Banking in nature

[Pandora]

Is there an equivalent behavior to banking and money lending in nature, or animal kingdom, or is this a 100% purely human creation? I just can't think of any.
What could be the closest analog in nature?

[Alf]

Is there an equivalent behavior to banking and money lending in nature, or animal kingdom, or is this a 100% purely human creation?

It's a 100% purely human creation.

What could be the closest analog in nature?

No one, of course. They are too far, far, far away.

[Innovice]

http://content.time.com/time/health/art ... 21,00.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih9M2d-KaMA
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/w ... fruit.html

Seems like animals using money to me

As far as banking is concerned... I suppose a squirrel burying a nut is akin to a bank

[Pandora]

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700821,00.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih9M2d-KaMA
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/w ... fruit.html

Seems like animals using money to me

As far as banking is concerned... I suppose a squirrel burying a nut is akin to a bank

I think a more accurate comparison would have been if the male monkey stole the fruit from the female and then gave it back to her in return for sex. Lol!

[Alf]

Seems like animals using money to me

As far as banking is concerned... I suppose a squirrel burying a nut is akin to a bank

The example lacks money. Money is not involved in this example.

I think a more accurate comparison would have been if the male monkey stole the fruit from the female and then gave it back to her in return for sex. Lol!

The example lacks money. Money is not involved in this example, although it is indeed a more accurate comparison.

[Innovice]

I think food is being treated as money/currency in the examples

[Arminius]

Money is something between the things and those who want the things (e.g. food). The examples lack this something. Money is such a something. It is something that can be exchanged between things, between living beings, between things and living beings, provided that these living beings confide, trust, believe in it as a means of exchange (barter). Money is a promise, which will be fulfilled in the future. So, if the money shall work, the promise shall be fulfilled in the future, one has to confide, trust, believe in it; and if one really confides, trusts, believes in it, it will work, the promise will be fulfilled.

[Arcturus Descending]

Is there an equivalent behavior to banking and money lending in nature, or animal kingdom, or is this a 100% purely human creation? I just can't think of any.
What could be the closest analog in nature?

If I understand your question, Pandora, the below is what came to my mind instantly after having read it. The first time I became aware of this in bats, I was quite taken with the little ones.

The closest analogy for me would be the below...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... group.html

I think that if we stretch our minds and think out of the box we can see the bats' social behavior and altruism, in a sense, as a form of finance which provides funding for others.

I think that some investigating could probably come up with more examples from nature.

[Carleas]

That was my first thought too, Arcturus. Where the monkey examples show the exchange of goods for services, the bat examples show something like lending, which is closer to the role banks play. But note that the bats don't charge interests on their loans, so it's a bit anthropomorphizing to call it lending. It's more like a form of insurance and risk spreading.

Consider whether other social exchanges count as "lending": if one chimpanzee grooms another without the expectation that it will be groomed in return, but with the expectation that the grooming will form a social bond that will strengthen a coalition within the group, is that a form of lending? What if one chimp grooms another with the expectation that it will be groomed in return? Social animals do 'invest' in relationships, including the exchange of goods and services without expectation of immediate payout.

[James S Saint]

Money is promissory notes, scripts, or credit items in place of goods or services, else it is merely bartering.

[Arminius]

Money is promissory notes, scripts, or credit items in place of goods or services, else it is merely bartering.

Yes.

In my words:

Money ... is something that can be exchanged between things, between living beings, between things and living beings, provided that these living beings confide, trust, believe in it as a means of exchange (barter). Money is a promise, which will be fulfilled in the future. So, if the money shall work, the promise shall be fulfilled in the future, one has to confide, trust, believe in it; and if one really confides, trusts, believes in it, it will work, the promise will be fulfilled.

