PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7
Competition Is the Creator and
the Regulator
The original saying is attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
Translated from the ancient Greek it says: “War is the father and the
king of everything.” However, the meaning of war goes well beyond the
customary image of violent conflict. Heraclitus, who has been characterized
as the first Western thinker, sees war as a divine force, a natural
law that distinguishes gods and people, declares masters and slaves; 1 a
law that creates and controls what happens. In that sense such a law is
more appropriately interpreted as competition than ordinary warfare.
Twenty-five hundred years later Charles Darwin arrived at conclusions
of comparable importance concerning competition when he
formulated the principle of survival of the fittest, otherwise known as
natural selection. In so doing Darwin provoked the wrath of contemporary
churchmen but the joy of biologists who built a successful science
on his ideas. Mathematicians such as Vitto Volterra and Alfred J. Lotka
put this theory into equations capable of describing the intricate interaction
between predator and prey in species populations. At the heart of
this formulation lies the logistic function, the mathematical representation
of a population growing under competition.
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