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To borrow Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design -- which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science.

Or, to take the observation of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, if "the financial system (is) the brain of the economy," then, I would suggest, heavy regulation is its lobotomy; while it removes the emotional highs and lows, it also dulls the perception, facility and adroitness. (Disclosure: In keeping with my long-held public view, I give professional advice to financial institutions seeking low regulation and taxation.)

A century ago, medical science had faith in lobotomies. Today, it seems, Washington political science has faith in new financial regulation.

Medical science began to gain wisdom when it learned what previously unrealized damage it caused when it lobotomized human brains. We must hope that the "experts" today who are drafting new regulations by which they would impair our financial system gain wisdom soon by recognizing how little they understand the effects of these new regulations on our economy's future health.

However, the current financial regulatory efforts in Washington may not even deserve the honor of being compared to intelligent design or a lobotomy. At least with those two processes, each has the intellectual dignity of an internal logic -- even if that logic does not accurately describe the reality it attempts to explain and manipulate.

Rather, the current likely financial regulatory efforts have an almost random nature to them, as the legislative logrolling is collecting unrelated and sometimes-inconsistent ideas that eventually will be called, I assume, the Frank/Dodd Comprehensive and Rationalized National Financial Redemption Act of 2009.

The final bill will be the compilation of the results of various political battles being fought among the president, his various White House economic and political advisers, the Treasury and various powerful committee and subcommittee chairmen in the House versus their equivalents in the Senate, as well as the successful interventions of various interests, the institutional partial victories that are gained in the battles among the half-dozen or so overlapping financial regulatory agencies in existence, plus whatever the whimsical effects are of the backbenchers, the states, the commentators, the media and, of course, the public.

Even if 10 of the smartest financial regulation experts in the world got in a room and wrote an internally consistent set of regulations, if history is any guide, it would not be likely to anticipate, avoid or mitigate whatever the next financial crisis would be. As Ferguson wrote in "The Ascent of Money," "It seems that, for all our ingenuity, we are doomed to be 'fooled by randomness' and surprised by 'black swans.'" (See -- and read -- two of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's intriguing books, "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" and "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.")

According to a study of financial data of the past two centuries, there is a 3.6 percent per annum probability of a financial disaster and, statistically, a 100 percent probability of a new financial disaster within 33 years.

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