The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.

if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.

Lucretius was more subversive, open-minded and far-seeing than either of those politicians (Cicero admired, but disagreed with, him). His poem rejects all magic, mysticism, superstition, religion and myth. It sticks to an unalloyed empiricism.

Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did.

In 1473 the book was printed and the Lucretian heresy began to infect minds all across Europe.

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does Syria suffer from a surfeit of commerce? Or Zimbabwe? Or Venezuela? Is Hong Kong largely peaceful because it eschews commerce? Or California? Or New Zealand?

wisdoms that is plain wrong. There has been a decline in violence, not an increase, and it has been fastest in the countries with the least bridled versions of capitalism – not that there is such a thing as unbridled capitalism anywhere in the world. The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

A lot of Britain’s continuing discomfort with the European Union derives from the contrast between the British tradition of bottom–up law-making and the top–down Continental version. The European Parliament member Daniel Hannan frequently reminds his colleagues of the bias towards liberty of the common law: ‘This extraordinary, sublime idea that law does not emanate from the state but that rather there was a folk right of existing law that even the king and his ministers were subject to.’

In fact, there is a way for acquired characteristics to come to be incorporated into genetic inheritance, but it takes many generations and it is blindly Darwinian. It goes by the name of the Baldwin effect. A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why? Because the offspring that by chance happen to start with a predisposition to cope with that circumstance will survive better than others. The genes can thereby come to embody the experience of the past. Something that was once learned can become an instinct.

not to the same extremes as in pastoral

Cities that encourage tall residential buildings in their centres, like Hong Kong or Vancouver, thrive, while those that insist on low-rise profiles, like Mumbai, struggle. The point is that these are not trends that human beings have chosen consciously as policy. The continuing evolution of the city is an unconscious and inexorable momentum.

There is no longer much doubt that free commerce has a better economic or humanitarian record than command-and-control government. The examples just keep rolling in. Take the history of Sweden, for instance. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sweden did not become wealthy as a result of having a big government imposing social democracy. When it liberalised a feudal economy and strongly embraced Smithian free trade and free markets in the 1860s, the result was rapid growth and the spawning of great enterprises over the next fifty years, including Volvo and Ericsson (companies that have since evolved new products). When it expanded government hugely in the 1970s, the result was currency devaluation, stagnation and slow growth, culminating in a full-blown economic crisis in 1992 and a rapid fall in the country’s relative standing in the world’s economic league table. When it cut taxes, privatised education and liberalised private healthcare in the 2000s, it rediscovered growth.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards? In 1969 the average American household spent 22 per cent of consumption expenditure on food and 8 per cent on clothing. Now it spends 13 per cent on food and 4 per cent on clothing. Yet the quality and diversity of both food and clothing have improved immeasurably since 1969. By contrast, the consumption of healthcare has more than doubled, from 9 per cent to 22 per cent of household expenditure, and the consumption of education has trebled, from 1 per cent to 3 per cent. The quality of both is the subject of frequent lament and complaint. Cost keeps going up, quality not so much, and innovation is sluggish. As for transport and shelter, broadly speaking the parts that the market supplies – budget airlines, house-building – have got cheaper and better, while the parts that the state supplies – infrastructure and land planning – have got more expensive and slower.

Besides, it is simply a fact of life that health and education must be supplied by the state, because – well, why? Because the market is not prepared to step forward? Hardly. Because the market would cheat the ill-informed consumer? It does not do so in the case of food and clothing, at least not much. Because the market would supply only the wealthy? Again, food and clothing suggest otherwise, as does the history of the medical profession. In times past doctors often charged their wealthy clients more than their poor ones, using the former to subsidise the treatment of the latter. Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, ‘every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm’.

One of the most beautiful evolutionary insights about technology came in 1908 from the philosopher ‘Alain’ (real name Emile Chartier), who wrote of fishermen’s boats: Every boat is copied from another boat . . . Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied . . . One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others. It is the sea herself who fashions the boats. It’s in this radical re-imagining that the new wave of thinking about the evolution of technology in the current century is turning the world upside down.

The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body – until he realised who was telling him this.

