Why are there so many species? One answer is that each species has its own 'niche'. If two species occupy exactly the same niche, says the doctrine, one will drive the other extinct. Accordingly, the natural world is a mass of subtly different niches, each exploited by a specialized species. Hence, for example, a forest is a mass of different trees. Each has its own shape of leaf with its own chemical composition, discouraging the insects and other forest creatures that live in that niche from eating it. A 'standard leaf', optimizing the uptake of solar energy and common to many plants, has not evolved.

Sadly, a niche is left undefined. Yet the central claim is often made that just one species of a given type can inhabit one. To resolve the matter, Daedalus will try out 'artificial life'. He will allow a mix of programmed species to evolve in a computer. He recalls Robert Axelrod's famous work on how cooperation evolved. Many programs playing 'Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma' competed together, and the ensemble tested the way cooperation or competition survived or grew under 'darwinian' conditions. Similarly, if we could recognize a niche in practice, we could discover if niche theory made real sense.

So DREADCO information technologists are setting up a large number of closely related species in a big computer, and are setting them all to mutate and evolve simultaneously. There are two possible outcomes. The most successful species may drive all the others extinct, leaving it in sole command of the computer. Alternatively, the programs may diversify into a whole batch of different species, each fairly secure in some niche of program space. To make this work, a niche must be properly defined in computer terms.

Daedalus also recalls how the Soviet Union tried to identify, for example, the 'best' sewing machine. It could then be made in a huge factory for the whole Union. This idea came unstuck. By contrast, Western competition lets many small manufacturers compete, and each somehow survives in its own economic niche. Indeed, some analogy must relate an economic niche to a biological one. If Daedalus can spot it in practice, he will be able to find the ideal economic number of manufacturers, and compare it with the number found in free-market economics. With luck, the free market will turn out to be as closely ideal as freely evolved darwinian ecology is in the natural world.