Unintelligent Complex Design

To settle an argument, we need science, not arguments based on competing beliefs.  This article explains, using a scientific approach, how complex organisms can arise from evolutionary processes.  In doing so, it counters the claim that complexity is inconsistent with evolution.

With the scientific approach to this problem in the article below, all of the assumptions are clear and the logical progression leading to the results is specified.  We can ask how well this model represents the evolutionary process.  We can ask how well the model’s predictions accord with experimental and historical data.  We can make progress towards understanding how an evolutionary process can produce the complex designs we see around us.  If we want to teach about how complexity arises in our schools, this is the path we take.  Nobody has to accept the theory that comes out of the process beyond its ability to explain the known facts.  That’s all it does, explain the known facts. 

The explanation can be used to predict experimental outcomes or data gathered from the historical record and it’s ability to explain the facts can be challenged in the process.  The ability to challenge the model's predictions is essential.  Nothing in science will ever be inconsistent with the world from coming into being through some unimaginable force.  An intelligent designer could have started this universe an instant ago with all of our memories and perceptions, all of the information present in the universe, pre-programmed to his/her/its whim.  Though this sounds to me like a pretty good scientist, the story itself will never be science.  It is a belief and nothing more.  There is no way to ever test the proposition that the world suddenly arose as it is an instant ago and that’s what makes all the difference between science and intelligent design.

What follows is science.  There is a long introduction, but it’s in question #1 that follows the introduction where the complexity issue is addressed directly.  If you are interested in this issue, this is something you should know about:

[Update:  I just learned that Kevin Drum references the same article a few days ago.]

Testing Darwin, Discover, February 2005 (Subscription link, Free link at author's web site): If you want to find alien life-forms, hold off on booking that trip to the moons of Saturn. You may only need to catch a plane to East Lansing, Michigan.  The aliens of East Lansing are not made of carbon and water. They have no DNA. Billions of them are quietly colonizing a cluster of 200 computers in the basement of the Plant and Soil Sciences building at Michigan State University. To peer into their world, however, you have to walk a few blocks west on Wilson Road to the engineering department and visit the Digital Evolution Laboratory. Here you'll find a crew of computer scientists, biologists, and even a philosopher or two gazing at computer monitors, watching the evolution of bizarre new life-forms.

These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however, they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.

After more than a decade of development, Avida's digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life. “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off,” says Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State and a member of the Avida team. “Does this, does that, does this. Metabolism? Maybe not quite yet, but getting pretty close.”

One thing the digital organisms do particularly well is evolve.“ Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it,” Pennock says. “All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things replicate, they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural selection is happening there. If that's central to the definition of life, then these things count.”

It may seem strange to talk about a chunk of computer code in the same way you talk about a cherry tree or a dolphin. But the more biologists think about life, the more compelling the equation becomes. Computer programs and DNA are both sets of instructions. Computer programs tell a computer how to process information, while DNA instructs a cell how to assemble proteins.

The ultimate goal of the instructions in DNA is to make new organisms that contain the same genetic instructions. “You could consider a living organism as nothing more than an information channel, where it's transmitting its genome to its offspring,” says Charles Ofria, director of the Digital Evolution Laboratory. “And the information stored in the channel is how to build a new channel.” So a computer program that contains instructions for making new copies of itself has taken a significant step toward life.

A cherry tree absorbs raw materials and turns them into useful things. In goes carbon dioxide, water, and nutrients. Out comes wood, cherries, and toxins to ward off insects. A computer program works the same way. Consider a program that adds two numbers. The numbers go in like carbon dioxide and water, and the sum comes out like a cherry tree.

In the late 1990s Ofria's former adviser, physicist Chris Adami of Caltech, set out to create the conditions in which a computer program could evolve the ability to do addition. He created some primitive digital organisms and at regular intervals presented numbers to them. At first they could do nothing. But each time a digital organism replicated, there was a small chance that one of its command lines might mutate. On a rare occasion, these mutations allowed an organism to process one of the numbers in a simple way. An organism might acquire the ability simply to read a number, for example, and then produce an identical output.

