Sunday, December 5, 2010
Rational markets and creationism
It occurs to me that rational market fundamentalists (those who believe that markets inherently behave rationally) are rather like evolution-deniers; both take the attitude that a complex system which behaves, if you don't look too hard, like it has a guiding intelligence must have a guiding intelligence, and quietly ignore any evidence to the authority. Bubbles are treated much the same as the human blind spot (which is, despite the tendency of creationists to go on about how the eye is irreducibly complex, evidence against design; a designer could fix it rather easily, but evolution through natural selection cannot).
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Maybe the market fundamentalists take the phrase "invisible hand" more literally than they should. It's worth a study, how often scientists who would explicitly disavow a religious perspective are still, deep down, in thrall to religion, sharing the view of many ordinary religious believers that Everything Works In Mysterious Ways To Produce The Best Outcome In The End. Some defences of free market economics sound a bit like shiny-eyed religious fundamentalists defending the view that, really, deep down, inoperable cancer shows just how benevolent God is.
ReplyDeleteIt's astonishing how people who seem to accept evolutionary theory often talk of it in ways that suggest they think of it as grounded in a sort of intelligent God-substitute. I found the students I taught at Glasgow University would cheerfully talk of evolution's designs and plans and intentions, and seemed put out when I said a central point of evolutionary theory was that there was no, plan, no design, no intention. They talked as though it were nature's plan for fishes to develop legs and crawl out of the see, sometimes used language that implied ("Fishes opted to develop legs in order to...")as though the Grand Committee of Fishes or the Great Fish in the Sky decided this. Their whole mindset about evolution was shot through with the idea that it's a system whereby everything works out for the best.
Here's an example from The Guardian recently, written by the ex-Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion: "On a more frivolous level, I’d also like to know whether my cat is fully evolved as a species. She certainly gives every impression of having pretty much everything she needs. Following on from this, I’d also like to know whether humans are the final step in the primate evolutionary ladder, or whether there will be another species running the world one day while we get locked up in zoos and forced to smoke cigarettes in laboratories." One hardly knows where to begin taking him apart. Oh, well, I'll try. Within evolutionary theory, Andrew, there's no room for talk of being 'fully' evolved, as though some template were being matched - THERE ARE NO TEMPLATES. There's no room for talk of a 'final step', as though beneath natural phenomena there were a cunning plan aimed at producing THIS, ta-da! There are just organisms that are more effecftive or less effective in getting by and reproducing in their envirionment; mutations sometimes make for greater effecti8veness, sometimes don't. That's it.