More on Darwin this time on economies of networks

I'm ignorant on issues of human physiology, so I don't really know if this is true or not, but the story is that we each have an appendix that is a vestigial organ.  This means that at some time in our evolutionary history the appendix was functional, but the need that it satisfied disappeared while the organ did not.  Vestigial organs are a feature of the evolutionary approach.  It's not possible to explain them from an efficiency perspective.  (And do note that with the appendix it is possible for it to become seriously inflamed, at which time the person has an appendectomy.  So, even if it doesn't do good, it is possible for the appendix to do harm.)

This idea ha an economic analog which is called "lock in" and is a rather important concept.  Lock in belies a sense of dynamic efficiency.  The most well known example is the QWERTY keyboard.  I wrote a post about that a while back that has links to other very good references on the subject.  By the way, subsequent to writing that post I learned that Colorado College is a place that does have students take one course at a time and focus on that.  I don't know other residential colleges that do this, but it is fairly common with executive education and online learning.