Re: [Futurework] JKG: Smith vs Darwin and The Predator State

[Ed Weick]

A recent Scientific American (Special Addition, Feb 20, 2006) contains an article by physicist by Jacob Bekenstein entitled "Information in the Holographic Universe".  The article begins with:  Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told "matter and energy."  Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals. I find this line of argument compelling.  But it does raise the question of where the information that has shaped the universe and ourselves came from.  It was there in the big bang, I suppose.  I'm not arguing intelligent design, but I do wonder how it got there. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Watters Cole To: futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:17 PM Subject: [Futurework] JKG: Smith vs Darwin and The Predator State Two by James K. Galbraith, first from Winter 2005, the second from the current issue of Mother Jones.   Smith vs Darwin: Like Intelligent Design, the idea of the Invisible Hand stubbornly persists in the face of overwhelming evidence.   In each generation since Veblen, some economists have fought for evolutionary ideas, but the ID types keep coming back. Today their most lethal champions call themselves the "School of Law and Economics." This group holds that markets are self-policing, that fraud is really impossible except where publicly provided insurance creates "moral hazard." Get rid of regulations, they believe, and we won't much need the SEC, the FTC, and the Justice Department to protect us from Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. Now that John Roberts has taken over at the Supreme Court, we'll see how this touching faith works out.   Modern economics resembles religion in other, more prosaic ways. The American Economic Association (AEA) runs like a priesthood; its flagship Review is as unreadable as a Dead Sea Scroll. And when heretics gather in the Association for Evolutionary Economics and elsewhere, Inquisitors keep after them. (At the annual academic meetings, the AEA sends seat counters to the heretical sessions, looking for groups small enough to cut from its rolls.) To borrow an old line from Robert Kuttner, the evolutionists are "a tiny and despised sect that stubbornly refuses to disappear."   Yet we're a threat. For Darwin cannot be erased; his material, randomized, godless view of change informs every aspect of the way real scientists investigate physical, biological, and social problems, from cosmology to the study of political or technological change. The new mathematics of chaos and complexity are evolutionary, for they study how simple determinate processes can give rise to lifelike diversity. These techniques yield many new insights into the origins of pattern and structure. (For a fun example, download John Conway's "Game of Life" and have a look at what it can do.) One day, they may break through even in economics, and Veblen's long-delayed evolutionary revolution will be complete.   http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/12/smith_darwin.html   The Predator State: Enron, Tyco, WorldCom... and the U.S. government? http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html     _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework

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