Geerat Vermeij, a biologist who has become interested in economic principles, wrote a few years back a book entitled, Nature: An Economic History. In this work he interpreted biological evolution through the lens of economic principles. (See Joel Mokyr’s excellent review of this effort in the Journal of Economic Literature.) Perhaps prompted by Mokyr’s criticisms, Vermeij just published an article in the Journal of Bioeconomics that sees today’s economic system to be subject to the same constraints that shaped biological evolution over billions of years. Vermeij argues: No matter how advanced our future civilization will become, it will retain properties that all living systems possess, and it is unlikely to escape entirely from the constraints inherent in resource-dependent life. Economic policies and visions of the future must take these realities into account. We cannot eliminate local competition, voluntarily reduce energy use, avoid resource limitation, or sacrifice redundancy in favor of economic efficiency. What will also interest social scientists in this article are the descriptions of how biological evolution proceeded at the very beginning of life before sexual replication had been invented. Full article.