I guess you noticed that I was speaking of believing in money and a promise that shall be fulfilled in the future. Yes, money has to do with belief, with religion, with theology, theism, with God. Money is a secularized God (false god), buying in the sense of spending money and accelerating the circulation of money is a secularized religion, the constant jurisdiction in favor of money is a secularized theology or theism. And each bank is a secularized church.

untab

[Pandora]

This doesn't directly answer the question, but an interesting note on "self-stabilizing" properties existing in natural/biological economics, from the article on Biological Trade and Markets (biological economics):

...Human contracts are unique in nature because no other species has developed institutions as powerful as our laws and their enforcement, through which almost any trade could, in principle, be protected against breach of contract. In the world of non-human organisms, however, there are no policemen to arrest traders who play against the rules and no judges to sanction them. Most biological trade can thus be expected to have self-stabilizing properties in the sense that the actions of all traders are compatible with their individual ‘fitness incentives’ [95]. These self-stabilizing properties determine what might be called the ‘biological terms of contract’. The scope for biological trade thus seems very small in comparison with human trade—most human contracts would not be self-stabilizing in nature. Conventional theory from economics, therefore, does not apply all too well to biological trade. However, modern economists have learned that human traders are not as committed to their contracts either. This puts modern economics in much closer proximity to the life sciences [94].

(b) How is biological trade self-stabilized?

Bobtail squids (example E5) provide a particularly intriguing example of self-stabilized trade. They have to ensure that the commodities they offer are selectively transferred to cooperative partners, that is, to bacteria from which they receive light in return [84,96,97]. This is difficult to achieve, however, since a great variety of bacteria exists in the sea and, in addition, the association between the squid and its partners is formed anew in each generation. Shortly after hatching, the squid recruits its first bacterial ‘passengers’. A population of Vibrio fisheri then quickly builds up in the light organ. After this initial recruitment, no more bacteria are ‘admitted’ and every day 90–95% of the bacterial population are pushed out by the squid [84]. But what enables the squid to select the luminescent bacteria, V. fisheri, and why should these actually produce light?

While recruiting bacteria as partners, the squid uses antibacterial defences to protect its entry sites. This apparently paradoxical way of opening the door for bacterial guests makes it possible to receive just a few of those that are ‘welcome’ [96]. The wanted guests, V. fisheri, seem better able than unwanted bacteria to resist the squid's defences. Furthermore, by letting just a few bacteria in, the squid probably makes it harder for unwanted invaders to hide among V. fisheri. Once in the light organ, the selected bacteria produce the enzyme luciferase that catalyses an oxidation reaction through which blue-green light is generated. The squid senses this cooperative behaviour and changes some of its gene expression patterns according to the perceived luminescence [98]. By mechanisms that are not fully understood yet, the squid manages to eliminate dark individuals of V. fisheri from its light organ [96]. This creates the incentive for V. fisheri to actually produce light and stabilizes the trade. The evolution of this now highly advanced mutualism was probably facilitated by the fact that luciferase interacts with host defences when it generates luminescence by indirectly disrupting the host's production of reactive oxygen species [84,97]. Hence, the bacteria's answer to the host's antibacterial defences almost inevitably generates the light that benefits the host.

Returning now to the general question of how trades are self-stabilized, the evolution of increased dependence of trading partners on each other can strongly protect trade from cheating [95]. This is nicely demonstrated by the example (E3) of the mutualism between acacia trees and their ant defenders. The extrafloral nectar offered to the ants contains glucose and fructose but virtually no sucrose [99,100]. This makes the nectar unattractive to unspecialized ant species because diet choice of ants in general seems to be strongly driven by sucrose content. The mutualistic Pseudomyrmex ant species, however, depend on the tree's extrafloral nectar, having lost the ability to digest sucrose [100]. The ‘ant bait’ is offered away from the tree's flowers, because preventing pollinator visits to flowers is certainly not in the interest of the tree. It is a likely evolutionary scenario that the acacia trees altered their sugar production, because this had the advantage of making them less attractive to non-mutualistic ants, and that this in turn created the need for the mutualistic ants to specialize. Finally, being well defended by an ‘ant army’, the acacia seems to have been under selection to restrict its ‘budget for self-made defences’. This budget cut manifests itself in the tree's leaves, which do not contain any of the alkaloids used for defence by other Acacia species. What results from these evolutionary steps is a mutual dependency between ant and acacia that is strong enough to create a high degree of ‘common interest’ [92]. Common interest is, of course, the best prerequisite for a trade unhampered by cheating and exploitation.

