I wrote about the three existing varieties of capitalism last month. Now I’m going to focus on a concept from evolutionary ecology, which is the r/K selection theory, pertaining to the tradeoff between quality and quantity in reproduction, after which I will detail its connection to business.

First, I should focus on the pure ecology. An r-selected organism (r-strategist) is one that has lots of offspring, but most do not survive. For example, a spider that leaves a brood of hundreds of infants, most of which will not live even a day, is an r-strategist. On the other hand, whales and humans, with their long gestation periods and high parental investment, are much closer to being pure K-strategists: few offspring, high quality. In reality, almost none of the higher animals clearly fall into one category or the other: mammals, perhaps notoriously, show adeptness at both r- and K-selective sexual strategies, with males and younger animals more r-driven and females and older animals more K-favoring. For an animal to have both impulses is most adaptive to nature because the two drives serve different purposes. After a population crash or calamity, the r-selectors will repopulate the quickest; when the population is near or at capacity, however, K-selectors have the advantage. Since both classes of circumstance have occurred over the millions of years in which complex life evolved, both strategies are part of our heritage.

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