"Who feeds New York City?"
Sounds Randian, jennyp should like it. Is it in the archives?
Are you unaquainted with market economics? Are conservative ideas automatically associated with Ayn Rand?
ID is to biology what scientific socialism is to economics; it is based on the assumption that central planning is necessary and inevitable. It is based on the assumption that you can forsee all contingencies in a chaotic system and plan a perfect instrument for dealing with them.
Sounds Randian, jennyp should like it. Is it in the archives?
It was a reply posted to a thread about 5 days ago; I can't recall which one, but I do recall conversing via FReepmail with the author (whose identity I can't recall either.)
It is essentially a variant of Milton Friedman's essay on how pencils get made, except the pencil is replaced by the food that goes into the mouths of New Yorkers. It was very good.
Consider a famous example. Several million people live in Manhattan. Almost everyone there is well fed. How does that happen? Who designed the system that feeds Manhattan?The answer is nobody. Individuals do various small tasks (for money) that in aggregate produce an astounding result - New York gets fed, day after day. Nobody understands how it happens - no single person or even small group of people understands where the food comes from, or how it is transported, or how it is distributed. Yet New York gets fed.
The complex "system" that feeds New York was never designed - it evolved over time, and continues to evolve as conditions change. Despite its enormous complexity, no one ever sat down and said "Let's figure out how to feed New York". And no one is monitoring the entire system today to figure out exactly what changes need to be made.
It's true that the individuals involved are intelligent, but their intelligence is only applied to the limited part that they play in the overall system. The system is self-organizing. Those people in the system have signals (the free-market) that tell them whether the small part they are doing is appropriate or not. The combination of individuals doing their small, simple parts and a signaling system that tells them if those parts are good yields a system as complex as any organism, with no one designing it.
I have to ask - do creationists feel compelled to discuss things they don't understand? Wouldn't you feel better if you did a little research on something like self-organizing systems before you showed that you didn't know what you were talking about? I'm just asking...
from:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1336776/posts?page=405#405
by "Joe Bonforte"