Google's "Don't Be Evil" philosophy is encoded in the evolution of the human fist

Fists compensate for fangs in nature; Algorithms compensate for aggression in business
George ILIEV

Because of the unique proportions of the bones of the human fingers, a clenched human fist is 4 times as rigid as the fist of a chimpanzee, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. This allows humans to deliver bone-breaking blows with their knuckles and may partly explain how humans evolved (and survived) through an era of large predators while at the same time losing the fangs that served a defensive role in earlier humanoids and in present-day great apes.

Human fingers have evolved to fold neatly into a fist without leaving a gap in the middle. This makes the structure stiff, while chimpanzees fingers curl up in a way that always leaves the centre hollow. The human thumb adds extra support to the structure by buttressing it sideways and turns the fist into a formidable defensive tool.

The evolution of the fist resembles the rise of Google and its "Don't Be Evil" motto. By giving up the fangs of aggressive corporate techniques such as cornering markets, leaning on suppliers and squeezing long hours out of employees (think investment banks), Google has built a "gentle empire" of innovation and creativity. Google's development of superior data crunching algorithms is the virtual fist that punches heavy blows in the online world.

(Photo: Google HQ, Mountain View, California, May 2009)

(Photo: Human fist, March 2013)

Dog domestication resulted from "free market style" diet adaptations, not from "central planning style" capture and taming

Dogs volunteered for domestication by adapting themselves to eat starchy food
George ILIEV

The dominant theory about the domestication of dogs has so far postulated that humans caught wolf pups to use for hunting and gradually tamed them into dogs through selective breeding. However, new DNA research at the University of Uppsala published in Nature shows that it was probably the wolves who volunteered for domestication by developing mutations that allowed them to digest starchy foods - found in the rubbish tips of early agricultural human settlements.

The wolf ancestors of modern dogs must have stumbled upon this unoccupied ecological niche - just like companies find lucrative underexploited niches in a free market and adapt to exploit them accordingly. This possibly disproves the earlier hypothesis that the domestication of dogs came about as a result of the "central planning" of humans, intervening by capturing and taming wolf pups.

A somewhat similar starch-focused digestive mechanism may have been at play in the domestication of the cat. Cats have not developed special mutations to break down starch but instead have longer digestive tracts compared with their wild ancestors. This allows them to better absorb nutrients from starchy leftovers.

(Photo: Patches & Lamb, domestic dogs, Atlanta, 2010)

Brand proliferation and contraction cycle resembles rise and fall of melanin content in human skin

Product portfolios and evolutionary adaptations sometimes go full circle to get back to square one
George ILIEV

(Photo: Chimpanzee, Wikipedia)

Early humans had pink skin covered by black fur, similar to modern chimpanzees. Around 2 million years ago as humans were gradually losing their fur to allow easier sweating and cooling, their skin melanin content started to increase as a protection against ultraviolet radiation. This process was driven by natural selection as dark-skinned homo sapiens had an evolutionary advantage under the tropical sun over pink-skinned furless creatures. However, as humans migrated out of Africa and into northern latitudes, the high melanin content of dark skin became an obstacle for the absorption of UV light and the production of vitamin D in the body. This resulted in less calcium in the bones which made them brittle. Natural selection again stepped in, leading to the loss of pigmentation and the return of pink skin in latitudes higher than 46 degrees north, closing the cycle with the early pink-skinned humans.

A similar cycle can be observed in the evolution and loss of fins in ocean-dwelling animals. The fins of ancient fish were lost and became legs when they moved onto land and became tetrapods. The legs were lost and became fins again when the ancestors of whales and dolphins moved back into the ocean.

Many companies share a similar history of cycles of product/brand proliferation and contraction. Starting with one main product, companies like Unilever, General Motors and Google gradually developed an array of brands. However, as market conditions changed and the managerial complexity increased, brand proliferation peaked and the three companies above started scaling down their brand/product portfolios to focus on fewer core products.

The most famous novel in Chinese literature, "Three Kingdoms", encapsulates this cyclical nature in its opening sentence: "The World under Heaven long divided, must unite; long united, must divide".

Evolution through multiple small mutations in line with Nassim Taleb's innovation by "aggressive tinkering"

Nature's "tinkering" with mouse colour gene through multiple mutations works better than one major mutation
George ILIEV

Deer mice in Nebraska changed their coat colour over an incredibly short period of 8,000 years as a result of nine separate mutations in a single gene, rather than in one single big mutation, a recent discovery by Harvard evolutionary biologists reported in Science reveals. With each mutation, the originally dark-coloured migrant mouse species obtained a lighter and more camouflaged coat, which made easier its survival in the lighter-colour environment of the prairie. This mechanism shows how natural selection produces fine adaptations through series of many small changes, rather than through a handful of big mutations.