Many mutualistic relationships are not stabilized by common interest. In the yucca plant example (E4), the plant needs fertilization services of its mutualistic moth but a moth individual would, in principle, have fitness benefits from depositing an excessive amount of eggs, thereby overexploiting the plant. Yucca plants, however, actively limit this option for fitness gains. They abort those flowers [50,51] into which the moth has laid excessive amounts of eggs. This stabilizes the trade but it leaves one question open. What caused the evolution of selective abortion? Presumably, it did not evolve in the first place for reasons of sanctioning, since the first sanctioning yucca plants would not have benefited from the effects of their sanctions on moth evolution. It is much more likely that the plants originally had a more generally used shut-off mechanism that prevented the allocation of resources into damaged flowers and fruit. This mechanism would have had sanctioning effects as a by-product and could therefore be considered as pre-adaptation for the self-stabilizing trade between yucca plant and yucca moth. Similarly, in rhizobia–legume mutualisms (example E1), the plants tend to selectively stop the resource flow into parts of their roots, in which rhizobia draw on the plants' resources without providing nitrogen in return. This could be demonstrated for soya beans in experiments with rhizobia acting in an N2-free atmosphere [101]. The general question of how sanctions can evolve and how they work has received much attention in recent years [46,95,102–104].

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 7/20150101

And another one on the same topic:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017 ... l-markets/

I'm not too sure, but I would think that hypothetically, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that some type of lending for profit does exist in nature, through some type of mutualistic (mutualistic/parasitic) relationship.

[Zero_Sum]

There is no currency usage in the animal kingdom beyond humanity in nature, that is a unique form of social tyranny and control that only human beings possess.

In the animal kingdom there is only quid pro quo within interactions of a primitive impulsive and instinctual variety.

[Arminius]

Especially, the "animal kingdom" lacks promises for the remote future, lacks belief or trust in those promises, lacks institutions like banks that hords those promises and works with them (mostly by misusing those promises).

[Zero_Sum]

Especially, the "animal kingdom" lacks promises for the remote future, lacks belief or trust in those promises, lacks institutions like banks that hords those promises and works with them (mostly by misusing those promises).

Animals are instinctively impulsive living moment to moment (simplicity) whereas human beings have become consumed with long term planning in terms of the future (A time that has not yet come) which we weaponize using against each other.

[Arminius]

But all those promises for the remote future need the belief or trust, faith, hope, cofidence in them. So, there are two sides needed: (1) the promise and (2) the belief in it. Just think analogously of the coin or banknote (paper money): both have two sides too. Look:

Example: € 50.

€_50.jpg (65.59 KiB) Viewed 3839 times

And before you can believe in such an abstract phenomenon like a promise, you must have a pretty large brain with a pretty large consciousness and the capability of understanding highly abtract conceptions.

[Zero_Sum]

Arminius:But all those promises for the remote future need the belief or trust, faith, hope, cofidence in them. So, there are two sides needed: (1) the promise and (2) the belief in it.

You know what us cynics call that Arminius? A con job but then again money itself is an essential form of con-artistry that revolves around con-fidence.

[James S Saint]

Actually, that was supposed to be "confinesse", but the con artist slip in a misspelling so as to distract.

[Arminius]

Arminius:But all those promises for the remote future need the belief or trust, faith, hope, cofidence in them. So, there are two sides needed: (1) the promise and (2) the belief in it.

You know what us cynics call that Arminius? A con job but then again money itself is an essential form of con-artistry that revolves around con-fidence.

I already said that there are cynics who are opposed by kyniks.

[Zero_Sum]

Arminius:But all those promises for the remote future need the belief or trust, faith, hope, cofidence in them. So, there are two sides needed: (1) the promise and (2) the belief in it.

You know what us cynics call that Arminius? A con job but then again money itself is an essential form of con-artistry that revolves around con-fidence.

I already said that there are cynics who are opposed by kyniks.

Yes, you did. Of course not everybody can speak the fatherland's tongue.

[Arminius]

Almost all bankers are cynics. So, if you want to be their opponent by being cynical, then you should also linguistically clarify this difference and call yourself a "kynik". (Cp. Peter Sloterdijk, "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft" [translation: "Critique of Cynical Reason"], 1983.) But you are right with your statement: "not everybody can speak the fatherland's tongue".

A "kynik" is a "counter-cynic", an opponent of the cynic. And I can only hope that kyniks will not succumb to the danger of becoming their counterpart, the cynics.