightly larger than one (i.e. the resources are slightly antagonistic), there is a convergent stable singular strategy whose basin of attraction is almost the entire strategy space (0, 1). This singular strategy is evolutionarily unstable and serves as an evolutionary branching point. Following evolutionary branching, our analysis and numerical simulations suggest that evolutionary dynamics are driven toward an end state consisting of two populations specializing on different resources. Fifth, when α 1, there is only one singular strategy and it is convergent unstable and evolutionarily unstable. Hence, if resources are overly antagonistic, evolutionary branching does not occur and ultimately only one resource is exploited.

Human Ecology, 1989

pologists to study human subsistence patterns. This paper explicitly tests an hypothesis posed by about energy utilization in the highland community of Nuiioa, Peru. Smith's hypothesis is largely confirmed, as greater energy availability is associated with increased caloric consumption and improved measures of health and well-being among the wealthier sectors of this population. However, an energetics model does not provide a full understanding of the behavior and biology of this population. Interacting so-cial~economic and environmental forces impose different constraints on different sectors of this population. These differences are in turn reflected in variation in adaptive strategies and in biological well-being. Future work in human ecology will benefit from (1) attention to the interaction of ecological and socio-economic forces, (2) greater appreciation of intra-populational variation in adaptive strategies, and (3) explicit linking of variation in adaptive strategies to differences in human biological parameters.

Journal of Bioeconomics, 2012

The success of extant species is largely due to their ability to adapt in the face of constantly changing environmental conditions. Natural selection is the biological mechanism that takes advantage of opportunities to promote spontaneous variations and facilitate evolutionary development. The character of this biological opportunism is considered here, placing it firmly within the context of various social and economic principles-notably individualism, industrialism, utilitarianism and consequentialism-that have characterised the philosophy of the modern era. However, this purely opportunistic approach, and its myopic emphasis on immediate problem solving, has serious shortcomings within both life and business practice. These are examined here in contrast to some of the alternative approaches found in biology and economics theory. The nature and relationship of function to utility in biology is also given particular consideration, as is the issue of incrementalism in the development of complex adaptive features. The methodological reductionism at the heart of evolutionary biology certainly does offer insightful empirical results reported in the scientific literature. Nonetheless, natural selection is observed to be a purely reflexive mechanism and not one capable of producing the kind of innovation necessary for the more revolutionary changes in an organism's systems.

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

Biological Theory

Efforts have been dedicated to the understanding of social-ecological systems, an important focus in ethnobiological studies. In particular, ethnobiological investigations have found evidence and tested hypotheses over the last 30 years on the interactions between human groups and their environments, generating the need to formulate a theory for such systems. In this article, we propose the social-ecological theory of maximization to explain the construction and functioning of these systems over time, encompassing hypotheses and evidence from previous ethnobiological studies. In proposing the theory, we present definitions and two conceptual models, an environmental maximization model and a redundancy generation model. The first model seeks to address biota selection and its use by human populations. The second emphasizes how the system organizes itself from the elements that were incorporated into it. Furthermore, we provide the theoretical scenario of plant selection and use from an evolutionary perspective, which explicitly integrates the phylogenetic relationships of plants (or other living resources) and human beings.