The natural order of things

Roger Carr

Wonderful, Matt!
Enlightening and provoking.
Thank you.

Wallace

So should Northern Rock have been allowed to become extinct?

John Pride

An article whose time has come.

Wonderful evocation of the Left-Right collectivist/dirigist versus individualism political debate with polar opposite views when it comes to different economic spheres.

Good stuff from the individualist bottom up types who appreciate the knowing Spectator overview.

How long before someone spots that there is something in information itself which is what is important and an idea of IT (some G-word translate) as information, across space and through scale, that becomes the new weak Einsteinian God of Dawkins et al.

Those particle accelerators in going for the ever smaller in interchangable matter-energy interactions show patterns. We may need to consider the patterns as primary, and the ubiquitous manifestations of pattern through scale, as being key as building blocks instead.

It makes us all "one" as some transcendentalist said to a sceptic who was concentrating on the red in tooth and claw as evidence of nothingness.

Simon C

What an excellent piece, and a wonderful explanation and defense of conservative thought.
Well done the Spec!

HFC

Thanks Matt. A brilliant and balanced piece to which I shall return.

Not Even Likely

Excellent article that contributes meaningfully to every single topic of the day.

Chris

Spoiled the argument with the reference to / puff for Wikipedia, though.

R Fairless

Which Matt Ridley is this? Is this the one who masqueraded as a Banker who knows a lot about Pheasants? I refuse to read the article until I know he is not the one who had a hand in robbing me and many others who were duped into investing in Northern Rock.

Charles Johnson

The idea that natural selection creates order like the human mind is mistaken.

The human mind picks and chooses information to suit the task at hand, while natural selection has no end goal.

Any local increase in complexity achieved (however unlikely), would be washed out by the overwhelming forces of time and chance.

Cambridge physicist Sir Fred Hoyle realized this, along with other notables like information theorist Marcel-Paul Schützenberger and zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé. Darwinism is not useful for explaining biological complexity because it has no algorithm.

In any case, financial markets do not display the same order as organisms, it's just a means for creating wealth. Where natural selection is absent, rigging by the human mind is apparent (IMF, FED, etc.)

Verity

Well, I gave up, but I'm so impressed with the endorsements, I'm going to back and read it through.

McLintick Sphere

Matt Ridley as in the Chairman of excellent bank Northern Rock? C'mon. Scientific explanations explain scientific phenomena. Human interaction cannot be explained in the same way. As a scientist you are a great banker.

Kevin

"On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before."

Right - because there is no design to the Internet. No TCP/IP protocols, no routing tables, no domain name resolution, no qualified network administrators, no rules of grammar allowing people to communicate over these technological layers.

It's flippant attitudes like this that lead to so many I.T. project disasters.

Side note: Apache is not an operating system.

Nick H.

Sorry Matt, your name will always be more famous for the ruinous collapse of the bank which you ran as an advertisement for your ideas.

Richard Courtenay

Typically of Darwinists Matt Ridley simply asserts that gradual Darwinian processes can lead to highly complex systems and then complacently goes on to draw comparisons in other areas. In fact no one, not even Richard Dawkins, has to date been able to explain how any of the thousands of highly complex molecular systems at work in all living organisms could have arisen by a gradual process of random mutation and natural selection; in fact there is a strong argument that many, if not all, molecular systems are "irreducibly complex", meaning that anything less than the completed version would have no no useful function; this means that they could not have arisen by random mutation. Furthermore, studies on organisms such as the malaria parasite with high populations/short life-spans, suggest that random mutation does not in fact produce new structures; it only breaks existing structures and this very occasionally is beneficial to the organism.

If also one considers at non-existence of unambiguous fossil evidence of transitional species, it is hard to see how Darwinism can still be taken seriously, however much it proponents may wish it to be true.

Patrick

Matt,

Have you ever read USS Clueless posts on the Burgess Shales and Islam?

The central theme of your wonderful post is a cut and paste. I expect you have no idea what USS Clueless is and your work is original. Which only shows the same good idea can spring into life independently more than once!

Neil Bonsor

In his article Matt Ridley says that technological evolution is much more similar to evolution by natural selection than people imagine . He points out that intelligent evolution does not in the vast majority of cases proceed by design but by systems similar to evolution by natural selection.

If that is the case then the possibility of mistaking one form of evolution for another must be very great.So the possibility must be considered that evolution by natural selection is in fact evolution by intelligent design .
Equally it may be true that evolution by intelligent design is not in fact intelligent at all but some other form of evolution .I think this explains a great deal about the modern world !

Dave Griffiths

"Yet if the market needs no central planner, why should life need an intelligent designer?" Because the market consists of millions of intelligent units while most of "life" is not.

THX1138

Moonbat on Matt Ridley and applying Darwinism to economics, unsuprsingly Monbiot doesn't agree.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/23/libertarians-are-the-true-social-parasites/

It's worth reading.

Neil Bonsor

Because Matt tells us that scientists are using the techniques of natural selection to arrive at intelligent solutions
Scientists then are using this technique but God isnt quite up to speed .
We should all pray that he catches up !

william hart

good try, but the question is still begged: how do the fateful, useful mutations occur in a system designed to conserve its basic pattern and to resist change, and if such changes occur, where are the creatures in medias res?

