Economia, uma continuação da biologia

Economia, uma continuação da biologia:

"Organisms impose themselves on their surroundings, changing them from “environment” to “fitness space.” Each organism creates a kind of “fitness valley” in its surroundings analogous to gravity wells created by bodies in space/time. The space in which organisms have non-zero fitness is Fundamental Fitness Space. The portion of fundamental fitness space accessed is Realized Fitness Space. Genealogical conservatism (also called evolutionary lagload) provides a distinction between fundamental and realized fitness space proportional to selection strength. Realized fitness space may grow, but lagload will keep it a subset of fundamental fitness space. Evolutionary innovations may increase both fundamental and realized fitness space over time. When an organism dies, its fitness valley disappears. If the organism is replaced by another with the same requirements, the fitness valley may appear to persist, but it has no independent existence. The apparent persistence results from historical conservatism of the nature of the organism—to the extent that niches are real, they are products of the nature of the organism, not the nature of the conditions. Organisms thus (re)constitute niches; they do not construct them, nor are the surroundings inherently organized into niches.
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Evolutionary lagload means the genealogical system is incapable of being distributed at maximum density in all places at all times, so there will always be unoccupied or less-than-maximally occupied fitness space. The smaller the proportion of fitness space occupied, the “sloppier” it is. As well, the “sloppiness” should increase over evolutionary time as the total information/fitness space grows, increasing the difference between what is possible and what is realized at any given time. Sloppy fitness space allows room for creativity and innovation because a lot of non-zero fitness space is always potentially available; however, sloppy fitness space does not rule out the possibility of local tightly optimized adaptations.
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The ability to move from surroundings that are deteriorating with respect to your fitness is more important in determining survival than how well adapted you are to any particular piece of the fitness space. [Moi ici: Isto tem tudo a ver com o esquema de Julho de 2008, que republico abaixo, sobre não existirem almoços grátis] And that ability (also called adaptability or resilience) is a function of how many historical alternatives you maintain in your collective genome (only successful adaptations get carried forward, so every bit of your history that you retain is a history of past success).
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Evolutionary lagload also implies that there will be parts of fitness space where reproductive overrun creates conflicts from which there is no escape."

Quanto mais uma empresa estiver ajustada a uma paisagem competitiva, menor é a flexibilidade. Quando a paisagem sofre um choque, a taxa de mortalidade é maior.

Trechos retirados de "The Major Metaphors of Evolution: Visualizing the Extended Synthesis" de Daniel R. Brooks publicado por Evo Edu Outreach (2011) 4:446–452.