The Sage Forge

Look for a moment at the basics of evolution.  Small organisms (and organizations) are less stable, more volatile, easier to institute, easier to replicate, easier to kill individually but harder to eliminate as a group than large organisms.  Successful small organisms, because of these traits, adapt readily to a rapidly changing environment.  Inflexible or inefficient small organisms rapidly fail.

In the biological world small organisms can institute rapid changes in an environment, such as the production of a toxin or increasing oxygen levels in their immediate vicinity, to favor their survival.  About 600 million years ago single-celled organisms did this to dominate their environments and completely overthrew Earth's ecosystem, changing the atmosphere from CO2/ methane/ ammonia to our current nitrogen/ oxygen mix.  This was the single greatest ecological calamity to befall the planet.  Well, except that we owe our existence to it.

Also looking at the biological world, large organisms are usually made up of collections of small organisms that gather together in such a way that, by the loss of individual flexibility and function, there is gained a capacity to control the environment in which individual cells function.  A heart muscle cell can't survive in the wild environment alone, but it also needn't bother with a whole range of functions an amoeba must master to survive on its own.  The heart cell becomes expert at a single function in a carefully protected environment.

By this specialization large organisms can supress the volatility small organisms often produce and begin to spread the sphere of their influence beyond their immediate internal environment.

This stability has another cost as well.  While individual cells may "turn over" as rapidly as the single celled organisms in the larger environment the information on which the organism is founded, the genetic code, is dependent on replications of the entire organism.  Inherently this slows the process of adaptation should the macro-environment change rapidly.  A single-celled organism may replicate, often with very minor mutations, every thirty minutes.  If the macro-environment changes dramatically over the course of a century there are millions of opportunities for these mild changes to improve the species' chances of survival.   An organism that reproduces only every two years will have only fifty such shots at survival and each genetic change must first not threaten the cohesiveness of the larger organism just to get the chance to help.

The lesson of all the above?  Large organisms and large organizations inherently favor stability and disfavor dynamism.  To the extent they can control their environment they will seek to limit dynamism and extend the reach of the kind of environment in which they thrive.  This is not a conscious thing.  It is inherent in the manner in which organisms and environments interact.  Those parts of organisms that promote the sort of environment in which the organism thrives will be perpetuated.  Those that do not will be supressed.

This is why is is counterproductive for people who favor smaller government to fail to understand evolution.  Only by comprehending environments, organisms, and evolutionary processes can they come to grips with how they must alter the environment in which government lives to favor a smaller, more adaptable form of the beast.  Those who grow government are not evil.  They are just functional.  It is we who have created the environment on which they grow.