In this new world of the 21st century, magnified in its nuances, but miniaturized in its totality, the invisible hand of the market exists, and is more patent than ever. There is a world company, which belongs to nobody, formed by the millions of people of each historical instant. An international and cosmopolitan company without owner that expresses an open universal order where we all participate, without knowing very well how, projecting and undertaking seemingly insignificant tasks but of a real important significance. "Bewildered by the whirlwind of the inorganic, of what revolves without orbiting, they do not always see harmony 'in fieri' of the eternal, because the present does not submit to the chess board of their head. They believe it is chaos; they cannot see the wood for the trees."

The correct interpretation of these processes of personal interdependence and intercommunication are more and more decisive. So for example, the popular phrase "survival of the fittest," was not created by Darwin, but rather it was coined a few years before by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer. Unfortunately, the phrase later became related to uncontrolled aggression and bolted violence in a bloody and competitive world.

As the biologist Isabel Jiménez de Lucas explained, the understanding of the invisible hand of the market is experiencing an evolution parallel to the most novel and less aggressive or violent interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution of the species. The phenomenon of natural selection do not operate exactly in favour of the "fittest", but rather they operate in favour of the best adapted to a concrete ecosystem (synthetic theory). A dependence of living beings exists with regard to their surroundings, (understanding by that not only the physical means, but the other species that inhabit it), in such a way that survival is associated with the population's possibility of adapting to the new environmental conditions. Adaptation, as it happens in the economic environment, implies specialization that allows the species to play a part with an advantage over their competitors under some concrete conditions (occupying an ecological niche). The extent to which a species adapts to some concrete conditions will be beneficiary, and only to the extent that it is able to adapt to variations in the conditions of the atmosphere will it be able to survive.

We have both theories that bring us finally to the same conclusion: it is not that selfishness in economic activity has an indirect repercussion on the common good, but rather the causal relationship is the other way around. The activities that best adapt to the necessities of the market and that have better repercussions for the benefit of the community, are those that will be favoured and fomented by demand, independently that this adaptation has been made pursuing a spirit of profit. Populations, within a species better adapted to a concrete environment, will be favoured by natural selection, independently from the character of that adaptation that does not necessarily have to imply a better capacity for fighting.

This coincidence of results is logical since in Ecology as well as Economics, ultimately, the behaviour of a collective of individuals is studied, and a market does not stop having a great basic resemblance with an ecosystem. The invisible hand of the market and the natural selection that facilitate the evolution of the species describe similar phenomenon. The main difference is that the collective that studies the Economy is rational and free, while the populations that inhabit an ecosystem are not. It does not distract from the coincidence, but rather it reflects a characteristic typical of the collective systems of interdependent individuals: adaptation to the means and the rest of agents of the system benefits the individual that assumes it, with independence that this assumption is at random or to a rationally certain plan. On the other hand one can also make a comparison with the theory of acquired characters of Lamarck. Organisms, because of the necessity of adapting to their atmosphere, acquire modifications during their lives that they then transmit by inheritance to their descendants.

Applied to the market we could say that the acquired knowledge is transmitted to humanity from generation to generation. It is that which avoids us suffering the process of blind selection in the market and human activities, allowing us to predict the success of certain behaviour in agreement with adaptation to the environment and other individuals.

The analogy with biological processes has not brought up for banal and simply comparative reasons. I have insisted on it because biology is about life, and the economy is also carried out by living beings, radically more alive, free and vivacious beings. It is forgotten many times that economic interdependences are between living beings. It is not a mechanism but an organism. Companies are not pure functional abstractions but rather concrete human people that mutually understand each other and blend to integrate an always original and changing microcosm according to the living laws of human behaviour.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
NEGOCIOS, Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd June 1996