There’s a genuinely contentious debate running through evolutionary biology right now over a deceptively simple question: when natural selection favors an organism, is it really favoring just that organism, or is it favoring the organism together with the trillions of microbes living on and inside it, as one combined, indivisible unit? The proposal that it’s the latter — that a host and its microbiome form a single “holobiont,” selected as a package — has real, serious proponents and real, serious critics, and the argument hasn’t been settled. Strip away the biology, and it turns out platform-economics researchers have been having almost exactly the same argument about companies and their app developers, sellers, and drivers, using none of the same vocabulary, for about as long.
Scientific Foundation
The hologenome theory of evolution, formalized by Eugene Rosenberg and Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg, proposes that the combination of a host organism and all its associated microorganisms — the holobiont — functions as a distinct biological entity that natural selection can act on directly, at a level above the individual host genome. Under this view, a coral’s heat tolerance, a mammal’s ability to digest a difficult diet, or an insect’s resistance to a pesticide might depend not just on the host’s own genes but on which specific microbial community happens to be living inside it — and if that combination affects survival and reproduction, selection can shape the pairing as a unit, the way it shapes a genotype. Researchers have found genuinely striking evidence for this kind of integration: experiments selectively breeding bank voles for improved ability to digest low-quality plant material found the selected lines evolved distinct, robust gut bacterial communities alongside their own physiological changes, exactly the kind of coordinated host-microbe shift the theory predicts.
But the theory remains a live, unresolved scientific dispute, not settled consensus. Critics writing in PLOS Biology have argued directly against treating the holobiont as a primary unit of selection, and a separate theoretical analysis goes further, arguing that only a small number of symbiotic relationships are integrated tightly enough to plausibly function as genuine co-evolving units at all. The central technical objection concerns heritability, the property natural selection fundamentally depends on: a trait combination has to be reliably passed from parent to offspring for selection to accumulate its effects over generations. Most microbiomes, across most host species, are acquired through horizontal transmission — picked up fresh from the surrounding environment each generation — rather than vertical transmission, direct inheritance of a specific microbial lineage from parent to offspring. If next generation’s microbes are drawn from a shared environmental pool rather than passed down intact, the specific winning host-microbe combination that succeeded in one generation isn’t reliably preserved in the next, which is exactly what selection needs to work with.
Cross-Domain Connection
Business strategists have had their own biological metaphor running for over three decades, and it’s worth being upfront that this part isn’t new: James F. Moore’s 1993 Harvard Business Review article, later expanded into a book, explicitly modeled companies as members of “business ecosystems,” borrowing directly from ecological language of co-evolution, interdependence, and shared fate. That framing is now standard vocabulary across platform strategy research. The sharper, more specific parallel worth drawing isn’t that generic ecosystem metaphor, though — it’s the holobiont debate’s precise technical fault line, transmission fidelity, mapped onto a question platform economists have independently built an entire literature around: multi-homing.
Multi-homing describes complementors — app developers, rideshare drivers, marketplace sellers — building for or working across multiple competing platforms simultaneously, rather than committing exclusively to one. Researchers studying platform competition have documented this extensively: Uber and Lyft actively work to discourage their own drivers from multi-homing onto the rival service; game console makers have paid developers directly, sometimes over $100,000 per title, to secure exclusive ports rather than let them build for a competitor too; Alibaba has reportedly tuned its own ranking algorithms to disadvantage merchants who also sell on rival marketplaces. The entire point of these interventions is to convert a complementor from something loosely, horizontally available to any platform into something more like an exclusively bound, vertically integrated part of one specific platform’s ecosystem — a business-world attempt to manufacture the equivalent of heritable transmission where it doesn’t naturally exist.
