aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

The Market and Intelligent Design

This guy’s one smart fellow. He says that evolution’s been proven and Intelligent Design refuted but “rehashing the refutation” isn’t his goal because “those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments.”

Rather, what he does is point to ”a surprising crossing of political lines:”

How it is that modern free-market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store, and you can find your favorite candy bar. And what’s true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they’re needed. E-mail reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.

The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is: Who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.

So far, so good. What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution - for example, many fundamentalist Christians - are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. They accept the market’s complexity without qualm, yet insist the complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.

They would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges, which are beneficial to people, become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.

I will be using that illustration again and again with the fundamentalist students I work with, who I find to be intellectually curious and good thinkers. When they proffer a good answer, I’ll be sure to share it.