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To: betty boop; VadeRetro
“natural selection,”

Marbles.

12 posted on 02/04/2003 7:30:15 PM PST by cornelis
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To: cornelis
Those British philosophers have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful. Their view is expressed in terms of “how nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of human design.” It stresses that what we call political order is much less the product of our ordering intelligence than is commonly imagined. As their immediate successors saw it, what Adam Smith and his contemporaries did was “to resolve almost all that has been ascribed to positive institution into the spontaneous and irresistible development of certain obvious principles—and to show how little contrivance or political wisdom the most complicated and apparently artificial schemes of policy might have been erected.”
Natural selection.
47 posted on 02/05/2003 4:59:01 PM PST by VadeRetro
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