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Societies for the History of Economics

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Subject:
From:
Richard Adelstein <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:40:01 -0400
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If we substitute the phrase "spontaneous order" for invisible hand, I 
think there are fascinating, explicit visual representations to be 
found in some unusual places.  I remember a show on PBS several years 
ago about time-lapse photography which included a three-minute, 
time-lapse film of a dead rabbit being consumed by maggots, a process 
that in real time took several days and which many scientists had 
previously believed was essentially random. Instead, on the film, one 
first saw a small white spot at the rabbit's eye; the spot grew 
larger (and as it did, one could see the individual maggots wriggling 
within the growing, moving white spot) and moved systematically and 
in tight formation from the rabbit's head, down each leg and back up, 
and then through the body from top to bottom.  That is, the mass of 
individual maggots looked, from this perspective, like a unitary, 
organismic mass that was eating the rabbit in a systematic (possibly 
even "efficient") way rather than a shapeless blob that consumed the 
rabbit willy-nilly.

This seemed to me to be a film of a real, spontaneously ordered 
process in which no individual maggot "had any idea" of the larger 
pattern that their actions and interactions brought about, but in 
which the pattern itself looked like the product of design.  I'm sure 
that there are dozens of similar examples that could be drawn from 
nature, and like this one, rendered visually explicit and preserved 
on film.  E.O. Wilson has recently written about ant colonies 
"superorganisms" -- this is essentially the same sort of process, one 
in which the structured interactions of individual ants produces 
large-scale patterns that look as if they were planned to proceed as they do.

Richie Adelstein

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