PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
been some animosity between the two countries? Or could it indeed be
a natural substitution in a local microniche?
Two arguments come to mind, and both stand against the possibility
of a microniche. The first is based on relating competitiveness to age.
The average age of the Swedish laureates is 65.1, distinctly higher than
the average Russian age of 57.5 during the same period. Thus, there can
be no competitive advantage of a Darwinian nature relating to age for
the Swedes during this period, as can perhaps exist for Americans over
Europeans and, later on, for the rest of the world over the United States.
The second argument fails with my inability to justify a microniche
occupied by Russians and Swedes over this particular period of time, in
which a natural substitution might occur.
As a third hypothesis, it is conceivable that this phenomenon—of
which we may have seen the end, considering that there have been no
Swedish laureates during eighteen years following that period—could
have been triggered by the unpopular Russian intervention in Hungary.
Russian popularity dropped worldwide at that time and suffered further
losses with the actions taken later, against Czechoslovakia in 1968 and
Afghanistan in 1978. This hypothesis is reinforced by the frankly political
nature that characterizes the peace Nobel prizes.
FISHING AND PRYING
When Fisher and Pry put forth their model for competitive substitutions,
they were mainly concerned with the diffusion of new
technologies. Similar applications of the logistic function have been
employed in the past by epidemiologists in order to describe the spreading
of epidemic diseases. It is evident that the rate of new victims
during an epidemic outbreak is proportional to both the number of people
infected and the number remaining healthy, which spells out the
same law as the one describing natural growth in competition. The diffusion
of an epidemic is a substitution process in which a healthy
population is progressively replaced by a sick one. In all three processes,
diffusion, substitution, and competitive growth, the entities
under consideration obey the same law.
In their paper Fisher and Pry looked at the rate of substitution for a
variety of applications and found that the speed at which a substitution
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