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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner
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Book Review: Ecological Stoichiometry, by Victor Niederhoffer
11-Apr-2006
The book Ecological Stoichiometry by Robert Sterner and James Elser contains a land mine of provocative hypotheses about the way humans and the environment react that might provide the basis for a big and highly profitable view of markets. It combines the most powerful ideas of science; natural selection, the periodic table of elements, conservation of matter and energy, positive and negative feedback, the central idea of molecular biology, and the ecosystem to explain how chemical elements come together to form living systems. It pays particular attention to the constrained proportions in which substances react. Most of the chapters concern the balance between the composition within and the composition without and what makes for homeostasis and growth. A favorite chapter is "Stoichiometry in Communities." They answer the question, " How could we know before we observe them together when species will react strongly or weakly, or even change their interactions from beneficial to inhibitory or neutral. We saw several examples where even the sign and magnitude of ecological interactions changed according to stoichemetric balance. There is so much to know in this world and so little time to do it; the components of the balance sheet of companies relative to the totals available in the economy, the movements of interest rates, stock markets and foreign exchange. These changing interactions might be well considered from this framework.
