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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on March 21st,

2017. I'm Steve Murski. Can biology teach us anything about how to survive

in the business world? On March 17th, an essay appeared on the Scientific American website,

making the case that, quote, biological systems offer valuable lessons on how to manage

under extreme uncertainty. And these are some uncertain times, all right.

The authors of the article,

Building a Resilient Business, inspired by Biology,

are Martin K. Reeves and Simon Levin.

I spoke to them by phone.

Martin, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your day job is?

So I'm Martin Reeves. I'm a senior partner with the Boston Consulting Group.

I run something called the BCG Henderson Institute, which is our think tank for new approaches to strategy and management, borrowing and developing ideas from beyond business and in this case

from the sciences and simon i'm the professor at princeton university in ecology and evolutionary

biology my phd is in mathematics and i've been interested for more than a half a century

in applying that mathematics to solving problems of the world.

I began applying it to problems in biology and still do that, and ecology and evolutionary biology.

And I hooked up with Martin five or six years ago, and we meet about once a month to talk about issues of common

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