This discovery could lend support to Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile" theory of innovation and scientific progress, in which he asserts that "aggressive tinkering" with a product leads to better and more innovative results than directed research. Taleb compares the R&D process with cooking, which "relies entirely on the heuristics of trial and error": adding an ingredient or spice to a dish is usually followed by tasting that verifies if the addition has led to an improvement. Crucially, the cook has the option but not the obligation to retain or discard the resulting mix, just like natural selection retains the positive adaptations and discards the negative.

(Photo: Nassim Taleb, photographed by Sarah Josephine Taleb, Wikipedia)

Specialisation comes with age and because of age

Biological and psychological processes related to ageing lead to job specialisation
George ILIEV

(Photo: Elderly man, Wikipedia)

With age, neurobiological and psychological processes make us less interested in novelty and lead us to stick to what we know. (Scientific American, March 2013). "Old people do not need to remember as much new material as the young do because they are already familiar with so much of what they experience."

Professionally, this natural phenomenon is correlated with, and possibly driving, job specialisation: As we get older, we become more comfortable with our professional field and less comfortable with new fields. Experience builds on this trend and creates "the expert".

Specialisation pays off with higher income though it also entails higher risk of job redundancy. Last but not least comes the comical danger of overspecialisation: "knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing”.

Disgruntled employees resemble malnourished algae

Algae under threat become poisonous; Employees under threat become litigious
George ILIEV

(Photo: Algae, Wikipedia)

"When Gulf of Mexico algae do not get enough nutrients, they focus their remaining energy on becoming more and more poisonous to ensure their survival." The algae become two to seven times more toxic when experiencing a shortage of phosphorus, a major nutrient. This protects them from their predators - grazers such as zooplankton.

A similar mechanism is at play when employees feel their job is under threat. Such employees often become litigious in order to keep their job or to extract the maximum compensation.

Could human attraction to still water account for frothy IPO prices?

Attraction to shiny surfaces = attraction to shiny stocks
George ILIEV

(Photo: The Bean, Chicago, 2009)

Humans are attracted to shiny surfaces as an evolutionary adaptation that helps them easily locate habitats with clear stagnant water (Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science).

Could this evolutionary adaptation explain, at a higher conceptual level, the fact that the stock price of "flashy, funky and cool" companies such as Facebook is often overvalued at initial public offerings (IPO). Or could the "peacock tail" theory of sexual selection have a role in our preference for the colourful and the flashy? In any case, human investors seem to find it hard to resist anything that glitters, even if they consciously know it is not always gold.

Advertising helps humans surmount two evolutionary obstacles in food selection

A product that looks too different is either not noticed or consciously shunned
George ILIEV

(Photo: Fruit Loops, Wikipedia)

If something looks unfamiliar, it does not get eaten. Animals avoid eating unfamiliar berries or insects for two reasons: "dietary wariness" (fear of eating something poisonous) and "apostatic predation" (difficulty to spot prey that looks too different).

Humans in the supermarket do not need to worry about poisonous berries or insects, though high fat or sugar content may be almost equally undesirable characteristics of a food product. On the other hand, apostatic predation is something consumers often fall victim to, e.g. when unsuccessfully hunting for a familiar product whose package has been changed by the manufacturer.

This is where advertising steps in: by creating awareness for a cereal product, a commercial makes it both acceptable (i.e. reassuring that it is not harmful) and easy to spot among the packages of fried crickets and roasted beetles that British supermarkets regularly stock up. Looking too different and unfamiliar would help a package of cornflakes hang on to the supermarket shelf not for the love of marketing but for evolutionary reasons.

Cleaning symbiosis exists in nature but not in corporate HR

"Reverse recruiters" can take care of unwanted employees

George ILIEV

(Oxpeckers eating ticks off the back of an impala, Wikipedia)

Symbiotic relationships are abundant in nature: from lichens (an organism that consists of fungi and algae locked together) to cleaning symbiosis (where a small bird or fish feeds off the parasites living on the skin of larger animals).

Cleaning symbiosis in the corporate world is limited to firms specialising in collecting recyclables or unwanted equipment. However, no recruiting company specialises in taking care of unwanted employees, who may be a hugely undervalued resource.

