Larry M. Frolich

Department of Biology

EDUCATION IS NOT:  Teaching people things they don't currently know

EDUCATION IS:  Teaching people behaviors they don't currently practice

Although we usually think of the word economy in such human terms as trade, profits, markets, and finance, it applies just as aptly to the systems of which living things other than humans are constituents and architects…An economy is a collective whole, a system of metabolizing, interacting, smaller units or entities that are themselves economies.  The constituent units adapt to, and bring about changes in, their environment as they compete locally for energy and material resources.  Economies are built on living things, which complete cycles of work by  coupling chemical transformations that alternately use and release energy in the context of an architecturally and organizationally constrained physical structure.  Economies thus have knowable properties not possessed by any one of their individual members.  The work of life—growth, replication, and activity—creates meaning and information and ultimately leads to a history in which self-interested parties who cooperate to fashion larger wholes give rise to and replace each other. Evolution—descent with modification—is thus an expected and universal historical process in economic systems.  It occurs because economic units compete locally for resources, and because only those entities that acquire and retain the necessities of life in the face of such competition and of uncertainty persist.  Cooperation among economic players reduces rivalry at one level, but creates more potent competitors on a larger scale.  Trade and cooperation (or mutual exploitation) thus lead through self-organization, or co-construction, to regulation of resource supply and consumption, and to complex interdependencies that emerge as the common good for the larger economy and for many of its constituents, especially for those that wield disproportionate power.

                                    --Geerat Vermeij, 2004.  Nature:  An Economic History, pp. 1-2

Biology Department                                                                                                                         In Ecuador:

Yavapai College                                                                                                                      Casilla 10-01-699

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