What Remains Undemonstrated
This is a genuinely close structural echo, but it’s this piece’s own construction, not an established cross-disciplinary borrowing — no platform-strategy researcher has explicitly imported the holobiont selection debate, or its horizontal-versus-vertical transmission framing, to formally analyze complementor relationships. Business ecosystem theory draws its biological grounding from Moore’s original food-web and co-evolution language, a different and older strand of ecological metaphor than the specific hologenome-selection controversy in evolutionary biology. It’s also worth being honest that the underlying biological question this parallel rests on is itself unresolved — whether holobiont selection is a valid evolutionary mechanism at all remains actively contested, so a business analogy built on top of it inherits that same uncertainty rather than standing on settled ground.
There’s a useful nuance the biology itself supplies, though, that sharpens rather than undermines the comparison: not all symbiotic relationships suffer the same transmission problem. Some, particularly certain insect endosymbionts passed with high fidelity from mother to offspring, are vertically transmitted and face much less of the critics’ objection — they’re less contested as genuine co-evolutionary units precisely because the heritability problem doesn’t apply to them. The honest, sharpened version of the business question, then, isn’t a blanket “are platform ecosystems units of selection” — it’s a testable, more precise distinction: which specific complementor relationships are tightly, exclusively bound to a platform through deep technical integration or contractual exclusivity, closer to vertical transmission, versus which are loosely affiliated, easily multi-homed, and functionally drawn from a shared environmental pool, closer to horizontal transmission. Nobody in the platform-strategy literature has framed the question that way, but the underlying data — exclusivity deals, multi-homing rates, switching costs — already exists to test it.
Why It Matters
The value here isn’t reheating “companies are ecosystems,” a metaphor that’s done useful work in strategy for thirty years but has grown vague enough to explain almost anything. It’s that a genuinely live, technical dispute in evolutionary biology supplies a sharper diagnostic question than the loose version of the ecosystem metaphor usually offers. Instead of asking whether a platform’s ecosystem is healthy, a more precise question borrowed directly from the holobiont debate would ask what fraction of that ecosystem is actually bound tightly enough to the platform, through genuine lock-in rather than convenience, to function as part of a coherently selected unit at all — versus how much of it is simply passing through, available to any competitor willing to pay for it, no more permanently attached than a microbiome the wind blew in this season.
Human Dimension
There’s something worth sitting with in the fact that a marine biologist arguing over whether a Hawaiian bobtail squid and its bioluminescent bacteria are truly “one thing” or “two things that happen to travel together,” and a platform executive arguing over whether their App Store’s developer ecosystem is a durable competitive moat or just a crowd of vendors who could walk to a rival tomorrow, are asking a structurally identical question. Neither has borrowed the other’s language. Both are trying to figure out, from opposite ends of a very long conceptual bridge, how much of what looks like “us” was ever actually going to stay.
Sources:
1. PMC (National Institutes of Health) — “Experimental evolution of a mammalian holobiont: bank voles selected for herbivorous capability evolved distinct and robust gut bacterial communities” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12516954/
2. PMC (National Institutes of Health) — “Emerging importance of holobionts in evolution and in probiotics” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3668144/
3. The American Naturalist — “Holobiont Evolution: Population Theory for the Hologenome” — https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/723782
4. bioRxiv — “Holobiont Evolution: Mathematical Model with Vertical vs. Horizontal Microbiome Transmission” — https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/465310.full.pdf
5. Microbiome (BMC/Springer Nature) — “The hologenome concept of evolution after 10 years” — https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-018-0457-9
6. PMC (National Institutes of Health) — “Some theoretical insights into the hologenome theory of evolution and the role of microbes in speciation” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6208839/
7. PLOS Biology — “The Hologenome Concept: Helpful or Hollow?” — https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1002311
8. Wikipedia — “Business ecosystem” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ecosystem
9. Harvard Business School — “Information Transparency, Multi-Homing, and Platform Competition” — https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/20-065_7db9c6ce-a005-4bd5-becb-f47d10b554d4.pdf
10. Electronic Markets (Springer Nature) — “Digital platform ecosystems” — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12525-019-00377-4
Idea originated at artificialideas.org. Article researched and written by Claude Sonnet 5. Published at artificialideas.org.
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