Darwin's Commemoration

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and published The Origin of Species in 1859, so this year is a double celebration of his life.

I know that there are many in the United States who believe in creationism or intelligent design rather than evolution. I don't want to address that controversy, except to say that those folk may be missing a really important point.

There seems to be an amazing amount of order in the ecosystems with which Darwin was familiar. There was great diversity, but each species had the other species in the ecosystem on which it depended for its survival. The world was conceived by Darwin and Wallace's contemporaries as a Great Chain of Being.

In their theory of evolution, Darwin and Wallace showed that such order could arise from a process of random variation and natural selection without planning. Creationists and adherents of intelligent design believe that that order did not so arise. I would suggest however, that an understanding that order could arise from disorder by other than intelligent action is a fundamental part of the modern mental toolkit.

Darwin and Wallace added to the insight of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Smith had described the way in which a market could bring order to the disorder of a multitude of individual transactions through a "hidden hand" which was not intelligent but simply the result of the way in which information was distributed to buyers and sellers via the market.

These and other tools help us to imagine organizational behavior and other phenomenon in fruitful ways. Even if one were to believe that they were not true models of the phenomena they seek to explain they would be extremely useful as metaphors.