PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6
A Hard Fact of Life
Natural growth in competition in its simplest form is a process in which
one or more “species” strive to increase their numbers in a “niche” of
finite resources. Depending on whether or not the “species” is successful
over time, its population will trace an ascending or a descending S-
curve. In a niche filled to capacity, one species population can increase
only to the extent that another one decreases. Thus occurs a process of substitution,
and to the extent that the conditions of competition are natural, the
transition from occupancy by the old to occupancy by the new should follow
the familiar S-curve of a natural growth process.
The first connection between competitive substitutions and S-curves
was done by J. C. Fischer and R. H. Pry in a celebrated article published
in 1971. It became a classic in studies of the diffusion of technological
change. They wrote as follows:
If one admits that man has few broad basic needs to be satisfied⎯food,
clothing, shelter, transportation, communication,
education, and the like⎯then it follows that technological evolution
consists mainly of substituting a new form of satisfaction for the old
one. Thus as technology advances, we may successively substitute
coal for wood, hydrocarbons for coal, and nuclear fuel for fossil fuel
in the production of energy. In war we may substitute guns for
121