"A creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith's basic argument for a rational economy"

 

"A 'snail link' — an article from the NYT Science Times that caught our politico-philosopho-scientific eye ten years ago," we captioned this scanned image three years back. "Not having the option of URL linking in those pioneering days, this protoblogger clipped the thing, underlined important passages, sent xeroxed copies to our small circle of interested parties and then carefully filed it away in a drawer, from which we were able to pull it this afternoon after all these years."

"Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution [as they should], but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics," writes Max Borders at TCS [via Roger L. Simon via Instapundit], touching deeply upon one of the ur-themes of our blog. First a snippet from Borders's piece [a must read in full], and then on to what we've been blogging about, a voice in the wilderness, forever:

Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith's basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits."

 

Look to the animals. They know everything, if only we had the sense to listen to them. Tiny, above, looks down upon us from the top of the shower stall.

We happened to stumble upon a spanking new study at Science Daily headlined "Evolutionary Process More Detailed Than Previously Believed," a welcome antidote to lingering creationistic tendencies among those who should know better. Now a few excerpts from our post of February 2005, "Bloggers are cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open":

"Meanwhile, the fossil record showed crabs, fish and others who would dine on these shelled delicacies diversifying and becoming better at cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open," goes the snail link from February 7, 1995, referred to in our last post. For ten years this brilliant/crackpot explanation has been festering in our brain. We're talking here about what went wrong with the Democrats, not to mention their leftist allies in academia, the MSM and the larger world of international progressivists.

We were able to retrieve and reread the actual newspaper clipping from our snail files this afternoon — a New York Times Science Times article about the work of blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, who "reads the embattled history of a snail in the dents and damage to its shell . . . mollusks appear to have evolved ever more rugged armor to protect their delicate flesh just as their predators developed more vicious weaponry"…

This was the very same insight of something we read the other day on one of our everyday fave blogs — don't remember which one but will link if we can find it — where the point was made . . . and it's HUGE . . . that leftists have become soft and flabby in their thinking over the last 20, 30 or more years because their fellow travelers in the mainstream media — supposed to be keeping them honest — have been giving them a free ride, even as thinkers of the right, not enjoying such reflexive support, have been honing our debating and intellectual survival skills. That leaves the left soft and lazy and the right battle ready.  Enter the bloggers, stage right.  As paleontologist Dr. Vermeij might say, "It isn't going to be pretty." Googling the good doctor, we were thrilled to see his field studies of animal evolution had led him to very much the same place Thomas Sowell has come to in his studies of economics. Re Vermeij's new book, Nature:  An Economic History, from the Princeton University Press:

"From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources.  This universal truth unites three bodies of thought — economics, evolution and history — that have developed largely in mutual isolation.  Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems — competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback — govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle."

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature. The long-repressed voices of opposition in a free society, now ringing loud and clear through talk radio, cable TV and — of course — the blogosphere, will force the left to rethink its arguments or go extinct.

Frightening to think that the utopianists are now back front and center. Gramscian marches through the institutions happen?

Update: Look to the animals. The lion lies down with the lamb at Modulator's Friday Ark #227.

Comments

[Byron00]

For a very interesting analogy between market coordination and biological phenomena, see Ch. 3 of Don Lavoie, 'National Economic Planning: What is Left?' (Cato 1985). The comparison is between (1) the way the disparate behavior of widely distributed individual market participants is coordinated via changing prices and (2) the way the behavior of individuals in termite colonies is coordinated via reflexive chemical secretions (pheromones). In both cases, individuals act on very fragmentary, localized knowledge, but those bits are automatically compounded and coordinated in a way that continually directs and redirects resources toward activities of highest demand. In both cases, rational allocation that might seem to require a central plan and administration occurs with neither, and with a level of adaptive efficiency that no centralized authority could ever come close to matching.

[Sissy Willis]

Byron00: Fascinating stuff! Thanks for dropping by and sharing your special lore with me and my readers. :-)

[Soft Cialis]

By assuming that agents in the economy develop rational expectations...?
By assuming that agents in the economy develop rational expectations, are you also assuming that they carry a detailed model of the economy in their heads? Which do you think is more plausible, rational or adaptive expectations and why?