Mike Burch

Great article. I suggest you also look at the writings of Frederick Hayek who explored the evolution of 'spontaneous order' thinking (starting with the Scottish enlightenment. Ferguson et al as much as Smith had great insights into the notion) and applied it with consumate skill to other social phenomena that seemed like the process of human design but was in fact a self-generated order (e.g. money, language, politics, the market, etc).

Richard Dell

It takes a very open mind to appreciate that order does not require agency (human or divine), and to go even further and admit to Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is smarter that you are". It is actually smarter than any of us can be, after all it "designed" us. Such complexity is way beyond even the best politician, who may also be stymied by fallacious Marxist dogma and the idea that intelligent control will always find a better way that doing nothing - witness Brown's constant jibe at the Tories. But we are all in thrall to the idea that government should be doing something, and those who utter the heresy that "the recession must take its course" must eat humble pie.

The phenomenon in aviation of pilot induced oscillation (which often disappears when the pilot takes his hands off) should have blown that idea, as should the experience of FDR's "New Deal", which held unemployment static for many years.

The software industry understood the "great top-down fallacy", which led to "runaway process inflation" many years ago, and was only beaten by agile methods. Computation has long involved optimisation techniques, often referred to as "hill climbing algorithms". The problem with all the early ones were many: they needed smooth functions; they needed linear systems; they failed on parameter spaces of more than about 5 dimensional; and they would only find a local (as opposed to the global) optimum. Few optimisers use linear techniques today, they use evolutionary methods because they are the only ones that work, consistently and reliably.

Robert.heming

A fascinating article with much to think about. Thank you Spectator for publishing it. I'm sure it will prompt the usual rants but so be it.

Patrick Sweeney

Matt left out a critical word -- "random" in "nudging forward descent with modification." I don't and I don't know of any engineer I know who works with random modification -- rather is it is intelligently directly modification

jim

Interesting article. Isn't the problem today that we have leaders who attempt to impose top down solutions, which inevitably fail? For example, large corporations bribing legislators to limit competition through expensive to follow laws. Or government selecting winners, which turn out to be losers, like energy saving light bulbs.
The other thought you provoked was that in all human bottom up societies some kind of god was created, which serves the function of a belief in an afterlife, so there is some point to human existence. Where this idea has disappeared, reproduction has fallen, like Italy, Japan and Germany. Although in Barnsley God has been replaced by the state, acting as a God, and Stella acting as the devil.

Joseph Lambert

This one of the most brilliant Spectator articles I have ever read.

CJ

Interesting viewpoint, but completely unrelated to cumulative increase of information (specified complexity) in the genome.

The "order" or "complexity" Ridley refers to can be more accurately described as patterns. Patterns that emerge from markets or weather are complex but not specified.

For example take a pile of sand. The grains of sand are complex but not specified. If I arranged the sand into the word CAT, the sand become specified because meaning (information) is conveyed.

Careless use of terminology like this is killing science and the humanities.

Charles Gray

Matt Ridley seems to have missed the fairly basic point that anything created by human beings, whether or not this has involved developing existing ideas or technologies, is still designed and any analolgies with blind Darwinian processes is false.

Has he, or any of the other people who seem impressed by his article, ever read any of the "intelligent design" literature, such as Michael Behe's books Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution? These could be a bit of an eye opener.

Hugh McLachlan

'But the notion that, with random variation, this selective survival could then generate complexity and sophistication where there had been none before, that it is a cumulative and creative force, is entirely his. It is also one that applies to more than the bodies of living beings.'

This is certainly a good, well-written article. However, it does not show that Darwin's theory actually explains anything. What Darwin says about random processes and so forth might be true, but I do not think that they actually explain why our bodies are as they are. There is a smack of teleology about the theory. It seems to involve explaining causes by their effects rather than vice versa. For instance, it is one thing to say that, since we have bottoms, we can sit down and quite another to suggest that we have bottoms so that we can sit down. Either way, the question remains: 'Why do we have bottoms'.

Erasmus

Please explain how blood works just before the hemoglobin molecule "evolved"?

charles soper

Good question Erasmus, or the even more tricky one of how myoglobin which has a highly similar tertiary structure to Hb but wildly variant amino acid sequence.
Oh the never ceasing wonders of convergent evolution! But remember children, this seductive black magic of a theory will produce any contortion and any marvel if you just wish hard enough and switch off your mind!

Incidentally I understand, computer simuations which use natural selection for design often come across local minima - the kind of constraining barrier Dawkins (and Darwin) have sought so hard to escape. Behe (despite Ken Miller's sqawking attempts to debunk his gentle reasoning) has some excellent examples.

egh

Looks like English. Sounds like English. However, real English makes sense; it does not 'blind the reader with science.'

So the fault, dear English ones, lies not in the reader, but in the writer that the text is difficult to follow.

That is to say, the inadequacy lies not in the English language - but in lack of technique and thought on the part of the writer.

Dennis Rydgren

Thanks Matt! I Googled all the way from Sweden to reed this article.

