Organ’s second line states that “evolution is smarter than you.” By this he meant that our inability to explain how this or that characteristic might have developed only shows a lack of imagination or understanding on our part. It does not serve as positive evidence against the evolution of that trait. But there is another meaning to draw from this: certain features of evolution that may seem inefficient or counterproductive may in fact serve as efficient adaptations to the constraints under which those features evolved.
Consider seeing an example of this in action this fairly amusing lecture by Douglas Adams about the mating ritual of the kakapo, a flightless parrot native to New Zealand. He goes into detail about how every aspect of the kakapo’s mating ritual appears to be actively counterproductive to actually producing offspring:
He describes the overall process as “incredibly long and drawn out, fantastically complicated and almost entirely ineffective.” The first problem is “that the mating call of the male kakapo actively repels the female,” which certainly seems like a suboptimal start. He then describes how the kakapo mating call consists of a deep, pulsating bass sound. This creates a new complication, Adams says. He makes an analogy with a home speaker system, consisting of two smaller speakers “that give you treble and you have to place them very carefully in the room because they will determine the stereo image.” But you also have a subwoofer to produce bass sounds, “and you can place it anywhere in the room you want. You can put it behind the couch if you want, because the other characteristic of bass sound – and remember, we’re talking about the mating call of the male kakapo – is that you can’t tell where it’s coming from.” Summing up the whole scenario, we are told that as far as the female kakapo is concerned, “suppose she is there, which she probably isn’t, and she likes the sound of the drone, which she probably doesn’t like, and that she can. If she can find him, which she probably can’t, she will then only give permission to mate if the Pōhutukawa tree bears fruit.
Now you might study this mating process and think that evolution has dropped the ball here. How on earth could it have been good for kakapos to develop such an inefficient mating ritual? But there is an answer.
In New Zealand the kakapo had no natural enemies and the population was therefore not controlled. As a result, if kakapos were to reproduce like proverbial rabbits, they would quickly overpopulate the island they lived on, which would harm their own long-term survival. The kakapo’s incredibly inefficient mating rituals actually appear to be an efficient adaptation for keeping population levels in check, without predation or other outside pressures. And this complicated mating process still resulted in an island teeming with kakapos – if they were capable of mating at all. more in fact, they would have actually damaged their own survival prospects. As with gift giving among humans, what initially appears to be highly inefficient in static terms turns out to be dynamically efficient once one has a deeper understanding of it. The result – evolved social norms, customs and institutions that seem to “make no sense” or even be socially harmful, may well resemble the kakapo mating ritual – a seemingly inefficient practice that is actually an efficient adaptation.
Unfortunately, this adaptation, which was once an asset, is now a threat, as the conditions the kakapo now face are very different from the conditions under which this mating ritual evolved. Predators have been introduced to the island, and so has the kakapo no instinct to flee from predators or from people. As a result, this once abundant animal is now critically endangered, but repopulation depends on this unchanged mating ritual – which does not bode well for the prospect of recovery.
So am I just rambling, or do I have a general point? Of course I do, namely [dear EconLog editor, please insert a point here. 😉 ] But beyond that, we should take this as an opportunity to reflect on what Hayek said about the distinction between law and legislation, and why we cannot ‘abstain from legislation altogether’.
FA Hayek was as strong an advocate of the value of the evolved order as one is likely to find. But inside Rules and orderthe first part of Law, legislation and freedom, Hayek also says that there are times when “mature law requires correction by legislation.” One such circumstance occurs when “the spontaneous growth process may lead to an impasse from which it cannot extricate itself on its own or at least not be able to correct it quickly enough.” When thinking about the current situation of the kakapo, I was reminded of this statement by Hayek. (Yes, I have somehow made a connection between the mating rituals of flightless parrots and Hayek’s work on social order. That’s just how my mind works – I don’t really understand it myself, but here we are. ) Evolution is far too slow for the kakapo to develop a new mating ritual for its radically new environment. Likewise, cultural and institutional evolution may be too slow to adapt to changes in our social environment, leading to situations where legislation may be necessary.
However, it also seems important to have a extremely high bar for this idea. First, it is very difficult to rightly know whether a social institution is actually inefficient or harmful, or whether it might be efficiently inefficient in some way that you do not understand. Second, even when we know that a social institution is suboptimal, it is often far from clear what a solution might be, and people have a strong tendency to think they understand more than they actually do. And we need strong reasons to think that the net benefits will be very large, because top-down changes to developed orders impose significant transaction costs. Richard Hooker said it best:
When people suddenly see things rejected, annulled, and discarded, which long habit had made second nature, they become bewildered and begin to question whether something is in itself good or bad by nature, rather than simply how people also want to mention it. at any given time… So whenever we change a law, it cannot help but erode and weaken in the eyes of the people the force that makes all laws effective.
Hooker then concludes:
If the newer laws are even slightly more favorable, we must generally conclude that it is better to endure a little pain than to attempt a dangerous remedy.
How often do we find ourselves in circumstances where we should try to find a solution? I’m not sure. But the answer is not ‘never’. Although Hayek describes a few different circumstances in which legislation can in principle serve as a useful corrective to adult law, I am unfortunately not aware of him citing specific, concrete examples of this in practice.
But I’m also curious about the readers. How often is it the case that top-down correction of developed institutions can be useful? And what is the bigger risk? The possibility that we will overestimate our ability to implement such remedies effectively, and end up doing more harm than good by continually trying to tinker with a system we don’t understand? Or that too much reluctance to try such remedies will leave us in the same position as the kakapo, saddled with behavior that was once helpful but is now harmful?