Hearing darwinian evolution you think of members of a species desperately struggling for their lives, but that's not always how things work. For example, if a business creates a new product, the problem isn't competition, it's marketing. I'll discuss some aspects of evolution in paradise, and how to use those effects to predict coming developments. Examples will include creatures, business products, and Twitter.

Let's setup a scenario for a creature in paradise: rabbits in a garden. It'll be the Garden of Eden, because it's perpetually cared for and there'll be no winter. The rabbits will reproduce at will, but if any ever feel crowded they'll just leave to make room for others. So what happens? I've eliminated all competition, so what's left to drive evolution? The answer is birthrate. If any of these rabbits reproduce faster than others there will be more of its decedents around. More of one means less of another, since we've limited the population. Over time, the average rabbit in the garden will have more children, and have them faster.

More important is how this is achieved. More children means that they must be smaller if they're all to be cared for by the same parent. Faster rate of reproduction means that the children must have simple needs that can be met quickly to move on to the next. Both require that suitable mates are found. Relating this to business, finding mates is like marketing, more children is like mass production, and simpler children is the phenomenon of products becoming cheaper over time. We all complain about it, but as you can see, it's the natural course of evolution as long as people are buying the products.

The reason this knowledge is useful is that we are able to predict what happens next. The rabbits have evolved to be much smaller and more numerous, but that's not how they started. If they were able to survive as they were originally, what's to prevent another full sized creature from taking over that ecological niche originally occupied by the rabbits? That was the job of the rabbits, but they're small now. Large things individually have more power than small ones, either through offense or defense, by consuming them or pushing them aside.

Now we take Twitter as an example. The internet allows people to write whatever they want whenever they want and have an audience. At first people did what they were doing before and wrote large articles in depth on a topic. People read them, but it took time and energy. When these people wrote something themselves, they wrote less. Eventually Twitter comes along, reducing articles to their very simplest and increasing the number of articles beyond imagination. These articles, if we can even call them that anymore, are so simple that we're left wanting more.

Our options are articles that go on the offense or defend themselves from tweets. Offensive consumption of tweets is already happening. There are many programs out there that analyze tweets to provide a more complete description of what's happening. There are many marketing initiatives that convince others to do the marketing work for them so that they'll have something to tweet about. Defense against tweets isn't mainstream yet, probably because tweeting is so popular, but eventually people are going to promote themselves as having more substance than twitter. They will have too, because if you don't care about substance you won't even bother reading a long article when a short one will suffice. Since the short one exists, the long one MUST be substantial or risk losing its audience. Twitter promotes meaningful articles, who'd have guessed?

Businesses should be able to use these trends to create and market products. If something's popular, make a smaller, cheaper version and sell lots of them (that's been happening as long as I can remember). Once the market's saturated, make a product that incorporates the many smaller ones that people already have. For example, if a kitchen has many new appliances in it, produce an appliance cabinet that holds and powers those appliances. Some can be used inside the cabinet, some can be stored inside, and some can be pulled out on a sliding shelf as needed. That's offense, for defense, create a large appliance that makes the others obsolete, like say, an all in one food processing station installed the way an oven or refrigerator is. Get it to be installed in every new kitchen and tell people that they don't even have to buy separate appliances.

Like my other writing, I'm trying to show how to use the principles of development and evolution in everyday life. These principles apply to so many situations if we can just change our perspective a bit. They're not just for historians mapping the human genome. Evolution happens everywhere, all the time, and if we can tap into it we can work with it instead of fighting it. It takes so much less energy to allow most things to develop naturally, saving your resources for time-critical situations. Go with the flow!