> Selfish individuals have discovered that they can make
> money by selling bread to their neighbours. And that is ALL it takes. The
> consequence of all these millions of combined selfish actions is that New
> York benefits immensely, and is able to coordinate it's bread supply and
> demand effortlessly.

I would take issue with the ideas that New York 'benefits immensely' and
'effortlessly'.  The effort required is distributed among many individuals
rather than concentrated among a few, but the overall effort required to
supply New York may be greater in the distributed case than in the
centralised case.

There's also the possibility of local maxima developing; you might be on top
of one 'hill' of benefit now, and there might be a very different system
that would be much more beneficial to suppliers and consumers alike (a
'mountain'), but the distributed, evolutionary supply system would never be
able to get there as there is a period of less benefit (a 'valley') on the
way.  Central control can move such systems, otherwise you have to 'tilt the
playing field' by central intervention such as taxes and subsidies to get
the mass of individually evolving bread suppliers to move across something
that is no longer a valley to the more optimal system.

Interestingly, Dawkins hasn't really considered environmental change in this
way in any of his books [that I've found] so far.  No doubt he will.

> There is no committee (apologies to Squeak central) that
> determines what the architecture of Squeak will be.

No, but merges into the Disney releases do tilt the playing field.

		- Peter