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. 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.
Biological evolution is blind, but corporate evolution can be directed.
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. 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. While biological evolution and internet business evolution do have some substantial differences, there are enough similarities that comparisons can be meaningful, as long as we don't overextend the analogy. Even if we can direct the course of business evolution, that doesn't necessarily mean we should. I am consistently amazed by how efficient the invisible hand of free market forces is, especially when compared with the gross inefficiency of biological evolution.