Adami rewarded the digital organisms by speeding up the time it took them to reproduce. If an organism could read two numbers at once, he would speed up its reproduction even more. And if they could add the numbers, he would give them an even bigger reward. Within six months, Adami's organisms were addition whizzes. “We were able to get them to evolve without fail,” he says. But when he stopped to look at exactly how the organisms were adding numbers, he was more surprised. “Some of the ways were obvious, but with others I'd say, 'What the hell is happening?' It seemed completely insane.”

On a trip to Michigan State, Adami met microbiologist Richard Lenski, who studies the evolution of bacteria. Adami later sent Lenski a copy of the Avida software so he could try it out for himself. On a Friday, Lenski loaded the program into his computer and began to create digital worlds. By Monday he was tempted to shut down his lab and dedicate himself to Avida. “It just had the smell of life,” says Lenski.

It also mirrored Lenski's own research. Since 1988 he has been running the longest continuous experiment in evolution. He began with a single bacterium-Escherichia coli-and used its offspring to found 12 separate colonies of bacteria that he nurtured on a meager diet of glucose, which creates a strong incentive for the evolution of new ways to survive. Over the past 17 years, the colonies have passed through 35,000 generations. In the process, they've become one of the clearest demonstrations that natural selection is real. All 12 colonies have evolved to the point at which the bacteria can replicate almost twice as fast as their ancestors. At the same time, the bacterial cells have gotten twice as big. Surprisingly, these changes didn't unfold in a smooth, linear process. Instead, each colony evolved in sudden jerks, followed by hundreds of generations of little change, followed by more jerks.

Similar patterns occur in the evolution of digital organisms in Avida. So Lenski set up digital versions of his bacterial colonies and has been studying them ever since. He still marvels at the flexibility and speed of Avida, which not only allow him to alter experimental conditions with a few keystrokes but also to automatically record every mutation in every organism. “In an hour I can gather more information than we had been able to gather in years of working on bacteria,” Lenski say.“ Avida just spits data at you.”

With this newfound power, the Avida team is putting Darwin to the test in a way that was previously unimaginable. Modern evolutionary biologists have a wealth of fossils to study, and they can compare the biochemistry and genes of living species. But they can't look at every single generation and every single gene that separates a bird, for example, from its two-legged dinosaur ancestors. By contrast, Avida makes it possible to watch the random mutation and natural selection of digital organisms unfold over millions of generations. In the process, it is beginning to shed light on some of the biggest questions of evolution.

QUESTION #1:  WHAT GOOD IS HALF AN EYE?

If life today is the result of evolution by natural selection, Darwin realized, then even the most complex systems in biology must have emerged gradually from simple precursors, like someone crossing a river using stepping-stones. But consider the human eye, which is made of many different parts-lens, iris, jelly, retina, optic nerve-and will not work if even one part is missing. If the eye evolved in a piecemeal fashion, how was it of any use to our ancestors? Darwin argued that even a simpler version of today's eyes could have helped animals survive. Early eyes might have been nothing more than a patch of photosensitive cells that could tell an animal if it was in light or shadow. If that patch then evolved into a pit, it might also have been able to detect the direction of the light. Gradually, the eye could have taken on new functions, until at last it could produce full-blown images. Even today, you can find these sorts of proto-eyes in flatworms and other animals. Darwin declared that the belief that natural selection cannot produce a complex organ “can hardly be considered real.”

Digital organisms don't have complex organs such as eyes, but they can process information in complex ways. In order to add two numbers together, for example, a digital organism needs to carry out a lot of simpler operations, such as reading the numbers and holding pieces of those numbers in its memory. Knock out the commands that let a digital organism do one of these simple operations and it may not be able to add. The Avida team realized that by watching a complex organism evolve, they might learn some lessons about how complexity evolves in general.

The researchers set up an experiment to document how one particularly complex operation evolved. The operation, known as equals, consists of comparing pairs of binary numbers, bit by bit, and recording whether each pair of digits is the same. It's a standard operation found in software, but it's not a simple one. The shortest equals program Ofria could write is 19 lines long. The chances that random mutations alone could produce it are about one in a thousand trillion trillion.

To test Darwin's idea that complex systems evolve from simpler precursors, the Avida team set up rewards for simpler operations and bigger rewards for more complex ones. The researchers set up an experiment in which organisms replicate for 16,000generations. They then repeated the experiment 50 times.

