Jorge Besada - How the World Works: Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life, Society, the Economic Crisis, Hip-Hop, and F.A. Hayeks Coming Intellectual Revolution

In June 2010, Nobel Prize winner inEconomics Friedrich August von Hayeks book The Road toSerfdom became the bestselling book in Amazon.com thusmaking it the fastest selling book in the world at the timejust as surely as mankind had to stumble upon an understanding of bacteria inorder to cure disease.

The central theme of this book canbe summarized by the following words Hayek wrote:

We understand now that all enduring structures abovethe level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are theresults of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selectiveevolution (Hayek F. , 1981, p. 158)

This book is about the single lawof nature that creates everything around us, both the biological as well as thesocioeconomic worlds, that law being Natural Selection.

Whether we know much about naturalselection or not, most of us associate it with people like Charles Darwin and the biological world of animals and living things, but natural selectionalso evolved the socioeconomic order and things like religions, laws, customs,language, and especially for our purposes, the many socioeconomic institutionsthat make up our modern economies like money, the banking and lendingindustries, interest rates and more. In other words, at a fundamental levelnatural selection creates both the biological as well as the socioeconomicorders.

At the most fundamental of levels,natural selection is a simple process that creates order. For example, if wecould travel back in time about 4 billion years, there would have been nocomplex life forms like what we have today; there probably would have been whatis commonly referred to as the chemical soup, which can be seenas a sort of chaotic sea of atoms/molecules. Out of this chemical soup, orderand complexity arose and eventually those molecules became ordered in a waythat led to the first living cells. Complexity and order continued to increaseand eventually single cells were ordered in a way that led to the first multi-cellularlife forms like plants, animals, and eventually us humans. Just like atoms arethe building blocks of molecules, and molecules are the building blocks ofcells, and cells are the building blocks of animals, human beings can be saidto be the building blocks of the socioeconomic order, or also the cells of whatcan be called the social organism. This increase in order andcomplexity as time goes by, and looking at human beings as being cells in alarger social organism are not just interesting observations that I am suremany readers might have noticed themselves; they are the inevitable result ofnatural selection building higher and higher levels of order and complexity.

What we commonly refer to asbiological evolution can be seen as natural selection building the order andcomplexity that we call living things. In the second chapter we will focus onhow natural selection reordered the primordial chemical soup to create andevolve life. The third chapter, which will deal mostly with what is commonlyreferred to as economics, will show how natural selection evolvedthe social order, in other words, how in just a few thousand years, naturalselection reordered and expanded tribal human beings to create the modernglobal economy. The fourth chapter will show how natural selection has evolvedour culture (laws, religions, customs), and just as importantly, how theevolution of culture is intertwined with economic growth. The bottom line isthat there is a single and simple law of nature, natural selection, thatwhen properly understood can explain at a very fundamental and profound levelhow things that exhibit order, both biological and socioeconomic, havenaturally evolved.

Most people fear the concepts ofnatural selection and evolution with good reason, we dont reallyunderstand them, especially when it comes to the concept of race andsocioeconomic achievement. Popular phrases associated with evolution likesurvival of the fittest can scare us and keep us away fromlearning these vital subjects. Racist and erroneous ideologies like the onesthat flourished in Hitlers Germany were also heavily influenced byfaulty evolutionary thought and still play a significant role, especially inEuropean politics.

Natural selection and evolution aremisunderstood and need to be re-explained in a different way. Natural Selectioncan be said to shape everything including the things we like and dontlike about ourselves: the way we smile, the cities we live in, the microchipsthat run our computers, the music we like, etc. By understanding how naturalselection works and shapes everything we can better understand ourselves, oursociety, and gain insights as to how we can help shape a more prosperous world.