The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the internet. The first motor cars looked as though they were ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. The idea for plastics came from photographic chemistry. The camera pill is an idea that came from a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided-missile designer. Almost every technology is a hybrid. This is one area in which cultural evolution has an unfair advantage over genetic evolution. For insuperable practical reasons connected with the pairing of chromosomes during meiosis, cross fertilisation cannot happen between different species of animal. (It can, indeed does, happen between species of bacteria, 80 per cent of whose genes have been borrowed from other species on average – one reason bacteria are so darned good at evolving resistance to antibiotics, for example.) As soon as two races of animals have diverged substantially, they find themselves able to produce only sterile offspring – like mules – or none at all.