Posts
Many flowers species use bees to handle cross pollination. They have a synergic relationship where the flower feeds the bee in return for it spreading the flowers pollen to other flowers.
To help the bee find the flower's pollen, it builds these rather large eye-catching petals that reflect light frequencies that will catch the bee's eye.
These petals serve little known purpose beyond attracting the bee's attention. It would appear that these resource could be better invested in deeper roots, longer stems and extra leaves. Interestingly, it is important enough to the flower to market to the bees that it willingly invests its resources in petals.
Taking this understanding and looking over nature you begin to see how deep rooted marketing is. Birds will get prettier to attract a better mate, Bombyliidae (bee flies) look like bees to repel predators, Whales scream across the ocean looking for company.
If you are to condemn marketing, realize you are infact condemning a very core property of the world around you.
Good point. Did you happen to read "Bionomics"?
ReplyDeleteHaven't read it -- from the summary I could imagine it would be an interesting read.
ReplyDeleteI thought of Bionomics here because he discusses exactly your point on pp215-218 wrt to both organisms and firms. Wether or not advertising takes place depends on whether that part of the network is consumer-limited or resource-limited.
ReplyDeleteI associate what you just said with mating rituals. Not with any kind of marketing done by humans.
ReplyDeleteI don't need Cilit Bang to survive.
Analogy FAIL. :P