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...