DNA Commissar
One creationist argument cites the ‘irreducible complexity’
of certain vital biological systems. But we can turn this argument around, and
in the process expose a cultural contradiction of conservatism; for its
cosmology and its politics do not match up.
Consider a bottle of milk. How did it get from the farm to
your doorstep? If you investigate this question, you will find that industrial
society has truly elaborate food-production and food-delivery systems. Not only
is the milk-delivery system complex, but it is irreducibly so; without the
farmer or the trucker or the dispatcher or the milkman (or even the banker!)
that bottle of milk would not arrive.
Milk production and distribution is irreducibly complex;
does this imply that there must exist a central milk planning board? Is there a
Milk Czar whose job is to micromanage everything to do with the milk trade?
Does that milk bottle at your doorstep imply, by an Argument From Design, the
existence of a Milk Commissar?
The absurdity of the above questions reveals a cultural
contradiction of conservatism; its cosmology is paternalistic, if not
authoritarian, but its political economics are libertarian, if not anarchistic.
Cultural conservatives wisely question the value of central planning in the
human realm, yet foolishly insist that it would work if applied to the entire
cosmos!
If there is no Milk Commissar; if such a bureaucrat would
indeed be a hindrance to the milk trade; if irreducibly complex social systems
can organize themselves by blind market forces alone, then why (by analogy)
need there be a central genetic planner?
Given this century’s experience with command economies vs.
free markets, which is a more credible creator of life’s miracles: a DNA
Commissar or the Invisible Hand of Natural Selection?
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