Based on my readings in current biology and evolutionary theory, the misunderstandings of it are nearly universal. Social Darwinists, Creationists, and IDiots are drinking from the same fount of ignorance.

I haven't read "Bionomics", but judging by the context in which you bring it up, I'd provisionally label it more of the same. Biological and evolutionary metaphors for human affairs rarely stand up to close examination.

The most basic misunderstanding is the chronological scale. Suppose, against all reason, there actually were a gene for capitalism (or more accurately, a gene to win in a free-market economy). That gene might come to dominate the genome (thus "improving" the species according to the narrow value system of capitalists) in at a minimum a few hundred thousand years. Do you really think that an economic system that's only a couple of centuries old, in a formal sense, will survive unchanged for another 100,000 years? Can you say "stagnation"?

If there were actually a gene for economic ability, or a selection process that selected for it, you'd expect the poor to have a lower reproductive success rate than the wealthy. Ahem....

Oh, yes, the process could be sped up considerably, if we stooped to eugenics and selective breeding (for a nonexistent gene). But generally few people have been so depraved as to seriously suggest we kill off the poor. Jonathon Swift was being sarcastic in his "Modest Proposal". Pass it on.

Short of culling the herd, the harshest pressure economic Darwinism can exert is to make the poor miserable all their nasty, short, and brutish lives. It doesn't "improve the species", it only makes the winners feel better about themselves, and torments the losers. Speaking for the species as a whole, and taking long view: What's in it for us? I can see it makes you happy in the here-and-now, but what will our descendents a million years from now have to thank us for?

Another fundamental misconception is that evolution is a synonym for progress. Most people are shocked and disoriented to learn that not only is "improving the species" not the purpose of evolution, but that evolution really has no purpose at all. By that I mean that it's not directional--there is no forward. When a fish with eyes is trapped in a dark cave, its descendents lose their eyes. They haven't regressed or "devolved", they've simply adapted to a new environment in which eyes are a waste of energy and materials. If they subsequently move back out into the light, the genes for eyes will be expressed again within a few generations (the one-eyed fish in the school of the blind is king...or at least a survivor). Adaption is lateral, which makes it essentially "values-neutral".

Evolution is nondirectional because all it accomplishes is to better adapt organisms to live in their present circumstances. Evolution doesn't have foresight. Humans and modern protozoa share a common ancester somewhere back a billion years or so, which probably resembled...a protozoa. Yet modern protozoa are no less well adapted to their environment than are modern humans. Unicellular organisms are not more primitive than humans. In fact, statistically (which is all evolution cares about), they're far more successful than humans. They outnumber us whether you judge by number of species or sheer weight of biomass on the planet. The only real difference is that evolution hasn't equipped them to pat themselves on the back.

So it is with the notion of "improving" humanity by making us all better capitalists (or communists). You can select people for a predisposition to succeed under a particular system--one ecological niche--but under a different system different people rise to the top. If evolution "values" anything, it simply values temporary success under temporary conditions. From an honest evolutionary point of view, a CEO is no better or worse than a Commisar. Each is equally well-adapted to the world he lives in.

Then there's the notion of stability:

I have often used a biological metaphor for economics, comparing a free market, where countless self-interested parties interact in a certain environment to produce a stable system that benefits the whole, to similar systems in nature. A rain forest works like that.

Stability? In nature? There is temporary equilibrium, but never stability. Evolution can't work in a stable environment; it would have nothing to do. If you really need to apply biological metaphors to human affairs, the one about the rise and fall of empires is far more accurate. Organisms and people get fat, dumb, and happy in good times; then the ecology collapses or there's a revolution, and in the new environment different organisms and people thrive (see "CEOs vs Commisars" earlier).

Note the anthropomorphism: "benefits the whole". The blind processes of real biology have no faculty for judging benefits, no foresight to seek a goal judged beneficial, and really no concept of the whole. That meteor 65 megayears ago splashed the dinosaurs and wiped out 90% of "the whole", but speaking as a mammal, I'm damn grateful for that. The dinosaurs would have felt much differently, I'm sure. Nature didn't give a damn.

So many misunderstandings, so little time...

I wonder if the psychological reason people can't accept a free society without a "controller" making sure everything works, is the same reason other people can't accept the idea of a universe of this complexity without a "Watchmaker."

Making sense of that sentence requires accepting two fallacies, one being the rich misunderstanding of evolution that makes it possible to even speak of a "watchmaker" in the context of human affairs. The other is simply that the "other people" must be the straw man liberals who love big government for the sake of big government. Two wrongs don't make a right.

In the end, everybody who tries to apply Darwinian theory outside of biology does so to rationalize their own beliefs. And in doing so, they're simply wrong. Individual humans are not the same as species; human societies change millions of times faster than biological systems; and there is no mapping between the genes we carry and the value systems of economics.

Biological and ecological metaphors are less often completely wrong, but still break down upon close examination, for similar reasons.

I don't see any "there" there, Tom. If this were the Space/Science board, Moderator Bob would be swatting your nose with a rolled-up newspaper for committing the sin of psuedoscience on the carpet.