CONCEPT
Competitive Exclusion (Gause's Principle)
Georgii Frantsevich Gause's 1934 principle — two species competing for exactly the same resource in exactly the same manner cannot coexist indefinitely. One will exclude the other.
Gause placed two species of paramecium in glass tubes filled with the same nutrient medium. Cultured separately, each reached a stable population. Cultured together, one invariably drove the other to extinction—not through aggression but through superior efficiency at converting shared resources into offspring. The slight advantage compounded across generations until only the more efficient competitor remained. The principle has been confirmed across thousands of ecological studies and represents one of the most robust generalizations in ecology. Applied to intelligence: any cognitive niche occupied by both humans and AI with complete functional overlap will eventually be dominated by whichever form performs better. The prediction is already confirmed for code generation, case synthesis, quantitative modeling—niches where the efficiency differential is large and the overlap is nearly complete.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The principle has a critical corollary that has been as thoroughly tested as the principle itself: species that appear to compete often coexist by differentiating their niches. Robert MacArthur's 1958 study of