"Irreducible complexity" in biology and markets

Once again Paul Hsieh at GeekPress has dug up something I feel compelled to post, especially in light of my last post.  (If you don't read GeekPress every day, you really should.  It's a lot more than just science and technology.)

John Paulos of Temple University has written an excellent essay pointing out the similarities between the spontaneous order found in economic systems and biological systems.  The economic systems obviously don't require a central designer or planner, yet they meet the same standards of "irreducible complexity" found in biological systems.

How is it 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. Every supermarket has your brand of spaghetti sauce, or the store down the block does. Your size and style of jeans are in every neighborhood.

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. Oil and gas supplies are, by and large, where they're needed. Your 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, a stunningly obvious example of spontaneously evolving order. 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. These people accept the natural complexity of the market without qualm, yet they insist that the natural complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer [emphasis mine - ob1].

They would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would rightly point out that simple economic exchanges that 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. They accept that Adam Smith's invisible hand brings about the spontaneous order of the modern economy. Yet, as noted, some of these same people refuse to believe that natural selection and "blind processes" can lead to similar biological order arising spontaneously.

...

There are, of course, quite significant differences and disanalogies between biological systems and economic ones (one being that biology is a much more substantive science than economics), but these shouldn't blind us to their similarities nor mask the obvious analogies.

These analogies prompt two final questions. What would you think of someone who studied economic entities and their interactions in a modern free market economy and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver? You might deem such a person a conspiracy theorist.

And what would you think of someone who studied biological processes and organisms and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Darwinian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed biological law-giver?

What indeed?

Now, one possible objection to this analogy will be "but wait--the agents involved in the economic system are intelligent people.  There's your intelligent design."

True, but here's why it's irrelevant:  these intelligent agents never got together to plan the entire system--the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing.  Each element of the system went about its business alone, and mostly not knowing where the raw materials that eventually became the products they ordered and sold came from.  And the system developed, anyway, into what it is today.

And if you care to see one scenario whereby Behe's "irreducibly complex" mousetrap may have developed step-by-step from more primitive (simple) forms with fewer parts, just go here.

Comments

[Rob]

A very excelent argument for those who failed to study logic in college.

hate to hit and run again but on a scale of 1 to 10, here at work i'm running a 15. Heaven forbid that Verisign could turn a cert around in under a week....