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Comment by science4sail | Hacker News Reader

> I find it thought provoking that there are no natural analogues to a capitalist system. In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity.

My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady. Biological systems don't stop growing because they think that they've reached a maintainable steady state; they stop growing because they run into resource constraints.

For example, the balance between predator and prey populations is maintained via a feedback loop, not via assessments of "sustainability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

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Biological systems are not considered failures if they stop growing and adjust to live in harmony with others.

> For example, the balance between predator and prey populations is maintained via a feedback loop, not via assessments of "sustainability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

That's a straw man. I did not suggest that organisms do "sustainability" analysis. Obviously, we were discussing nature and natural processes.

> My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady.

except nature is constrained by nature laws.

Truth is in reality the Volterra equation describes an ideal environment[1], with unlimited food supply for both predators and preys and of course economists have rushed to use it to explain that capitalism is "natural" but it's as natural as plastic bags

[1]

Physical meaning of the equations

(!!! ->) The Lotka–Volterra model makes a number of assumptions, not necessarily realizable in nature, about the environment and evolution of the predator and prey populations: (!!!)

    1. The prey population finds ample food at all times.
    2. The food supply of the predator population depends entirely on the size of the prey population.
    3. The rate of change of population is proportional to its size.
    4. During the process, the environment does not change in favour of one species, and genetic adaptation is inconsequential.
    5. Predators have limitless appetite.

In this case the solution of the differential equations is deterministic and continuous. This, in turn, implies that the generations of both the predator and prey are continually overlapping.

> ideal environment

Naturally we're not discussing imaginal worlds, but the planet that we inhabit.

Nature shows us that it is possible to have richly diverse, highly competitive, and extremely long running species operating in that non-ideal, resource constrained environment. And I think we should pay attention and see if we can emulate that in our socioeconomic constructs.

> Nature shows us that it is possible to have richly diverse, highly competitive, and extremely long running species operating

but not infinite unbalanced growth disconnected from natural resources.

when the balance is broken by men or natural causes, consequences are immediate and unavoidable.

Case in point, the population of moose in Yellowstone park

The Yellowstone moose population has declined from roughly 1,000 in the 1970s to about 200 in 1996, with the northern range population down by at least 75% since the 1980s. The population declined steeply following the fires of 1988 that burned mature fir forests. Many old moose died during the winter of 1988–89, probably as a combined result of the loss of good moose winter forage and a harsh winter

nature has no way of protecting individuals other than letting them die out and replace them with something that is more fit to survive

I don't think that's a good outcome for humanity at large or a good message to transmit to the future generations...

> And I think we should pay attention and see if we can emulate that in our socioeconomic constructs.

We should pay attention to the fact that the narrative of "nature is competitive so should we" is almost completely fabricated, nature is almost entirely about sharing the resources and inter dependencies between species.

Predator-prey is one of the mechanisms, but not the only one.

Bees and flowers don't follow that pattern, like also remoras and sharks, anemone and clownfish, oxpeckers and hippos etc. etc.

It's a last resort, not a daily activity predators carry out 24/7 just because they can.

If you watch a documentary you can always see a group of predators drinking water close to a group of preys, because both need to drink, more than eating.

If we think about it domestic cats are much more dangerous for extinction than wild predators, in the US only they kill more than 2 billion birds every year and over 12 billion other mammals.

Just because we put them there without thinking of the consequences and the sustainability of such a large cat population.

Nature wouldn't have allowed it.

Anyway, we are one species, we are all humans, we are not predators and preys, it's very illogical (and always leads to terrible consequences) to compare us to the entirety of nature.

We are all under the same label in the biological taxonomy.

> but not infinite unbalanced growth disconnected from natural resources.

You seem to insist on misunderstanding what I write. Not sure where you got that.

> we are one species

To clarify, the "species" in question are corporations, collectives, and/or any organized entity made by humans, existing in the ecosystem of human economic activity. Hope that finally clears it up.

> You seem to insist on misunderstanding what I write. Not sure where you got that.

I got it from this, that you wrote

My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady

Your impression is wrong, constant growth is not the normal state of nature.

The normal state of nature is equilibrium.

Nature constantly moves towards maximum entropy.

> To clarify, the "species" in question are corporations, collectives, and/or any organized entity made by humans

See the problem?

Nature metaphors fall short every time one uses them to describe modern human society and its complexity.

In what you call "the ecosystem of human economic activity" all people coexist peacefully and none of them is the prayer or the prey, none of them is the sheep or the wolf, all of them have personalities and express different behaviors in different circumstances, sometimes they aren't even coherent, because they are people and not metaphors of the wildlife at large.

You'll never see a wolf help a sheep in need, a wolf will always be a wolf, a sheep always a sheep, a shark always a shark, while it's common among people to help each other, even for individuals who have the "predator" (with a thousand quotes around it) traits at work or when playing professional sports.

We are not organized in the same way nature is self organized.

At all.

We are very far from it, not because we are not part of nature, but because we don't have to follow its rules anymore.

The only rule we should follow and we constantly don't and end up in deep, scary, probably irreversible crisis is that "constant growth" means total depletion of the resources, which in turn means human civilization as we know it will disappear.

> My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady

I did not write that.

"In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity."

I wrote that.

My first reply was to this comment, that I quoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464963

Anyway, there's one thing we can learn from nature.

How individual cells of different nature and scope, unaware of each other, cooperate by passing messages to make living beings functional.

That would be really interesting.

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