Evolution or central planning.

In Pennsylvania a case will be taken to federal court to test whether creationism-lite (known as intelligent design) can be taught in state schools. An article on MSNBC had this comment: “Proponents argue that the structure of life is too complex to have evolved through natural selection, challenging a core principles of the biological theory launched by Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in 1859.”

Creationism-lite says that because life is to complex to have evolved there must have been some intelligent being who designed life. The fundamental fallacy is that complexity can only come about by design. That is, by the way, the old socialist argument about economics. i have long contended that the fundamentalists and the Marxists have more in common than they care to admit or acknowledge.

Consider this point made a century and a half ago by Herbert Spencer, the founder of sociology. Spencer said that socialists could not see that the “process of evolution” in man’s economic and social life. No one designed it. No one centrally planned it. Yet there was constant order without the central planner. Spencer put it this way:

“The houses they live in, their furniture, clothes, fuel, food—all are brought into existence by the spontaneous efforts of citizens supplying one another’s wants. ...The roads, the railways, the trains, the telegraphs (this was the late 1800s) are products of combined exertions prompted by desires for profit and maintenance. The villages and towns they pass exhibit the accretions due to private actions. The districts devoted to one or other manufacture have been so devoted by men who were simply seeking incomes to live upon. The enormous distributing organization with its vast warehouses and retail shops lining the streets, carrying everywhere innumerable kinds of commodities has arisen without the planning of any one.”

All this says Spencer is non-governmental. There is no central “creative” force imposing order on chaos. The market economy arose spontaneously. And this is precisely what makes so many people mistrustful of capitalism. Michael Rothschild, author of the under-appreciated book Bionomics, compared market forces to natural forces that are around us every day. He wrote:

“Putting aside the details of genetic variation and natural selection, is it really possible that an unconscious, spontaneous phenomenon could have brought forth a natural world of such awesome diversity, beauty, and balance? We can see it. But it still boggles the mind.
“Oddly enough, the same sense of incredulity underlies the widespread mistrust of free markets. Anyone who thinks carefully about capitalism must ask, How could such a vast and complex system emerge without the benefit of some grand design? Somewhere, somebody must be in charge. How else could, simple, self-interested components coalesce into an immensely complicated, well-coordinated economy? The notion that no one is in control — that economic order spontaneously emerges from the chaotic interaction of millions of individuals and firms — is quite simply, hard to swallow.”

In fact the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko said this concept, that somebody must secretly be in charge of capitalism, was ever present in the minds of Soviet officials. He said the Russian officials were baffled by American capitalism. “It puzzles them how a complex and little-regulated society can maintain such a high level of production, efficiency and technological innovation.” The only conclusion they could come to was that “there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States.”


Now the political Left, ready to dismiss the idea of a divine creative organizing force for the universe, demands that economies be ordered exactly by this centralized principle. Ask them about the rise of nature and they can point out how evolution works. And, no doubt, they are generally correct about this. They can easily grasp the idea that a spontaneous order has emerged all around them. But when asked to accept this principle in economics they sound like the most fervent creationist.

The Creationist will argue that nature could not have evolved as it has. It is too spectacular and incredible to have had an entirely natural birth. They compare nature to a watch and from that false comparison they assume the presence of a Watchmaker. Yet, many of these same individuals support some form of a market economy. The fact that they rarely do so consistently is irrelevant for this debate.

The spectacular nature of a evolving, ever-changing, spontaneous market is something they are willing to accept. Ask them how language came to be and many of them will again point to evolution and spontaneous order. After all no one has centrally planned any of the languages widely used in the world today. Esperanto, one attempt at a planned language, remains an oddity. Language as spoken by all the people’s of the world arose spontaneously. No one planned it. No one designed it. No one manipulated it. But there it is working just fine for billions of people in every nook and cranny of the world.



