Adam Darwin: Emergent Order in Biology and Economics | Matt Ridley
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ย. 2012
- Matt Ridley gives this year's Adam Smith Lecture. Matt Ridley will spoke on the parallels between the work of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, as both markets and evolution are strikingly similar examples of experimental processes that improve our standing in the world we inhabit.
thanks for the video
An excellent presentation and one which I think makes a strong case for diversity in cognition and interdisciplinary exchange. The sources cited in Matt Ridley's presentation from Locke, Mill and Voltaire to Smith and Darwin were also inspirational for me. I'd add two more, Al-Khwarizmi and Omar Kayyam because mathematics and poetry underpin the sciences and and help us to perceive the elegance, beauty and grandeur of emergent forces. I hope we'll clearly demonstrate, once again, what innovation can emerge when these ingredients are poured into the Biomedical Algorithmic Exchange. I totally agree with Matt, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Just so.
Michael Shermer wrote: “If there is a connection between evolution and economics-between Charles Darwin and Adam Smith-it is this: Life is intricate, complex, and looks designed, so our folk biology intuition leads us to infer that there must be an intelligent designer, a God. Analogously, economies are intricate, complex, and look designed, so our folk economic intuition is to infer that we need an intelligent designer, a Government."
Mr. Ridley, we demand a transcript..
I'm lonely too (following both Smith and Darwin). So refreshing in this era of doom, thank you.
This is brilliant.
Matt Ridley is truly brilliant. I hope his ideas are having sex on a wide scope! More people need hear this and at least consider his ideas. One day perhaps these ideas (memes) will reach a critical mass and policy (or better yet; the lack of policy) will begin to develop.
"In terms of prosperity, we ain't seen nothing yet."
Ridley says that the left loves Darwin and natural selection. But in actual fact this is more of a troll of the religious right than a sincere belief. The fact that human beings evolved has strong political implications. It means there's such a thing as human nature, it means that men and women have different physical abilities and are almost certainly "wired" differently, it means that a significant part of variation in ability is genetic, not environmental, and that human races are not interchangeable either physically or mentally. This is why Stalin tried to eradicate Darwinism in the Soviet Union and replace it with Lysenkoism, a belief in radical environmentalism. This is why Marxist biologists like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin relentlessly tried to downplay or even reject the ideas natural selection when applied to human beings. It's why blank-slate ideas are so difficult to dislodge in academia.
This is the coolest lecture I've seen in a while! It always blows my mind that my atheist (& liberal) friends love central planning in government. If you don't like central planning in your religion, why would you want it in your government?
Both Darwin and Wallace claimed that it was Malthus who motivated their Evolution and not smith.
+Assaf Wodeslavsky Malthus was an economist too who was no doubt also influenced by The Wealth of Nations. Besides the quote he cited was from Darwin himself.
His emphasis on trade, which is conscious and intentional, risks undermining Darwinian evolution of order out of disorder. This is because people will see it as 'creationist'.
In your examples, you refer to similarities between order in a system developed by sentient beings (mankind/economics) and order that exists outside of the influence of mankind's sentient influence (physics/biology). You make the argument that a system evolves out of chaos in a world that is governed by sentient beings (a nations economy, and/or the creation of a pencil) purely by chance or rather some "natural law". Yet such systems did require sentience, and the ability to communicate. How then, can we assume that far more complex systems (physical constructs of matter, space, and time, and/or the complexities of a bio organism, could have evolved without sentience (or at least some way for the variables to communicate). In short, Mr. Ridley, in your arguments, you are not comparing apples to apples. The study of behaviors and systems developed by man clearly point to the need for sentience, the opposite (as you suggest) cannot be true.
Go back to 0:42 and listen: both economies and ecosystems *emerge*. The economy is not designed by sentient beings anymore than than an ecosystem is; both are emergent systems resulting from the mass aggregate effect of many individuals (who do not need to be sentient) acting indivudually. We are all involuntarily creating the economy, just as plants and animals are involuntarily 'creating' evolution.
This guy is remarkably learned and ignorant. The learned part shines through, the ignorance is in the, perhaps deliberate, ignoring of ideas that do not help his thesis. You will spot him elsewhere arguing for a lassez faire, (otherwise known as 'slack'), attitude to burning more carbon.
The basic problem with his conclusions as far as I can see are basically due to scale and ignoring the idea that both reductionism and wholism operate albeit on different scales of time and magnitude.
Darwin's theory of evolution takes a relatively short time on fast generations of non complex items such as viruses.
Smith can be regarded as a reasonably moral individual I don't think we need accuse Matt Ridley of that weakness.
My particular distaste for his views are that he allows anything to do with business practise, perhaps not including armed robbery and warfare and with no explanation as to why he stops short of this, but nothing to to with communal organisation Unions etc. Honesty is a tool to be used and disgarded as suits the job.