The central themes of this book are those of cultural evolution and the inability of centralized economies to make economic calculations without a price system to harness diffuse knowledge.

It is the revelation that culture, including morals, institutions and such, is neither designed by human minds nor a result of inborn instinct but an evolved system that does not admit of simple explanations that is humbling.

When this is understood it becomes clear that a rationalist approach to analyzing tradition is unlikely to be fruitful.

Hayek's essay, [Why I am not a Conservative] might add to an analysis of these thoughts since Hayek here seems to present a very powerful conservative thesis.

Hayek's remarks early in the book about the possibility that Darwin might have been inspired by evolutionary ideas in the social sciences seems a bit overblown, particularly when it is well known that Darwin himself claimed that it was a book about gradualism as a shaping force in geology that he took with him on his sea voyage aboard the Beagle which led him to think along that line. Nevertheless it is true that various evolutionary explanations were in the air during his youth, including from economists but also from naturalists in his own ancestry.

I am one of those who think it is very odd that as someone once said, it seems that the left and right are mostly divided between those who disbelieve in spontaneous order and evolutionary feedback regarding the market but very accepting of it in biology on one hand and those on the other side who accept spontaneous order in economics but don't credit it in regard to the world of living things. ( )