Ludwig von Mises made exactly the same argument regarding the evolution of money. Money arose spontaneously, directed by the nature of the market. People started out trading goods with one another. But this was inefficient since you had to have precisely what the other person wanted and they had to have precisely what you wanted. Often such trades would be inefficient. For instance you might want a loaf of bread and the baker might want a table. But you didn’t feel comfortable trading one table for one loaf of bread. Yet if you took the 50 loaves of bread you felt fairer you would end up with 49 loaves going to waste.

So people started looking for something that would have specific characteristics that could be used as medium of exchange. The nature of what needed to be accomplished determined the nature of what would eventual become a medium of exchange. First, it had to be desirable. Horse manure was not highly desirable and would not work. Second, it had to be divisible. This was to avoid the problem of trading a table for more bread than you could consume.

Humans used various forms of money. Some even used sea shells but the fact that they were relative plentiful made them problematic. A certain amount of scarcity was needed otherwise unscrupulous individuals would “inflate” the money supply to everyone’s detriment. Gold and silver were eventually the money of choice. Individuals could easily carry it around, it could be coined into small or larger amounts and people desired them. The function that money had to fill eventually determined what was used. I will note that in recent centuries the idea of spontaneous money has been replaced with the concept of centrally planned money — thus the use of paper and all it’s potential and real problems.

Now I can understand why some people are not able to comprehend the idea of spontaneous order. In spite of it surrounding them on a daily basis. Everyone knows that in most of the world farmers grow what they want, in quantities that they themselves determine. They sell it at prices they find acceptable or stop producing. Other random individuals purchase those products and market them in various ways to various people. Again no one dictates to them who sells what vegetable at what time in what location. No one issues orders to consumers laying out their purchases for the week. There is virtually no effort to co-ordinate the distribution of food. Yet in every market economy food is everywhere and very, very few people ever go without.

Other nations have tried to impose a creative order by organizing food production for the “sake of the people.” They put “people before profits”. They certainly ended up with a system where there were no profits. But they also ended up with nations where there was no food. It happened repeatedly in the Soviet Union and under Mao in China. And it is happening today in African nations where agriculture is rarely left to market forces and where marketing boards and central plans proliferate.




Darwin explained how natural orders evolve. Such order is not unusual at all, as some creationists want us to believe, but entirely expected. Ayn Rand once made the point to Phil Donahue that a “disorderly universe” would be impossible. In fact the orderly aspect of nature is not a proof for a Watchmaker at all. If there were a case to made from nature for the presence of a Divine Creator then it would be the existence of a disorderly, chaotic, contradictory universe. The only kind of universe that could have evolved was an orderly one. Order is what we expect when a central planner is not playing his game with people.

The idea that markets and societies can evolve spontaneously makes perfect sense to me. Ideas that work are copied by others while ideas that are failures are neglected. In fact bad ideas must always be promoted at the point of a gun in one sense or another. Now what is bad or good is simply determined by what is consistent or inconsistent with reality. Markets work because they are consistent with reality. Central planning fails because it isn’t.

This simple, yet profound, concept is enough for me. It explains why markets work. It explains how language evolved. It explains why individuals, each seeking their own good, are required to work with one another in co-operation. It explains why certain moralities lead to good things and other moralities lead to bad things. It tells me that the universe is understandable without having a central planner in the sky or in the capitol.

Now I assume that any advocate of the market should understand spontaneous order. But I am baffled by why any such individuals need a Creator to explain everything else. And I’m equally baffled when I see advocates of evolution demanding centralized planning for economies as a whole. Certainly the evolutionary principle is satisfactory in explaining both the natural order and the natural economic order.


The theologically minded who argue for “intelligent design” are in war with a major premise of the free society. Freedom means the absence of a central planner. If one can not have order and a complex society without “intelligent design” then one can not have freedom. If a complex universe needs an intelligent designer then a complex society and complex economy would need one as well. At it’s core these people, by attacking the concept of spontaneous or evolved order, are attacking the concept of spontaneous or free markets.