See you later

*bling bling*

And the Swede is gone in to the mist of cyberspace again

Dennis Rydgren

PS.

UK seems to be quite the middle ages if you read the comments. There are really people here whom still don't understand the theory of evolution. It's 2009 my dear friend: God won't let us have laser swords before we admit to the basic facts.

Maybe it's time to dust of the school and give modernity a chance.

Richard

Just for the record, Apache is not an operating system, it's a web server:

http://apache.org/

GC

I'm not sure you can be right to describe living organisms as eddies in the stream of entropy.

Einstein famously remarked that he couldn't believe in a God who played dice. In fact I suspect God simply has to play dice if his creation is to be anything other than profoundly boring.

Milton got it about right with:

"... Chaos umpire sits, /
And by decision more embroils the fray /
By which he reigns: next him high arbiter /
Chance governs all. ..."

[Paradise Lost II 907 - 909]

I'm busy with other stuff but if I don't notice future young Turks dipping at least a toe in I'll eventually wade in myself with a thought or two but it's a deeply difficult enquiry and your contribution both sensible and welcome.

Stuart

Matt Ridley has surgically removed all mention of Northern Rock from his CV. Should a scientist doctor his own data in order, presumably, to deceive people from knowing his involvement in that debacle and his convenient switch to expecting the state to bail out market failures. Not very Smithian Dr Ridley?

Thomas Read

As a UK citizen I am embarrassed by the arrant nonsense that some people have posted on here. I didn'trealise the situation was so bad, but we have anti-evolutionists perpetuating the same tired, and endlessly debunked, canards. As ever we get the same old ‘argument from incredulity’, about life just looks so darned complex. Scientists admit that ‘Darwinism’ doesn’t explain everything but nothing in science does, and this is what keeps scientists in their jobs. However that doesn’t mean that the scientists who study evolution don’t have a basic picture of what happened. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we should start attributing anything to invisible beings. The evidence in favour of common descent (the fact of evolution) is completely overwhelming, and natural selection certainly played an important role in driving evolution forward over almost 4 billion years, whether it was the main mechanism involved or not.
Irreducible complexity, as with every other piece of ‘evidence’ for Intelligent Design, is a myth. Nobody has ever demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientists who work in evolutionary theory that any biological system is ‘irreducibly complex’. Hardly any of the people involved with ID are scientists and, even of those who are, none has any credentials in any field even remotely relevant to evolution. Furthermore, they have yet to present a single piece of peer-reviewed research in support of their position. Can anybody provide me with the name of any scientific organisation anywhere in the world that endorses ID? I can tell you now you won’t find one because it is pseudoscience; creationism slightly warmed over and served up again with dubiously selected aspects of modern biochemistry. This was all exposed in court, and to this day ID has utterly failed to convince the rest of the scientific community that any of its claims are anything more than religiously motivated propaganda. Please don’t bring this garbage over here.

Me

People should read Adam Smith before they write about him. According to Smith, a central planner is superfluous in the market because the market is thoroughly planned by all of its participants, who purposively cooperate with each other to achieve their ends. Darwin's natural selection is bereft of purpose in any way, shape, or form. In nature, there is neither planner nor plan; in Smith's market, everybody is a planner and the market is the sum of their attempts to realize their plans. Smith and Darwin are antitheses, not analogues.

Iain Orr

There are far too many ideas here for one essay: Charles Darwin and Adam Smith deserve a series. For Matt's next conjuring trick I suggest Darwin and Lincoln, both born in the Year of the Dragon on 12 February 1809.

Dr Milton Wainwright

Darwin did not have to look to Malthus for an explanation of how evolution worked.The idea of natural selection had already been published in 1813 by Charles Wells and in 1831 by Patrick Matthew.Both Darwin and Wallace accepted this simple fact. The idea that Darwin orignated natural selection while on the Beagle and after reading Malthus is simply a Darwinist "tooth fairy story" (Search Google for "wainwrightscience" for more details.Dr Milton Wainwright,Dept.Molecur Biology and Biotechnology,University of Sheffield,UK

Ashok Sanghvi

Evolution has come about, among other things, by observing the animal and plant worlds.Can it be that it is only an hypothesis and not the one?
Man is an animal but the important distinction is that he is a social animal with all its trappings.For his survival one of the skills he has learnt is to mitigate the failings.Another is to create order out of disorder.
Lest we forget, and to our on peril,economic and other man-made disasters will happen but with our grey cells we shall survive and thrive.Cheers.

bill

How successful have attempts been to mimic natural selection on high powered computers ? There have been a few hints here that they run into problems

roberto

civilisation (the british spelling...) and prosperity? al carajo..!! not even in the UK...Sober to the fact that 60 % of us humans 6 billions live with less than 10 bucks a day!!market economy? al carajo!!...wake up ridley take a walk in the milky way with guaraches, take a hard look down and feel the brunt that darwin has done nada for our lives, on the contrary i would surmise......ask jemmy button and the otehr unfortunates taken to england...this is darwin on the "weak": "Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Steve

Socialists are economic creationists. Same intellect.

John1142

Very nice site!