Jan 7, 2018 06:19 AM
How Evolution Can Make Sense of the Stock Market
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...cs/549725/
EXCERPT: . . . In a complex system like the stock market, rationality and irrationality coexist. Determining what strategies make the most sense depends on the constantly changing conditions, says Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT’s business school.
To better understand complex financial markets, a growing number of economists are looking beyond math and physics, the roots of the field’s historic models, to what might seem an unrelated discipline: evolutionary biology. Much like a biological organism living in an ecosystem, the stock market is a network. As cells do within a human body, or as bacteria do in their colony, investors and companies interact with, influence, and compete with each other—and they need to adapt for survival.
Proponents of this so-called adaptive-markets approach, sometimes known as “evolutionary economics,” believe it has big implications for investment strategies, from how to make financial systems more stable to understanding innovation, growth, and inequality.
The theory reconciles behavioral economics—which examines psychological factors in economic decision-making—with traditional efficient-markets economics by taking into account that things change over time, says Lo, who has written a book called Adaptive Markets. Neither alone is the complete story, he says.
One of the hallmarks of networks is that properties emerge from them that you can’t predict from a one-on-one relationship...
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...cs/549725/
The key to healthy plants is healthy microbiomes
https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/t...77.article
EXCERPT: . . . It’s long been known that legumes such as peas, clover, soy and beans host nodules on their roots and gain benefits from the bacteria inside them. School textbooks recount this as classic symbiotic relationship; bugs converting nitrogen in the air into ammonia for the plant and receiving sugars in return. Today, soybeans planted across millions of hectares are inoculated with such bacteria as a coating on their seeds to boost yields.
For years plant scientists had tried without success to move these nitrogen-fixing nodules into cereal crops so they too could fix nitrogen from air and cut down on fertiliser use. Following the sugarcane discovery, researchers realised that if they could use this unusual microbe to fix nitrogen inside major food crops it would be a boon for agricultural industry. [...] Azotic Technologies, is now in its seventh year of field trials, which have taken place in the US, Europe and Asia. They have shown a reduced need for nitrogen fertiliser and increased of yields in wheat, maize and rice. The field trials are set to continue in 2018.
[...] Over the past decade the wider availability of DNA sequencing technology has brought to light the huge variety of bacteria within a single plant. We now know that a microbial zoo – the equivalent of the human microbiome – exists inside many different plant and tree species. And, intriguingly, the same types of microbes keep showing up. ‘There is a core microbiome that is winnowed from what is a highly complex community within soils,’ explains Jeff Dangl at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, a leader in this field. The surprise is not how diverse the soil community is but the steep decline in diversity closer to the roots, then on the roots and finally inside the plant, where perhaps only 200 species gain a pass. ‘Plants have immune systems and only some strains are allowed in,’ says Dangl....
MORE: https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/t...77.article
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...cs/549725/
EXCERPT: . . . In a complex system like the stock market, rationality and irrationality coexist. Determining what strategies make the most sense depends on the constantly changing conditions, says Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT’s business school.
To better understand complex financial markets, a growing number of economists are looking beyond math and physics, the roots of the field’s historic models, to what might seem an unrelated discipline: evolutionary biology. Much like a biological organism living in an ecosystem, the stock market is a network. As cells do within a human body, or as bacteria do in their colony, investors and companies interact with, influence, and compete with each other—and they need to adapt for survival.
Proponents of this so-called adaptive-markets approach, sometimes known as “evolutionary economics,” believe it has big implications for investment strategies, from how to make financial systems more stable to understanding innovation, growth, and inequality.
The theory reconciles behavioral economics—which examines psychological factors in economic decision-making—with traditional efficient-markets economics by taking into account that things change over time, says Lo, who has written a book called Adaptive Markets. Neither alone is the complete story, he says.
One of the hallmarks of networks is that properties emerge from them that you can’t predict from a one-on-one relationship...
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...cs/549725/
The key to healthy plants is healthy microbiomes
https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/t...77.article
EXCERPT: . . . It’s long been known that legumes such as peas, clover, soy and beans host nodules on their roots and gain benefits from the bacteria inside them. School textbooks recount this as classic symbiotic relationship; bugs converting nitrogen in the air into ammonia for the plant and receiving sugars in return. Today, soybeans planted across millions of hectares are inoculated with such bacteria as a coating on their seeds to boost yields.
For years plant scientists had tried without success to move these nitrogen-fixing nodules into cereal crops so they too could fix nitrogen from air and cut down on fertiliser use. Following the sugarcane discovery, researchers realised that if they could use this unusual microbe to fix nitrogen inside major food crops it would be a boon for agricultural industry. [...] Azotic Technologies, is now in its seventh year of field trials, which have taken place in the US, Europe and Asia. They have shown a reduced need for nitrogen fertiliser and increased of yields in wheat, maize and rice. The field trials are set to continue in 2018.
[...] Over the past decade the wider availability of DNA sequencing technology has brought to light the huge variety of bacteria within a single plant. We now know that a microbial zoo – the equivalent of the human microbiome – exists inside many different plant and tree species. And, intriguingly, the same types of microbes keep showing up. ‘There is a core microbiome that is winnowed from what is a highly complex community within soils,’ explains Jeff Dangl at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, a leader in this field. The surprise is not how diverse the soil community is but the steep decline in diversity closer to the roots, then on the roots and finally inside the plant, where perhaps only 200 species gain a pass. ‘Plants have immune systems and only some strains are allowed in,’ says Dangl....
MORE: https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/t...77.article