There’s a fascinating finding in economics that taller men earn more money throughout their careers, but that it is their height at sixteen, not at thirty, that best predicts their earnings. The reason for this, as other studies have shown, is that this is when men decide their status, and shape their personalities accordingly. So what employers are rewarding are the attributes of self-confidence and ambition that came partly from being a tall, strong football player at school, rather than the height of the person today. Women tend to decide their status based largely on relative attractiveness, and they judge their attractiveness based on how others seem to judge them. In both sexes therefore, says Harris, there is a tendency to settle some aspects of your personality in the mid-teens, based on how high you think your relative status is amongst your peers. That, she thinks, is the likely cause of the differences in personality that are not directly or indirectly genetic.

Experiment after experiment has shown that given a choice, girls will play with dolls and boys with trucks, no matter what their previous experience.

Doris Lessing once wrote that we should say to children: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not indoctrination. We are sorry, but it’s the best we can do.’ There is one education system that seems to be better than most at inculcating resistance to indoctrination, at least in the early years. Montessori schools, with their collaborative, test-free, mixed-age classrooms and emphasis on self-directed learning, have a remarkable track record in producing entrepreneurs. The founders of Amazon, Wikipedia and Google (both of them) went to Montessori schools. The secret, according to Larry Page of Google, may lie in the schools’ habit of bringing out children’s natural tendency for ‘not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently’.

Alison Wolf examined the data in exhaustive detail in her book Does Education Matter?, and concluded that the answer is a surprising ‘no’. She points to World Bank studies that show a negative relationship between education levels and growth. The countries that devoted the most resources to expanding their education systems grew less rapidly than those that devoted fewer resources to education.

The countries with the most education simply do not show greater productivity growth than the ones with less. Each year spent in school or university should be enabling an employee to be more productive, but there is no sign of this in the economic statistics. As Wolf concludes: ‘If high-quality schooling is making any difference to the relative economic performance of countries, it is doing so in a very undramatic fashion, since its effects appear to be swamped or neutralized by other factors.’ Education clearly benefits the individual’s earning power, but it does not determine the growth rate of the whole economy. Far from seeing an economic dividend from education, Wolf finds that countries that boosted their education levels the most tended to grow more slowly than countries that neglected to increase their education spending so much. Her conclusion is stark: ‘The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist.’ She concedes of course that some education is necessary. Without good literacy and numeracy, it would not be possible for most well-paid jobs to exist. That is not the issue. Rather it is whether, beyond a certain level, more education – let alone more education spending – does more good. ‘The idea that having the most education will get you the most prosperity is a chimera,’ says Wolf. A great many jobs today are open only to graduates, although evidence suggest...

The Eugenic Records Office director Harry Laughlin drew up a model eugenics law in 1932. This, together with his and Davenport’s energetic lobbying, eventually persuaded thirty states to pass laws allowing for the compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed and dependent. By the time such laws were struck down in the early 1970s, some 63,000 people had been forcibly sterilised and many more persuaded to accept voluntary sterility.

California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined.

The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would ‘perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents’. The organisation’s international arm was headquartered in the offices of the British Eugenics Society as late as 1952. The population-control movement was, to an uncomfortable extent, the child of the eugenics movement.

Leave the last word to Jacob Bronowski, speaking at the end of his television series The Ascent of Man. Standing in a pond at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where many of his relatives died, he reached down and lifted up some mud: ‘Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.’

As the technology expert Steven Johnson has argued, the unintended consequences of historical events can be far-reaching. Gutenberg 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.

Charles Mann shows how again and again the forces that truly shaped history came from below, not above. For instance, the American Revolution was won by the malaria parasite, which devastated General Charles Cornwallis’s army in the Carolinas and on the Chesapeake Bay, at least as much as it was won by George Washington. I say this not as a bad-loser Brit seeking excuses, but on the authority of the distinguished (American) environmental historian J.R. McNeill. Referring to female mosquitoes of the species Anopheles quadrimaculatus, he writes: ‘Those tiny amazons conducted covert biological warfare against the British army.’

‘The Fannie Mae saga demonstrates that once crony capitalism captures an arm of the state, its potential for cancerous growth is truly perilous.’ Jeff Friedman, in a lengthy and influential essay on the financial crisis, came to a similar conclusion: ‘The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism.’