A "reverse recruiter" can play three important roles: 1) placing unwanted/underperforming employees in a new job where they can generate more value; 2) training these employees for the next job; and 3) keeping such employees away from dabbling with unfair dismissal lawsuits and negative media publicity.

"Reverse recruiting" is not even a matter of reciprocal altruism: it is self-serving and has the potential to be an entirely profit-driven business, as companies would have an incentive to pay the "reverse recruiter" to get the unwanted employees off their payroll. The beauty of it is that the "reverse recruiter" can charge both the previous employer and the next employer. Any different from eating ticks off the back of an impala?

Companies can be worse than plant roots in self/non-self recognition

Competition and miscommunication among company departments harms the organisation: the story of Volvo
George ILIEV

(Mangrove tree, Wikipedia)

As the roots of a plant grow, the root branches of the same organism recognise each other (the underlying mechanism for that is still unclear) and stay out of each other's reach as much as possible: "plants develop fewer and shorter roots in the presence of other roots of the same individual". This is an evolutionary adaptation that minimises direct competition for nutrients between parts of the same organism. On the contrary, the roots can speed up their rate of growth if surrounded by roots of other plants, in order to be successful in competing externally.

Sadly internal cooperation is not always the norm in the corporate world. Company departments can be notoriously bad at synchronising their actions and sometimes even compete against each other. A case in point is the following story at car-maker Volvo in Sweden in the mid-1990s:

Volvo was accumulating a large stock of cars painted green. To reduce the stockpile, the sales department began selling green-coloured cars at a discount. Unfortunately no one told the manufacturing team down on the production line. No sooner had the production managers seen demand for green cars perking up, they immediately ramped up the production of green cars to build up the inventory (a typical supply-chain phenomenon known as the bullwhip effect)

Thus the cooperative plant roots seem to avoid "biting the dust" even if they literally do this all the time.

More than just a name: Car plants and green plants share asymmetric structures

Companies appear to have the asymmetric structure of plants rather than the symmetry of animals
George ILIEV

The physical world is asymmetric on the macro scale: coastlines, river systems and mountain ranges adopt an infinite variety of forms. Animals, on the other hand, usually have either bilateral symmetry (along an axis) or radial symmetry (around a central point), as a result of a predetermined embryonic cell division process. Starfish and sea urchins, uniquely among animals, even have both: bilateral symmetry at the larval stage and  fivefold radial symmetry as adults. The eggs of birds also have bilateral symmetry but one end is sharper than the other in an evolutionary adaptation that makes the egg roll in a circle, preventing a destabilised egg from rolling out of the nest.

(Basic fern symmetry, Sino-Burmese border, Dec 2011)

Plants fall in between the two extremes. Their growth follows a pattern, e.g. the Fibonacci sequence of prime numbers determines the repeating spiral pattern of tree branches and plant leaves. Yet because of the constraints imposed by its fixed environment, a tree may grow in an irregular shape, e.g. to fill a gap in the forest canopy. This would rarely happen in animals, where the outcome is binary: any development of major structural irregularities usually leads to the death of the organism.

How do corporate organisational structures compare with rivers, plants and animals?

Internally, company departments resemble the systems/organs in animals. There is always someone sitting at the top ( = the brain, though Dilbert might disagree); at operational level ( = muscles); a finance department ( = heart and circulation). The organs do not all need to be symmetrical: animals have pairs of some organs but only one heart and liver and the reason for this is not well understood. Yet, the overall symmetry in the animal body is preserved. In contrast, the size of company departments/divisions can vary so widely that the entire shape of the organisation rarely has any symmetry. Think of the Coca Cola Company, which is now not much more than a huge marketing and new product development department. This imbalance makes corporate structures conceptually incompatible with the rigid structure of an animal body and much more closely aligned with the diverse shape of plants.

The question is what causes the lack of symmetry. Plant adjustments in shape are a substitute for movement in animals. Varying their shape is the only way for plants to overcome the physical constraints in their environment and gain access to sunlight, water and nutrients, whereas a grazing animal just needs to move on to greener pastures. Do companies evolve as geographically-rigid, rather than mobile, organisms with little scope to change their location? Can this explain why their internal departments adjust their structure instead? This makes companies similar not only to plants but also to cities. It might also explain the coincidence of having one and the same word for manufacturing plants and photosynthesising plants.

(Basic fern symmetry, Bolivian highlands, July 2009)