Stardate 20020429.1301

(Captain's log): In some ways, the expansion of life culminating in the Burgess Shale is similar to the expansion of humanity on Earth. There was a long period in which the number of people out there was really pretty small, and if you wanted to move somewhere new you probably could because no-one else was located there. The Phoenicians established a colony at Carthage, for instance, and it's unlikely that they had to conquer anyone to do it. (Maybe some local tribes got the message that they'd have to hunt somewhere else, but aside from that nothing.)

The Greeks established several cities on Sicily, and also colonized Crete, and Rhodes, and put some cities on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. But the human population of the world continued to rise, and you reached a point where if you wanted to start a colony somewhere you had to brush aside people already living there. There were not really any "unpopulated" places left, so colonies would go into lightly populated places instead. The Romans started cities in the rest of Italy, and in Gaul, and in North Africa but only after fighting wars there. Later they established several settlements in Britannia such as Londinium and Camelodunum, but only after conquering the island and chasing the most dangerous inhabitants north to Scotland, and building Hadrian's Wall to keep them out.

Historically, it seems as if it was mainly the Europeans who were into doing this. When you find large concentrations of Asians or Africans somewhere else, nearly always it was because Europeans brought them in to be cheap (often slave) labor. And as time goes on, the process of brushing aside the natives gets more and more complicated and expensive, the wars longer and more bloody on both sides. The initial colonization of American was not too difficult but as the United States spread west the result was the Indian Wars of the late 19th century, some of which got quite bloody. Dutch, and later British attempts to create a colony in South Africa resulted in the Zulu War where a native army of 30,000 well-armed and extremely well disciplined native troops had to be defeated.

But by that point, the Europeans had largely ceased trying to establish European colonies (in the sense of them being made up mostly of Europeans) and instead went with enslavement (ahem) of the locals, with a thin crust of Europeans on top ruling them (e.g. British rule of India).

By fifty years ago, there wasn't anywhere empty left. Everything worth having had been taken. The world's last attempt to create a new colony anywhere was the creation of Israel by refugees from Europe fleeing religious persecution. But unlike the Puritans, who had little difficulty finding somewhere to go (New England) the Israelis chose a place which was already heavily populated. That war is still going on, more than fifty years later, and shows no sign of ending any time soon.

What do we see happening here? There's an early stage where expansion is nearly free. There's plenty of room to expand, so when someone expands it's not at the expense of anyone else. As time goes on, though, more and more it becomes necessary for someone to lose in order for someone else to win. The disputed land is already occupied by progressively higher densities of natives who don't want the colonizers there. Eventually you reach the point where it's become completely zero-sum, as epitomized by Israel. For Israel to exist, the people already living there had to be moved out. (Note that I am not expressing any moral judgment on that in this discussion.)

You see the same thing happening in markets. A new market opportunity arises and early on there will be a large number of competitors, and a lot of variety in the product offerings. For all the production of cars now, nearly all of them are fundamentally identical in design, varying only in detail. By comparison to what was available in the early stages of the automobile market (abut 1890) it's surprisingly uniform. (Stanley Steamer, anyone?)

The size of the market in this case didn't run up against a hard limit (e.g. the size of the world) but did run up against a slowly growing limit (the number of potential customers). Before market saturation, an automobile company could expand its sales without causing any other company's sales to decline by finding new customers to which to appeal. But when you've saturated the market, you now have a situation where the only way to get new customers is to steal them from a competitor.

That's the critical transition from non-zero-sum to zero-sum. Once the market saturates, you can only grow at the expense of a competitor.

Which finally leads up to the key insight I had a couple of days ago: during the non-zero-sum expansion stage, it is the virtues of each competitor which decide how well they prosper. But after the switch to zero-sum competition, it is their faults which decide who will die. An uneven competitor, with both virtues and faults, may prosper in the early stages but will in the long run be destroyed by a competitor which is uniformly mediocre.

Take, for example, the creatures of the Burgess Shale, and consider the question of survival of young. One way to look at the success or failure of a species is to consider the product of how many offspring each adult generates multiplied by the chance that each such offspring will survive long enough to create further offspring. If that product is less than 1, then the species is in decline