Avida beat the odds. In 23 of the 50 trials, evolution produced organisms that could carry out the equals operation. And when the researchers took away rewards for simpler operations, the organisms never evolved an equals program. “When we looked at the 23 tests, they were all done in completely different ways,” adds Ofria. He was reminded of how Darwin pointed out that many evolutionary paths can produce the same complex organ. A fly and an octopus can both produce an image with their eyes, but their eyes are dramatically different from ours. “Darwin was right on that-there are many different ways of evolving the same function,” says Ofria.

The Avida team then traced the genealogy leading from the first organism to each one that had evolved the equals routine. “The beauty of digital life is that you can watch it happen step by step,” says Adami. “In every step you would ordinarily never see there is a goal you're going toward.” Indeed, the ancestors of the successful organisms sometimes suffered harmful mutations that made them reproduce at a slower rate. But mutations a few generations later sped them up again.

When the Avida team published their first results on the evolution of complexity in 2003, they were inundated with e-mails from creationists. Their work hit a nerve in the antievolution movement and hit it hard. A popular claim of creationists is that life shows signs of intelligent design, especially in its complexity. They argue that complex things could never have evolved, because they don't work unless all their parts are in place. But as Adami points out, if creationists were right, then Avida wouldn't be able to produce complex digital organisms. A digital organism may use 19 or more simple routines in order to carry out the equals operation. If you delete any of the routines, it can't do the job. “What we show is that there are irreducibly complex things and they can evolve,” says Adami.

The Avida team makes their software freely available on the Internet, and creationists have downloaded it over and over again in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. While they've uncovered a few minor glitches, Ofria says they have yet to find anything serious. “We literally have an army of thousands of unpaid bug testers,” he says. “What more could you want?”

QUESTION #2:  WHY DOES A FOREST HAVE MORE THAN ONE KIND OF PLANT?

When you walk into a forest, the first thing you see is diversity. Trees tower high overhead, ferns lurk down below, vines wander here and there like tangled snakes. Yet these trees, ferns, and vines are all plants, and as such, they all make a living in the same way, by catching sunlight. If one species was better than all the rest at catching sunlight, then you might expect it to outcompete the other plants and take over the forest. But it's clear that evolution has taken a different course.

Figuring out why is a full-time job for a small army of biologists. … [link to article]

QUESTION #3:  WHY BE NICE?

Human society depends on countless acts of cooperation and personal sacrifice. But that doesn't make us unique. Consider Myxococcus xanthus, a species of bacteria that Lenski and his colleagues study. Myxococcus travels in giant swarms 100,000 strong, hunting down E. coli and other bacteria like wolves chasing moose. They kill their prey by spitting out antibiotics, then spit out digestive enzymes that make the E. coli burst open. The swarm then feasts together on the remains. If the Myxococcus swarm senses that they've run out of prey to hunt, they gather together to form a stalk. The bacteria at the very top of the stalk turn into spores, which can be carried away by wind or water to another spot where they can start a new pack. Meanwhile, the individuals that formed the stalk die.

This sort of cooperation poses a major puzzle because it could be undermined by the evolution of cheaters. … [link to article]

QUESTION #4:  WHY SEX?

Birds do it, bees do it, and even fleas do it-but why they all do it is another matter. Reproduction is possible without sex. Bacteria and protozoa simply split in two. Some trees send shoots into the ground that sprout up as new trees. There are even lizard species that are all female. Their eggs don't need sperm to start developing into healthy baby female lizards.

“One of the biggest questions in evolution is, why aren't all organisms asexual?” says Adami. Given the obvious inefficiency of sex, evolutionary biologists suspect that it must confer some powerful advantage that makes it so common. But they have yet to come to a consensus about what that advantage is. … [link to article]

QUESTION #5:  WHAT DOES LIFE ONOTHER PLANETS LOOK LIKE?

