Is Nature Libertarian or Communist?

Should We Care?

Marxists can point to ant colonies to argue for human collectivism, while Hayekians can point to natural selection to argue for limited government.

Pick up a book on the brain and you might find arguments for framing intelligence as decentralized or you might find arguments for framing it as tightly coordinated.

But should it matter whether cells are cooperative or competitive? Whether life is best described as bottom-up or top-down? Whether mycelia might be compared to NGOs or multi-national corporations?

Assuming we could come to consensus about what the laws of nature are (which we can’t), and assuming we could simplify them into a unified set of non-contradictory principles (which we also can’t), why should we think that nature is morally instructive for us?

Moreover, why assume that human civilization, which we often oppose to nature, is not itself a form and extension of nature?

But if nature isn’t morally instructive, (why) should science writers be qualified to leap from their observations about the non-human world to social and political recommendations?