By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009

Is life fundamentally bottom-up and randomly designed or top-down and intentionally designed? Are you a socialist-creationist or a free-market evolutionist? If you reject this dichotomy and instead view yourself as a socialist-evolutionist, how can you justify arguing for the power of self-organization and unintentional, benevolent design in biology and against it in economics?

In 1776 Adam Smith argued in his Wealth of Nations that a wide variety of high quality products did not come about through the action of governments, but rather from the industriousness of individuals. Smith’s “invisible hand” did not work by the design of a benevolent creator but through the self-organizing nature of life itself.

In his recent book, The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer points out that Smith’s bottom-up vision of the world was countered in 1802 by William Paley’s top-down revision in Natural Theology where he argued that the intricacies of an eye could only be the product of a benevolent creator just as the intricacies of a watch could only be the product of a fastidious watchmaker.

In response to Paley’s top-down story, Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, The Evolution of Species, explained life’s self-organizing capabilities in line with Adam Smith’s earlier bottom-up explanations. Life began with single-celled organisms and gradually evolved into more complex, intelligent beings. Individual ants with the right stuff self-organize their colonies for the greater good. The queen ant is not a commander ant. The colony just consists of individual ants instinctively following their nature.

The arguments of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin are linked more deeply than just their bottom-up commonality. They are bonded together by a belief in the unintended nature of benevolence in economics and evolution. Smith argued “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Likewise, Darwin did not view “natural selection” as the result of benevolent intention, but rather as the result of random deviations in genetic code. Some deviations were beneficial and some were harmful. Those species that got the beneficial deviations prospered while those that got the harmful ones died out.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus did not share this benevolent view. His Iron Law of Population predicted population growth would outstrip growth in the world's ability to feed its expanding population. His view that humanity was doomed to forever live in poverty on the edge of starvation gave "the dismal science" its malevolent moniker.

Karl Marx also felt that the world left to its own devices would result in disaster. Without governmental guidance from above, capitalism would destroy itself and ultimately lead to a new world order of socialism where government would control and organize production just as God directly controls and organizes the creation of each new species.

Karl Marx and William Paley tell a consistent, socialist-creationist story of life controlled through top-down, intentional design. Their view contrasts sharply with the free-market evolutionist story of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin who see a world of self-organizing, bottom-up, unintentional benevolence.

If you reject this dichotomy and instead view yourself as a socialist-evolutionist, how can you justify arguing for the power of self-organization and unintentional, benevolent design in biology and against it in economics?

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