Life on Earth is based on DNA. But we can't exclude the possibility that life could evolve from a completely different system of molecules. And that raises some worrying questions about the work going on these days to find signs of extraterrestrial life. NASA is funding a wide range of life-detecting instruments, from rovers that prowl across Mars to telescopes that will gaze at distant solar systems. They are looking for the signs of life that are produced on Earth. Some are looking for high levels of oxygen in the atmospheres of other planets. Others are looking for bits of DNA or fragments of cell walls. But if there's non-DNA-based life out there, we might overlook it because it doesn't fit our preconceptions. “We can look at how known life-forms leave marks on their environment,” says Evan Dorn, a member of Chris Adami's lab at Caltech, “but we can never make universal statements about them because we have only one example.” Dorn says Avida is example number two. … [link to article]

QUESTION #6:  WHAT WILL LIFE ON EARTH LOOK LIKE IN THE FUTURE?

One of the hallmarks of life is its ability to evolve around our best efforts to control it. Antibiotics, for example, were once considered a magic bullet that would eradicate infectious diseases. In just a few decades, bacteria have evolved an arsenal of defenses that make many antibiotics useless. Ofria has been finding that digital organisms have a way of outwitting him as well. Not long ago, he decided to see what would happen if he stopped digital organisms from adapting. Whenever an organism mutated, he would run it through a special test to see whether the mutation was beneficial. If it was, he killed the organism off. “You'd think that would turn off any further adaptation,” he says. Instead, the digital organisms kept evolving. They learned to process information in new ways and were able to replicate faster. It took a while for Ofria to realize that they had tricked him. … [link to article]

Comments

[Lee A. Arnold]

I'm hardly a creationist but if I were, these experiments would prove very little to me. To begin with, these computer simulations do not proceed from a vacuum, but from prior commands (software) to do things. That is a bit like the Garden of Eden, right there.

Of course the response to creationists is that Darwinian evolution is only half the process; the other half is self-organization and persistance of molecular structures, i.e. memory, which would probably allow evolution to our level several times over, in six billion years.

I suspect that there are at least three different motives behind the "god-design" movement, and they may predominate differently in different people: (A) the idea that part of what is wrong with the world is that the accepted knowledge is incorrect, and the additional and social thrill in having a forbidden and contrarian view; (B) a misunderstanding of the total method of science, which relies upon inductive inferences for large parts of certain disciplines; and (C) entry whether knowingly or not into the mystical process, which necessitates countermanding, for that moment of change, rational thought.

I still think the problem is not how complexity comes about, but how simplicity emerges from it! I doubt whether selection provides the entire answer. A real logical crux is the evolution of consciousness, which I suppose you could put down to the fact that one's physical body is a point in space, so intentionality will become unified. Sort of proceeding from Aristotle's point that there is no body of infinite extension (The Physics.)

But then what do you do with the fact that consciousness has evolved to the point where it has identified "Evolution"? (i.e., it has become self-consciousness?) I suppose you could dismiss this as a given, (or explain limply that it's a cycling oscillation between the mirroring brain-halves--it wouldn't surprise me if bilateral symmetry had something to do with it--) but it remains a circularity every bit as goofy as the logical idea of god.

Despite that fact that "god" is more of a heuristic propadeutic, there is also, finally, the evolutionary status of higher forms of consciousness, such as mystical god-consciousness. Since only one in every hundred people will have an exact idea of what this phrase means, and scientists in particular are curiously unscientific and incurious about the possibility of it, we are on semantically very shaky ground, and it will not help, to belabor the discussion. But take it from an old hippie mystic that it exists, and it is nothing like a psychological hallucination. The next question is, if it is wrongly ascribed to god, how in hell did it evolve?

[cm]

Bottom line, instead of assigning more mindshare to *really* unknown or difficult subjects, we are defending scientific principles in a subject that is largely empirical and thus won't yield formal proof.

I say, "Mission Accomplished" for the inventors of Intelligent Distraction!

[anne]

Ernst Mayr was the foremost evolutionary biologist of the last century, among the foremost scientists in hiistory. Mayr wrote extensively and with simple beauty on the philosophy of biology, and I cannot praise the work highly enough.

[anne]

Here is a portion of a brilliant interview of Mayr at 97 :)

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html

October 2001

ERNST MAYR: WHAT EVOLUTION IS

EDGE: To what extent has the study of evolutionary biology been the study of ideas about evolutionary biology? Is evolution the evolution of ideas, or is it a fact?

ERNST MAYR: That's a very good question. Because of the historically entrenched resistance to the thought of evolution, documented by modern-day creationism, evolutionists have been forced into defending evolution and trying to prove that it is a fact and not a theory. Certainly the explanation of evolution and the search for its underlying ideas has been somewhat neglected, and my new book, the title of which is What Evolution Is, is precisely attempting to rectify that situation. It attempts to explain evolution. As I say in the first section of the book, I don't need to prove it again, evolution is so clearly a fact that you need to be committed to something like a belief in the supernatural if you are at all in disagreement with evolution. It is a fact and we don't need to prove it anymore. Nonetheless we must explain why it happened and how it happens.

One of the surprising things that I discovered in my work on the philosophy of biology is that when it comes to the physical sciences, any new theory is based on a law, on a natural law. Yet as several leading philosophers have stated, and I agree with them, there are no laws in biology like those of physics. Biologists often use the word law, but for something to be a law, it has to have no exceptions. A law must be beyond space and time, and therefore it cannot be specific. Every general truth in biology though is specific. Biological "laws" are restricted to certain parts of the living world, or certain localized situations, and they are restricted in time. So we can say that their are no laws in biology, except in functional biology which, as I claim, is much closer to the physical sciences, than the historical science of evolution.

EDGE: Let's call this Mayr's Law.

MAYR: Well in that case, I've produced a number of them. Anyhow the question is, if scientific theories are based on laws and there aren't any laws in biology, well then how can you say you have theories, and how do you know that your theories are any good? That's a perfectly legitimate question. Of course our theories are based on something solid, which are concepts. If you go through the theories of evolutionary biology you find that they are all based on concepts such as natural selection, competition, the struggle for existence, female choice, male dominance, etc. There are hundreds of such concepts. In fact, ecology consists almost entirely of such basic concepts. Once again you can ask, how do you know they're true? The answer is that you can know this only provisionally by continuous testing and you have to go back to historical narratives and other non-physicalist methods to determine whether your concept and the consequences that arise from it can be confirmed.

EDGE: Is biology a narrative based of our times and how we look at the world?

MAYR: It depends entirely on when in the given age of the intellectual world you ask these questions. For instance when Darwin published The Origin of Species, the leading Cambridge University geologist was Sedgwick, and Sedgwick wrote a critique of Darwin's Origin that asked how Darwin could be so unscientific as to use chance in some of his arguments, when everyone knew that God controlled the world? Now who was more scientific, Darwin or Sedgwick? This was in 1860 and now, 140 years later, we recognize how much this critique was colored by the beliefs of that time. The choice of historical narratives is also very time-bound. Once you recognize this, you cease to question their usefulness. There are a number of such narratives that are as ordinary as proverbs and yet still work.

EDGE: Darwin is bigger than ever. Why?

MAYR: One of my themes is that Darwin changed the foundations of Western thought. He challenged certain ideas that had been accepted by everyone, and we now agree that he was right and his contemporaries were wrong. Let me just illuminate some of them. One such idea goes back to Plato who claimed that there were a limited number of classes of objects and each class of objects had a fixed definition. Any variation between entities in the same class was only accidental and the reality was an underlying realm of absolutes.

EDGE: How does that pertain to Darwin?

MAYR: Well Darwin showed that such essentialist typology was absolutely wrong. Darwin, though he didn't realize it at the time, invented the concept of biopopulation, which is the idea that the living organisms in any assemblage are populations in which every individual is uniquely different, which is the exact opposite of such a typological concept as racism. Darwin applied this populational idea quite consistently in the discovery of new adaptations though not when explaining the origin of new species.

Another idea that Darwin refuted was that of teleology, which goes back to Aristotle. During Darwin's lifetime, the concept of teleology, or the use of ultimate purpose as a means of explaining natural phenomena, was prevalent. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant based his philosophy on Newton's laws. When he tried the same approach in a philosophy of living nature, he was totally unsuccessful. Newtonian laws didn't help him explain biological phenomena. So he invoked Aristotle's final cause in his Critique of Judgement. However, explaining evolution and biological phenomena with the idea of teleology was a total failure.

