From Lotka's biophysics to Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomics

Alfred Lotka was one of the founders of modern ecology. This paper explores Lotka's contribution to biophysical economics resulting from the marriage of the three disciplines: biology, physics and economics. Lotka founded the concept of “exosomatic evolution” to characterise the economic activities in their biophysical environment as a continuation of biological processes. Like Vernadsky, he adopted a holistic perspective of planet-system - the biosphere.Georgescu-Roegen was one of the founders of ecological economics. He explained the entropic nature of evolution and adopted Lotka's “exosomatic evolution” concept in his bioeconomic approach. Georgescu-Roegen had several warnings for economists about the irrevocability of the entropic degradation of matter-energy and the pressure on natural resources that goes hand in hand with economic processes in general.This article aims at drawing a parallel between Lotka's contribution and Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomics, by shedding light not only on their similarities, but also on the divergences that testify the novelty of Georgescu-Roegen's approach.