http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE
Starlings on Otmoor......
at 4:00.....a big WOW!
And that, folks, is a visual demonstration of how a free market creates a coherent, highly efficient, economy: the actions of each individual, pursuing only its own ends, and interacting only with its nearest neighbors form a coherent organism - a meta-organism, if you will - of which each individual is only faintly aware, if at all.
This is also, in a sense, a real-world example of the ant colony in Douglas Hofstadter's book,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Or, even closer to home, a stripped-down example of how the human brain works: individual cells - neurons as well as the other cell-types that compose the brain - each pursuing only its own good, and responding primarily only to the actions of its immediate neighbors - albeit also to its more distant neighbors as, for example, various hormones released by specific collections of specialized cells, suffuse through the entire structure - but, as a meta-organism, giving rise to consciousness and thought; in short, to the "me" I believe myself to be.