Studying competition

Abstract

Why study competition? All life forms consume resources such as water, oxygen, and nitrogen. This consumption reduces the supplies available for neighbours. In order to maintain access to resources, organisms sometimes must interfere with their neighbours. These three sentences summarize the state of affairs of both the simplest bacterium and the most self-assured twentieth century human. Without resources, organisms will die, and so the contest to find, harvest, transport, store and retain possession of resources is an essential part of the struggle for survival.

“The general picture of nature which I have endeavored to delineate would be incomplete if I didnot venture to trace a few of the most marked features of the human race.” A. von Humboldt (1845) Kosmos (p.351)

There is some danger that a symposium on competition which begins with a section on definitions may so irritate later speakers that the whole meeting degenerates into a display of semantics. J. L. Harper (1961)

We start with a word whose meaning we think we understand...and begin to investigate the things which it designates. We always find that it changes its meaning in the course of the investigation, and sometimes we have to invent new words for the things we discover. J. B. S. Haldane (1985)

How every fool can play upon the word! W. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice