The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

Matt Ridley, “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge”,  Harper Collins, 2015, 320 pp.

Author Matt Ridley, the author of several well-regarded books on genetics and evolution, argues that most of the progress the world has experienced would happen even without Darwin, Einstein, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, etc.  The momentum of the evolving world propels these changes with or without specific individuals.  The idea is simple, yet to many people disturbing: Society evolves, as does the world in general, largely in a way neither we nor whatever God we conjure up has any real control over. This isn’t true of everything, but it’s true of far more than we care to believe. Highways are designed; traffic happens. Buildings are constructed; cities happen. Battles are strategized, troops mobilized, weapons deployed, but defeat or victory happens. “I want to . . . get you to see past the illusion of design,” Ridley writes, “to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.”  Government, religion, the Internet — all are spontaneous and evolutionary in Ridley’s view, the laws of Moses notwithstanding,

My Notes: 

Pg. 2:  Evolution is far more common, and far more influential, than most people recognize.  It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.  The way in which these streams of human culture flow is gradual, incremental, undirected, emergent and driven by natural selection among competing ideas.  People are the victims, more often than the perpetrators, of unintended change.  We tend to give too much credit to whichever person is standing nearby at the right moment: Edison, Bell, Darwin, etc...  These changes would have evolved and were evolving without these people whom we now credit with their creation. 

Pg. 5:  Darwinism is the ‘special theory of evolution’; there’s a general theory of evolution too, and it applies to much more than biology.  It applies to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality.  The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they show ‘path dependence’; they show descent with modification; they show trial and error; they show selective persistence. 

Pg. 8:  A poem, De Rerum Natura, written in the first century by Titus Lucretius Carus, could serve as an agenda for modernity.  He anticipated modern physics by arguing that everything is made of different combinations of a limited set of invisible particles, moving in a void.  He grasped the current idea that the universe has no creator, Providence is a fantasy and there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.  He foreshadowed Darwin in suggesting that nature ceaselessly experiments, and those creatures that can adapt and reproduce will thrive.  He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organized religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist.  In his ethics, he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.

Pg. 28:  Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature chronicles the astonishing and continuing decline in violence of recent centuries (i.e. on a per capita basis).  The 1^st decade of the 21^st century has had the lowest global death rate in warfare on record; we have seen homicide rates fall by 99 percent in most Western countries since medieval times; we have seen racial, sexual, domestic, corporal, capital and other forms of violence in headlong retreat; we have seen discrimination and prejudice go from normal to disgraceful; we have come to disapprove of all sorts of violence as entertainment, even against animals.  (Pinker's book is a C2011 book that I reviewed in Nov. 2011; The premise is that moral values evolve).

Pg. 50:  It was not until 1968 that the US Supreme Court struck down all laws preventing the teaching of evolution in schools.  Fundamentalists then fell back on teaching ‘creation science’, this in turn was effectively proscribed in 1987 by the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was religion, not science.  The movement then reinvented itself as ‘intelligent design’, rewriting their textbook Of Pandas and People, using an identical definition for intelligent design as had been used for creation science.  In 2005 Judge John Jones in the Dover Case, a Bush appointee, held that this too was religion, not science, and violated the Establishment Clause. 

Pg. 82:  Sometime around 200,000 years ago, in a part of Africa but not elsewhere, human beings began to change their culture.  After more than a million years of making simple stone tools to just a few designs, these Africans began making lots of different types of tools.  By 65,000 years ago the people with the new tool sets had begun to spill out of Africa, and began a comparatively rapid colonization of the Eurasian continent, displacing—and very occasionally mating with—the native hominids that were already there, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia. 

Pg. 83:  The first stirrings of different tools in parts of east Africa seem to be up to 300,000 years old, so by modern standards the change was happening with glacial slowness.  And that’s a clue.  The defining feature is not culture, for plenty of animals have culture, in the sense of traditions that are passed on by learning.  The defining feature is cumulative culture—the capacity to add innovations without losing old habits.  In this sense, the human revolution was not a revolution at all, but a very, very slow cumulative change, which steadily gathered pace, accelerating towards today’s near-singularity of incessant and multifarious innovation.

Pg. 84:  Cultural evolution drove the changes in cognition that are embedded in our genes.  The changes in genes are the consequences of cultural changes.  Remember the example of the ability to digest milk in adults, which is unknown in other mammals, but common among people of European and east African origin.  The genetic change was a response to the cultural change about 5,000-8,000 years ago.  Another is the genetic mutations associated with facilitating our skill with language.  Music, too, evolves.  To a surprising extent, it changes under its own steam, with musicians carried along for the ride.  Baroque begets classical begets romantic begets ragtime begets jazz begets blues begets rock begets pop.  One style could not emerge without the previous style existing 

Pg. 96:  Depending on whose estimate you choose and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800.  The lion’s share of this improvement went to ordinary workers and the poor.  Although the rich got richer, millions more now have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, lower child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university and respect.  The only agreement on why this has happened is that nobody planned it, and nobody expected it.  Prosperity emerged despite, not because of, human policy.  It developed inexorably out of the interaction of people by a form of selective progress very similar to evolution.  Above all, it was a decentralized phenomenon, achieved by millions of individual decisions, mostly in spite of the actions of rulers.  This decentralized emergence of order and complexity is the essence of the evolutionary idea that Adam Smith crystallized in 1776.  It appears it wasn’t necessarily capitalism but rather the rise of innovation and technology.

Pg. 108:  Robert Solow in the 1950s was able to tease out just how much innovation was contributing to the increase in living standards. When he discounted out the contribution of capital and labor, 87.5 per cent remained and must be due to technological change.  Little wonder, then, that Deirdre McCloskey describes the system that produced the great enrichment of the past two centuries as ‘innovationalism’ rather than ‘capitalism’.  She locates the cause of the Industrial Revolution in the decentralization of the production and testing of new ideas: ordinary people were able to contribute to and to choose the products and services they preferred, which drove continuous innovation.

 

Pg. 173:  The fall of social, cultural and parental determinism and its replacement by a more balanced, evolutionary theory of human personality and character is a great liberation from an oppressive and false form of cultural creationism.

Pg. 196:  In 1877 Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli appointed Robert Bulwer-Lytton as Viceroy of India.  Lytton was a confirmed Malthusian.  During his tenure as Viceroy, a drought afflicted some parts of India and despite plenty of food in India as a whole—food exports doubled and doubled again in two years—up to ten million people died.  Lytton specifically halted several private attempts to bring relief to the starving.  The justification was that it was cruel to be kind, because Malthusian ends justified harsh means.  (Note this is some 20 years after the Irish potato famine which began in 1848 and was dealt with in the same manner).

Pg. 220:  Observe the great sea changes in human history and how unintended consequences of historical events can be far-reaching: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution all occurred as accidental by-products of other things:

·         Trade made Italian merchants rich, and because they felt guilty about committing usury, they commissioned artists to produce pious works of incomparable beauty and supported open-minded inquiries into the learning of the classical world.

·         Printing made possible the cheap and widespread dissemination of texts, which enabled religious reformers to undermine the authority of the Pope.

·         Guttenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun.

Pg. 234:  To judge by the movies, in the American West in the nineteenth century, homicide was routine.  If there was government at all, it was in the form of a timid, corrupt or outgunned sheriff.  However, the truth is different.  In five such cattle towns like Abilene in the key years 1870-85, there was an average of just 1.5 murders per town per cattle-trading season.  The truth is that the Wild West was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent as documented in the book The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford Economics and Finance), by Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill.  With few formal law-enforcement mechanisms, people generated their own arrangements, enforced by private marshals and punished by simple measures.  Anderson and Hill conclude that in the absence of a government monopoly of coercion, multiple private law enforcers emerged, and competition among them drove improvements and innovations that thrived by natural selection. 

Pg. 240:  The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical (i.e. excluding the US and certain colonies).  The State generally originated in conquest and confiscation—that is to say, in crime.  Tudor monarchs and the Taliban are cut from exactly the same cloth.

Pg. 250:  It is often forgotten that America became a remarkably illiberal place under Woodrow Wilson and his successors.  It was not just the tightening of segregation, the spread of eugenic laws and the prohibition of alcohol, but censorship and the squeezing of civil liberties.  For instance, a Hollywood producer during WWI received a ten-year jail sentence for depicting British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution.

Pg. 260:  Except for one brief Christian reference to a Saracen prophet in the 630s, nothing was written down about the life of Mohamed during his lifetime, the first public mention in the Muslim world coming in 690.  The detailed biographies were all written two centuries after he died.  Mecca was not a major center of trade, indeed it is not mentioned till 741.  The Koran is too full of details about Jewish and Christian literature to have been a compilation of notions picked up by a trader, let alone one from a pagan and largely illiterate society.

Pg. 270:  The characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus, and that it takes the moral high ground.  Notice that this applies to most religions.

Pg. 272:  Antarctic ice cores reveal a clear relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide as the earth goes into and out of ice ages that is the reverse of that predicted by the theory: carbon dioxide levels follow temperature up and down, rather than precede them.  Effects cannot precede causes, and we now know almost for sure that ice ages are caused by changes in the earth’s orbit, with carbon dioxide playing a minor, reinforcing role, if any at all.  In short, there is a tendency to over-prioritize carbon dioxide as a cause of global temperature, rather than just another influence among many.

291:  2008 Subprime Bubble:  The explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top-down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.  It is a myth that the problem came from deregulation.