further evidence on how technology is our new form of evolution

[streched]

as with living organisms and ecosystems, the economy looks designed-so just as humans naturally deduce the existence of a top-down intelligent designer, humans also (understandably) infer that a top-down government designer is needed in nearly every aspect of the economy. but just as living organisms are shaped from the bottom up by natural selection, the economy is molded from the bottom up by the invisible hand. the correspondence between evolution and economics is not perfect, because some top-down institutional rules and laws are needed to provide a structure within which free and fair trade can occur. but too much top-down interference into the markeplace makes trade neither free nor fair. when such attempts have been made in the past, they have failed because markets are far too complex, interactive and autocatalytic to be designed from the top-down.

-michael shermer