Wirt Atmar  wrote:

> John Wilkins (the newer 2003 model) writes:
> 
> >I think, though, that the poster is inverting matters - there is a lot
> >of recent work done on the influence of *Darwin* on economics. The
> >classic book is Nelson and Winter, but see also the list below. The
> >movement is called "evolutionary economics".
> 
> However, an earlier, more classic version of John Wilkins (the 1997 model)
> wrote:
> 
> "A more serious claim to have influenced Darwin can be made for the
> Scottish economist Adam Smith, in his work 'The Wealth of Nations' of
> 1776. There is a clear analogy between the survival of the corporation
> through successful trading and the survival of a hereditary lineage
> through advantageous traits. It is known that Darwin read Smith and those
> political and social commentators that followed him, and it would be
> surprising if these ideas did not lodge in his thoughts. However, the
> biological and social and moral worlds were thought at that time to be
> completely divorced. Remember, this was a time when even the existence of
> an involuntary reflex was considered unthinkable: biology simply could not
> overcome conscious will (for example Marshall Hall in 1832 was unable to
> publish his reflex studies in the Royal Society's proceedings10). Malthus'
> views, e.g., were based on the assumption that the poor were simply
> lacking in the moral fibre and strength of will. The extension of this
> pattern of explanation to the biological world was a major leap of
> imagination.
> 
> "Smith thought that there was an `Invisible Hand' effect that a free
> market created, ensuring that efficient trading bodies and manufacturers
> flourished purely as a result of the pursuit of self-interest. He
> characterised the market in terms of a division of labour, and the
> resulting equilibrium was not due to any planning or intention on the part
> of individual corporations or agents to maximise the common good; that was
> an undesigned outcome. Smith's views, via Malthus, were applied by David
> Ricardo to the British Corn Laws from 1815, and they were also influential
> on John Stuart Mill. The idea of a mechanism that determined the mean
> effect of the activities of populations and their survival and spread may
> have influenced Darwin's desire to come up with a mechanism not based upon
> design to explain organic change, and may have suggested a way to do it.
> However, Ricardo's and Malthus' views tended to make a virtue of these
> necessities, which Darwin's mechanism of natural selection did not,
> despite the interpretation of the misnamed "social
Darwinists" later that
> century."
> 
>      --http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/precursors/precurs7.html
> 
> In that, I'm certain that the earlier, younger John Wilkins is the more
> correct and the one you should be preferentially paying attention to.
> Darwin must have seen the idea of an "invisible hand" as an agent of
> change as a fundamentally philosophically liberating notion, allowing him
> to propose a similar agent in "natural selection."
> 
> Wirt Atmar


Yes, and I am not reneging on that now; but I do not think, on the basis
of the past 7 years of further reading, that Darwin was *directly*
influenced by Smith. At best he got his ideas via Ricardo; but I think
that, as many others do, the Malthusian inspiration was just that, an
inspiration, and that Marx and Engels, who are the source of this idea,
were wrong, as have their descendents been, when they said that Darwin
was just projecting English commerce into biology. One might as well say
that Darwin was influenced by Hume's problem of induction if you think
Smith was a direct influence, because Smith was influenced by Hume. The
actual connections are far more indirect and subtle than that.

The problem with "influenzitis" is that while we can make many
*plausible* links, demonstrating actual influence on a thinker is much
harder to do. The hidden hand was common knowledge in the period in
question, but I do not think that it was as influential on Darwin as
many seem to think. It has been orthodoxy in the Left since Mark and
Engels to say that Smith was important, but so far as I am aware of,
this is an argument from, at best, tenuous similarities.

Here is what Marx and Engels said:

"I too was struck ... with the remarkable likeness between his
[Darwin's] account of plant and animal life and the Malthusian theory.
Only I came to a different conclusion than yours: namely, that nothing
discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has
not succeeded in getting beyond the economic forces of the animal
world." (F Engels to FA Lang, 29 March 1865. Quoted in Bannister
1979:14)

"It is splendid that Darwin again discovers among plants and animals his
English society with its divisions of labour, competition, opening up of
new markets, 'inventions' and Malthusian 'struggle for existence'. This
is Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes ["war of all against all"]."
(Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862, quoted in Bannister 1979:14)

Engels called Darwin's doctrines a
"... bitter satire on mankind and especially on his countrymen, when he
showed that free competition, the struggle for coexistence, which the
economists claim is the highest historical achievement, is the normal
state of the animal kingdom." (F Engels, The Dialectic of Nature, New
York 1940: 19, quoted in Bannister 1979:131).

Now I am totally convinced that Marx and Engels are reading this into
Darwin's writings, and their subsequent inability to fully comprehend
both the non-teleological and contingent nature of Darwinian evolution
gives more reason to think they are wrong here, too. But so far as I
know there is absolutely no other economic influence noted in Darwin's
writings than Malthus.

And the inability of the Left to appreciate Darwin's ideas is well
discussed by Singer in his little book.

Bannister, Robert C. 1979. Social Darwinism: science and myth in
Anglo-American social thought, American civilization. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.

Singer, Peter. 2000. A Darwinian Left: politics, evolution, and
cooperation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

But I am pleased to see such a serious scholar as you aware of my web
essays...

-- 
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
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