Excerpt

Spanning the time of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species there emerged two truly original and organic regulatory principles that would come to dominate our understanding of adaptive order in decentralized systems: the invisible hand and natural selection. 

These ideas were radically different from the universal ideas of physics that had preceded them and that had provided the liberating empirical soil in which they now grew. What Newton described in the Principia was a universe of cold cause and effect:

“It seems to me farther, that these Particles have not only a Vis inertiae (want of power to move themselves), but also that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as that of Gravity . . . which causes . . . the Cohesion of Bodies. These Principles I consider . . . as general Laws of Nature.”

Whereas for Newton, particles were as simple as possible—possessing only the property of inertia and pushed around by active principles (namely gravity)—for Smith and Darwin, the correct particles were organisms actively seeking scarce resources and regulated by emergent principles generated by the collective activity of populations in competition. Both the invisible hand and natural selection encode the integrated average of purposeful adaptive agents.

The founding of SFI was a very active effort to move beyond theory in which homogeneous elements move in response to universal forces and fields, towards heterogeneous agents responding to emergent incentives and rewards. And the biological sciences and the social and economic sciences are those domains where these features predominate, hence their critical founding role in SFI’s history. To this day many are still looking for the keys to insight under nineteenth-century gas lamps (or even eighteenth-century oil lamps). The fact is, our theories are still very far from capturing complex reality. 

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