To make a long story short, Darwin showed very clearly that you don't need Aristotle's teleology because natural selection applied to bio-populations of unique phenomena can explain all the puzzling phenomena for which previously the mysterious process of teleology had been invoked.

The late philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, who was for many years probably America's most distinguished philosopher — you know him, he died last year — told me about a year before his death that as far as he was concerned, Darwin's greatest achievement was that he showed that Aristotle's idea of teleology, the so-called fourth cause, does not exist....

[anne]

Mayr, by the way, was Jared Diamond's teacher.

[cl]

Very interesting.

I am curious to see how the ID proponents will respond to this. If they are of the mind that they misunderstand how science is conducted, then I am not sure that this will convince them.

However to remain silent, and not take issue with ID is a mistake. Perhaps they are creating distractions that some would argue do not warrant our attention. But if we are silent, they will gain traction. This is a step in the right direction.

[cm]

cl: I did not mean to suggest one should remain silent, but to lament how easily public discourse is sabotaged, hijacked, and redirected. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss what good countermeasures could be. Perhaps there are none.

[anne]

What is important is that we understand evolution. I have no interest in convincing a creationist of anything, and no illusion that I could. The creationists I have read or heard have no interest in science.

[Lee A. Arnold]

I think it is important to prevent the creation of more creationists. But evolutionists have not evolved that ability, yet.

[Movie Guy]

I have four simple questions.

1. What created the Universe?

2. What is beyond the Universe?

3. Am I dreaming or is this reality?

4. Does ice cream rank high on the list of created items? (I think so...)

[Timothy]

Movie Guy:

Dude, we're like totally brains in vats. Ask any first-year Philosophy undergrad. Hell, ask any philosophy professor.

Riddle me this, though: Those who are largely willing to accept that the order of the market economy will arise untamed through the seemingly random actions of individual actors refuse to believe that the whole universe could operate on largely the same principle.

[mynym]

"...seemingly random actions of individual actors..."

What? You're comparing a vast network of at least marginally intelligent actors making or trying to make intelligent selections to the notion of "random" mutation and natural selections. The two networks are comparable only if one argued that natural selections had some guiding principle favorable to Life just as intelligent beings try to make selections favorable to themselves. If there is a "guiding principle" or anthropic principle governing random mutation and natural selection then the philosophy of Naturalism that Darwin put at the foundation of Darwinism is defeated.

One could compare your neural nets to "..seemingly random actions..." as well, yet in theory you are still thinking through your brain and guiding the process. It is only you who sees the big picture of all the "random brain events" that conclude in a thought through your neural nets.

So think now, while you have some chance to do so. Sometimes to have a chance you have to take a chance.

Our brains are, if you will, “quantum computers.” But they are not of the sort now making headlines. Subtle quantum effects in the brain afford us a capacity we would not otherwise have, yet to make maximum use of such effects our natural brains are now designing even better synthetic ones. These employ quantum principles directly, not, as in the human brain, in subtle and nearly invisible fashion. ....if quantum processes are the source within the human brain of genuine thought—as also of genuine will, intention, and choice—then the quantum computers we are on the verge of designing (or whose evolution we are at least facilitating) may turn themselves into genuine sentient beings. They may have as much intelligence as we have, quite possibly more: There are severe limits to how much quantum weirdness the human brain may employ...limits on how much a synthetic brain might employ are far less severe. Vast, synthetic, self-evolving, superintelligent, and completely sentient computers must surely sound like pure science fiction, but they are not.
(The Quantum Brain
By Jeffrey Satinover :6-8)

Some philosophers of science have noted the fact that we are most likely alone in the universe in an argument along the same lines of Stephen Hawkings notion that if there were time travellers then we would have met them already. (An example)

[Travis]

http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

says...

cm:

I understand. I thought before to even respond was to give them press, but I am tired of the legitimacy given simply to the printed word regardless of source.

So I have concluded we fight back. Let them know we think they are idiots.

[cl]

Timothy:

Maybe there is a god of markets. An intelligent designer of sorts. Could that be what Adam Smith meant by the invisible hand?

The IH prayer:
Oh ye great invisible hand, by your wisdom, allocating resources with divine efficiency, yada yada yada....