The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

The umbrella that keeps you dry in a shower of rain is the result of both human action and human design, whereas the rainstorm that soaks you when you forget it is neither. But what about the system that enables a local shop to sell you an umbrella, or the word umbrella itself, or the etiquette that demands that you tilt your umbrella to one side to let another pedestrian pass? These – markets, language, customs – are man-made things. But none of them is designed by a human being. They all emerged unplanned. We transfer this thinking back into our understanding of the natural world too. We see purposeful design in nature, rather than emergent evolution. We look for hierarchy in the genome, for a ‘self’ in the brain, and for free will in the mind. We latch on to any excuse to blame an extreme weather event on human agency – whether witchdoctoring or man-made global warming. Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, termites build cathedrals without architects, bees make hexagonal honeycombs without instruction, brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching, political events are shaped by history rather than vice versa. The genome has no master gene, the brain has no command centre, the English language has no director, the economy has no chief executive, society has no president, the common la...

Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: ‘The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.’ Montesquieu’s phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and enmity was ‘doux commerce’ – sweet commerce. And he has been amply vindicated in the centuries since. The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

By far the lion’s share of this improvement went (and still goes) to ordinary workers and the poor. As McCloskey puts it, although the rich got richer, ‘millions more 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’. Global inequality is currently falling fast as people in poor countries get richer quicker than people in rich countries. The proportion of the world population living on $1.25 a day, corrected for inflation, has gone from 65 per cent in 1960 to 21 per cent today.

You will often hear people say that free markets have been discredited, as they sip cups of coffee while sitting on chairs, wearing clothes and checking text messages – each of which was supplied by hundreds, thousands of producers whose beautifully coordinated collaboration was unplanned but achieved by ‘market forces’. You will hear people say that none of this could happen without government to provide the roads, the traffic lights, the air-traffic control, the police, the law that make commerce possible. True, and Adam Smith was the first person to observe that it is the duty of the state to protect trade from pirates, predators and monopolists. He was no anarchist. But to leap from this to the conclusion that social order is consciously designed or enforced is absurd.

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.