Darwin introduced the idea of the survival of the fittest in the natural order of the world, but little did he know that this ideology will define and reshape business enterprises forever.
Answers
By Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen
University of Chicago Press, $45/ £29
Few thinkers have had quite the same impact as Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution was so powerful and compelling that it became the new orthodoxy, affecting how we think about many aspects of our lives. Not least of these influences has been on the way we do business. So-called social Darwinism has played an important role in shaping our understanding of economics, markets and organisations.
For example, when discussing business organisations we often speak of them “adapting” and “evolving” to meet conditions in their changing “environment”, as if our business organisations were some sort of Galápagos seabird and not large and highly complex institutions.
Answer:
Answer:
Genetic variation is an important force in evolution as it allows natural selection to increase or decrease frequency of alleles already in the population.
Genetic variation can be caused by mutation (which can create entirely new alleles in a population), random mating, random fertilization, and recombination between homologous chromosomes during meiosis (which reshuffles alleles within an organism’s offspring).
Genetic variation is advantageous to a population because it enables some individuals to adapt to the environment while maintaining the survival of the population.