** How the Invisible Hand kills off “designer” gods” **

Methodologically, whenever so-called *sacred* writings make claims about the natural world, they are subject to exactly the same forces of refutation as any other empirical claim. There is no “executive privilege” for God.

>> The Invisible Hand writes its own script.

Complex systems can and do arise from simple events, including random events.

The first adequate theoretical explanation of the emergence of earth-bound empirical complexity from simple events in a determinate context arises (I think) from the Scottish economic philosopher, Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776).

Smith’s famous unintended “invisible hand”, which is microeconomic capitalism, arises from simple economic exchanges in a context of fair competition among self-interested vendors and buyers. The market is an emergent (abstract) complex entity which arises from a sum-over of simple exchanges conditioned by their “environment.”

There is no need for a ‘god of economics’ to design the microeconomic market — under specified mechanisms of exchange. It forms itself. (There’s a large literature on “self-organizing systems.”)

>> Speciation by descent, not by divine fiat.

Darwin solved a supposedly insuperable empirical puzzle for a very wide (not universal) set of events in the history of life: how do new life forms arise. Darwin refrained from publicizing his answer for 15 years.

Darwin knew how maligned, even shunned he would be by Society — he was after all a bona fide *gentleman* quite aware of the perks of his class and the esteem earned by his vast and thoroughly *respectable* empirical research which occupied him in support of his novel theory.

Forced to come out in 1858, Darwin did not refer to his view with the already suspect term “evolution” but as “descent with modification.” What was so radical, so disturbing to his contemporaries? His mechanism for “descent with modification”, “natural selection”.

What makes natural selection so uncomfortable? In operation, it has no goal and achieves no purpose. Speciation is a random trial-and-error process dependent upon differential reproductive success — in a determinate ecological setting. (Darwin proposed no account of the origin of life . . . as the title of his great work makes clear — On the origin of species. 1859.)

Life in its multitudinous forms requires no spiritual force, no élan vital, no teleological principle, no purpose, no design.

A designer for evolution is as superfluous as a designer for economics. And for exactly the same reason.

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© 2008