La mano invisible y el relojero ciego: Los límites del paralelo Smith-Darwin

Throughout the history of economic thought and political philosophy, many have identified a common thread between the ideas of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. In the same way that Smith showed how national wealth and aggregate prosperity are unintended consequences of competition among individuals driven by their self-interest, Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance are unintended consequences of competition among organisms. The analogy, notably defended by F. A. Hayek, states that the economic and natural orders were not deliberately designed from the top-down, but they emerged spontaneously from the bottom-up. Taking Hayek's lead, contemporary popular science writers and political theorists have argued that creationists and "Intelligent Designers" who follow Smith in economics should accept Darwinian mechanisms to explain biodiversity. Otherwise, they are guilty of philosophical inconsistency. The same charge has been levelled against socialists who accept Darwin's 'blind watchmaker' in nature but reject Smith's 'invisible hand' in economics. The paper explores this charge and finds it vulnerable in different ways. Among other problems, it violates Hume's dictum that we do not derive ought from is; it obscures the differences in which individual agency deploys in biology and economics; it underestimates the specific non-chaotic conditions in which each order emerges; it ignores the epistemic features of an omniscient god in Christian theology; and it misreads the extension that Hayek himself gave to the Smith-Darwin analogy.