Michael Rothschild, a business consultant, argued in a 1990 book, "Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem," [sic] that it was time to stop thinking of economics as if it followed mechanistic laws of Newtonian physics. Instead, he suggested, it was time to imagine economics as a variety of biology. He wrote: "A parallel relationship exists between an ecosystem based on genetic information and an economy derived from technical information."

In this new bionomic system, as he called it, companies and individuals found ecological niches that were suited for the kinds of information they possessed and could pass on, and evolution was taking place at a phenomenal rate.

Although economic change is much faster than biological change, both are essentially information systems. In biology the basis of life is genetic information, encoded in the DNA molecule; in "bionomics" the basis of life is technical "DNA" encoded in books, blueprints and software packages and in the minds, skills and capital of people and firms.