1. For both, the participants differ in one or more traits, and these traits affect their likelihood of survival. The companies that provide products and services that buyers want at prices those buyers are willing to pay will sell the most, and the companies that can do this profitably will be the ones to survive and thrive. The rest will go out of business or be gobbled up by "bigger fish".
2. Both are often zero-sum games. In the battle for scarce resources, whether a meal for an animal or market share for a company, one participant's gain is another's loss. Granted, some interactions are positive sum (since there are opportunities for cooperation), and a few are negative sum (for example, a predator that kills its prey gains less than its prey loses, and a bidding war can hurt all suppliers), but most interactions are zero-sum: a given physical object, whether a piece of food or a dollar, can go to only one participant.
3. Both often result in arms races, in which the bar continues to rise as competition gets fiercer. In simple terms, cheetahs evolved to be faster in order to catch gazelles, and gazelles evolved to be faster in order to avoid being caught by cheetahs, together creating an upward spiral of speed. Similarly, companies are much more competitive than they were just a few decades ago, because good ideas, new technologies, and best practices at one company are quickly duplicated by others.
4. In both, the selection process is heavily dependent on the environment in which the participants are competing. This environment includes both ongoing competition and the occasional catastrophe. In nature and in the markets, some environments encourage conservative behavior (e.g. a desert or a harsh winter incentivizes organisms to store food and water), while others don't (e.g. salmon swim upstream at great risk in order to spawn). Similarly, the business environment sometimes rewards risk-taking and sometimes rewards caution. Before March 2000, startups were getting almost unlimited funding, both through angel investors and venture capital and through a frothy IPO market. Investors showered money on the internet companies with the grandest long-term plans regardless of near-term unprofitability, and any company not burning through its cash was expected to fall behind its more aggressive competitors. But around that time, disaster struck: the internet's asteroid was the perception that the net was falling apart (or the reality that investors' short-term expectations were overly optimistic). As a result, the landscape changed dramatically, and fitness was redefined to mean the ability to survive an extended period of erratic revenues (whether by having high margins or by having a lot of cash in the bank). Since then, VC firms, angels and individual investors have been netophobic, and now it's difficult for even companies with good business models to get funding. Over the last year, a lot of internet companies ended up in the dotcom graveyard, and more are headed that way. The most survivally fit organisms and companies in the pre-disaster environment were not necessarily the most fit ones post-disaster.
5. For both, the participants are interdependent. An organism doesn't last very long in the absence of other organisms, and a company simply can't operate without interacting with other companies. In the business world, this interdependence has been steadily increasing in the last few decades. The problem is that the interdependence increases the risk for all participants. If one species goes extinct, this affects the other species that share the environment. And if one company goes out of business, this affects all of that company's suppliers and customers. In the normal course of business this is a manageable problem (or even an opportunity), but when the number of companies going out of business is high (as it has been recently in the internet sector), this magnifies the volatility and the potential for a downward spiral. And even if companies don't go out of business, reduced spending has a domino effect through the web of interconnected companies.

1. The mechanisms of selection are completely different. Natural selection requires not just differential survival of different traits, but also a mechanism for passing those traits to one's offspring. Business does not have anything analogous to a species, or reproduction with inheritance. (A case could be made that incubators have a primitive form of inheritance, but that's extending the idea a little too far.) Some of the similarities above compared a business with an individual organism, while others compared a business with a species, but in neither case is the analogy completely accurate. Additionally, businesses are collections of individuals who join and leave the businesses over time, a characteristic with no counterpart in biological evolution.
2. Biological evolution is slow, while corporate evolution is fast. In biological evolution, it usually takes centuries or millennia for significant changes to propagate throughout the population, but beneficial features can spread through the business world in months or years as best practices are quickly copied. In this respect, corporate evolution more closely resembles Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's mechanism of selection, in which organisms are able to pass on to descendants the characteristics they acquired throughout their lives. While this idea has been discredited for biological evolution it might be more appropriate for the business world (keeping in mind, however, that the business world's version of inheritance doesn't occur between parent and offspring).
3. Biological evolution is blind, but corporate evolution can be directed. Businesses are developed from the ground up by conscious beings, whereas evolution doesn't have a conscious entity guiding it (as far as we know). Most scientists are reluctant to ascribe a purpose to the process of evolution via natural selection, but the evolution of business need not suffer from the same shortcoming, since we are able to direct it to our own ends, at least to some degree. Also, biological evolution is restricted in terms of what it can accomplish because it moves slowly around the "state space" of what's possible, and virtually all changes are gradual, so it's restricted to those changes which are incrementally beneficial. Again, the evolution of business need not suffer from these drawbacks, because sufficiently creative individuals can launch startups that are radically different from anything the world has seen before.

• When others are panicking, buy. When others are greedy, sell. As Warren Buffett has said, "Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it."
• Do your research, so that you invest only in companies that deserve your investment. You are the mechanism by which business evolution operates, so you get to define what fitness means. Reward only the companies you believe are "built to last".
• When evaluating internet companies, place a high level of importance on safety and adaptability. Make sure the company has sufficient cash to weather a storm, and a business model that can change when circumstances dictate. Throughout Microsoft's existence, Bill Gates has had a policy of trying to maintain at least one year's worth of expenses in cash and short-term investments. Although he hasn't needed it, that's the kind of preparation that would serve internet companies well. (If everyone who reads this article follows these recommendations and volatility decreases as a result, this will change the environment and a somewhat less conservative approach will be justified, but in the current conditions smart investors should focus on companies having substantial safety nets.)

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