Viewing Companies as a Species

It is common that banks would provide credit for companies that are over 2 years old. This screening rule that banks use to filter out budding companies helps banks avoid a lot of bad credit. The reasoning is that statistically it has been show that a large percentage of companies close within the first 2 years of their inception.

It would be interesting to go even deeper with statistics about companies in the same fashion that ecologists use life tables to gather and analyse data about the life and death of organisms. By doing so, one could gain much more insights and be able to understand the business world and the business landscape on a deeper level. Different types of companies can thus be treated as different types of species and a lot can be learned.

Coexistence of Similar Species

Thought

Again trying to force in the theory of evolution by finding 'excuses' for the coexistence of similar species, like what was done with presence of different species.

Digest

• Communities support a variety of species performing apparently rather similar roles
• Antarctic seals have undergone radiative evolution
• Weddell seal:
• feeds primarily on fish
• has unspecialized dentition
• Crab-eater seal:
• feeds almost exclusively on krill
• its teeth are suited to filtering these from the sea water
• Ross seal:
• feeds mainly on pelagic squid
• has small, sharp teeth 
• Leopard seal:
• feeds on a wide variety of foods, including other seals and, in some seasons, penguins
• has large, cusped, grasping teeth
• Apparently very similar coexisting species may differ in subtle ways:
• morphology
• physiology
• responses to their environment
• role they play within the community of which they are part
• The ecological niches of such species are said to be differentiated from one another

Weddell seal

Question

I don't buy it, the idea of explaining the evolution of similar species to be a result of granular differences within the same geographical environment.

Specialization within Species

Thoughts

The idea of mobility makes me think about people of Upper Egypt and how their mingling with Egyptians from the Nile Delta area creates a sort of hybridization which is healthy. On the other hand, people who live in Siwa and have been more or less in isolation from the external world for thousands of years have been forced to adapt more to their environment. Also people who live in Aswan in Egypt and are Nubians might have less genetic variation and are more adapted to their environment.

Digest

• The term species will be defined in the next section.
•  An ecotype was coined in 1922 by Göte Turesson for plant populations "to describe genetically determined differences between populations within a species that reflect local matches between the organisms and their environments."
• Only if the forces favoring divergence are strong enough to counteract the mixing and hybridization of individuals from different sites and  there is sufficient heritable variation on which selection can act evolution then forces the characteristics of populations to diverge from each other.
• Immobile organisms become differentiated most notably while mobile organisms are less exposed to the forces of natural selection and therefore do not have to match themselves to a fixed environment as much as immobile organisms have to.

Questions

1. Why is there no continuum of species along a spectrum of variation among organisms?
2. What is the definition of a species?
3. What about variation within the same species according to the environment they live in?