The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

But 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.

As Nassim Taleb remarks in his book Antifragile, in a complex world the very notion of ‘cause’ is suspect: ‘another reason to ignore newspapers with their constant supply of causes for things’.

In society, people are the victims and even the immediate agents of change, but more often than not the causes are elsewhere – they are emergent, collective, inexorable forces.

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. And human beings none the less take credit for this process of endogenous change as if it was directed from above.

Thanks largely to Greenblatt’s marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.

In his passionate attachment to rationalism, materialism, naturalism, humanism and liberty, Lucretius deserves a special place in the history of Western thought, even above the beauty of his poetry.

The Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and the American Revolution were all inspired by people who had to some degree imbibed Lucretius. Botticelli’s Venus effectively depicts the opening scene of Lucretius’s poem.

theodicy,

non sequitur.

As David Waltham puts it in his book Lucky Planet, ‘It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed.

As David Bodanis argues in his biography of Voltaire and his mistress, Passionate Minds, people would be inspired by Newton’s example to question traditions around them that had apparently been accepted since time immemorial.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

parsimony

It is through everybody accommodating their desires to those of others that a system of shared morality arises, according to Smith. An

invisible hand (the phrase first appears in Smith’s lectures on astronomy, then here in Moral Sentiments and once more in The Wealth of Nations) guides us towards a common moral code.

‘prevaricate’

Elias argued that the habits of refinement, self-control and consideration that are second nature to us today had to be acquired. As time went by, people ‘increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration’.

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. Think of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800, the Japanese after 1945, the Germans likewise, the Chinese after 1978. The long peace of the nineteenth century coincided with the growth of free trade. The paroxysm of violence that convulsed the world in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with protectionism.

It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all. British and American law derives ultimately from the common law, which is a code of ethics that was written by nobody and everybody. That is to say, unlike the Ten Commandments or most statute law, the common law emerges and evolves through precedent and adversarial argument. It ‘evolves incrementally, rather than leaps convulsively or stagnates idly’, in the words of legal scholar Allan Hutchinson. It is ‘a perpetual work-in-progress – evanescent, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalizing, and bottom up’.

idolatrous

Charles Darwin’s dangerous idea was to take away the notion of intentional design from biology altogether and replace it with a mechanism that builds ‘organized complexity … out of primeval simplicity’ (in Richard Dawkins’s words).

pyrrhic,

Life consists of the capacity to reverse the drift towards entropy and disorder, at least locally – to use information to make local order from chaos while expending energy. Essential to these three skills are three kinds of molecule in particular – DNA for storing information, protein for making order, and ATP as the medium of energy exchange.

profligate,

As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation. Just as each person uses energy to make buildings and devices and ideas, so each gene uses energy to make a structure of protein.

Cities will converge on the same patterns of growth wherever they are. In this they are very like bodies. A mouse burns more energy, per unit of body weight, than an elephant; a small city burns proportionately more motor fuel than a large one. Like cities, bodies get more efficient in their energy consumption the larger they grow. There is also a consistent 15 per cent saving on infrastructure cost per head for every doubling of a city’s population size. The opposite is true of economic growth and innovation – the bigger the city, the faster these increase. Doubling the size of a city boosts income, wealth, number of patents, number of universities, number of creative people, all by approximately 15 per cent, regardless of where the city is. The scaling is, in the jargon, ‘superlinear’. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, who discovered this phenomenon, calls cities ‘supercreative’. They generate a disproportionate share of human innovation; and the bigger they are, the more they generate. The reason for this is clear, at least in outline. Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy. Indeed, nobody was aware of the supercreative effect of cities until very recently, so no policy-maker could aim for it. It’s an evolutionary phenomenon.

Surprising as it may seem, the cause of the great enrichment is still unknown. That is to say, there are plenty of theories about why incomes started growing so rapidly in some parts of the world in the early nineteenth century, and this then spread to the rest of the world, and – despite repeated predictions that it would stop – they just keep on growing today. But none of these theories commands universal allegiance. Some credit institutions, others ideas, others individuals, others the harnessing of energy, yet others luck. They all agree on two things, however: nobody planned this, 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.

But the core insight that he had, that most of what we see in society is (in Adam Ferguson’s words) the result of human action but not of human design, remains true to this day – and under-appreciated. This is true of language, of morality and of the economy. The Smithian economy is a process of exchange and specialisation among ordinary people. It is an emergent phenomenon.

And the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people’s problems. It is ‘best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are “fitter” than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.’

Just as the Industrial Revolution took the world by surprise because it emerged from thousands of individual fragments of partial knowledge, rather than as a plan, so every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas.

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.

paroxysms

Two other phenomena underline the overwhelming inevitability in the progress of technology. The first is the equivalent of what biologists call convergent evolution – the appearance of the same solution to a particular problem in widely different places. Thus ancient Egyptians and ancient Australians both invented curved boomerangs without conferring.

Technology proceeds, like evolution, to the ‘adjacent possible’, a phrase coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman. It does not leap far into the future. I recently tried to think of examples of inventions that came long after their time, that should have been invented much sooner than they were – things we take for granted now and that would have been great for our grandparents to have had. It’s surprisingly hard to come up with them. I thought wheeled suitcases were a good example, recalling all those days when I lugged a heavy bag to a railway station in my youth.

terms. In 2009 Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute published a book called The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves, in which he concluded ‘that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget further technologies … we can say that technology creates itself out of itself’.

The economics writer Tim Harford, in his 2011 book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, pointed out that ‘trial and error is a tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world, while expert leadership is not’.

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.

Much the same can be said of the market. Indeed, as Peter Drucker wrote in his classic 1954 business book The Practice of Management, customers shape companies in much the same way: ‘It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or for a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods.’

The implications of this new way of seeing technology, as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge, are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa. Short of bumping off half the population, there’s little we can do to stop it happening, and even that might not work.

The original idea of a patent, remember, was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits, but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and deterring rivals as about sharing ideas. And that discourages innovation.

The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles.

munificently,

Innovation, then, is an emergent phenomenon. The policies that have been tried to get it going – patents, prizes, government funding of science – may sometimes help, but are generally splendidly unpredictable. Where conditions are right, new technologies will emerge to their own rhythm, in the places and at the times most congenial to them. Leave people free to exchange ideas and back hunches, and innovation will follow. So too will scientific insight.

The self is a consequence, not a cause, of thought. To think otherwise is to posit a miraculous incarnation of an immaterial spirit.

The human freedom we all boast we possess, said Spinoza, ‘consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined’. In that sense we are no more in charge of our lives than a stone rolling down a hill is in charge of its movement.

In Anthony Damasio’s words, ‘The mind exists for the body, is engaged in telling the story of the body’s multifarious events, and uses that story to optimize the life of the organism.’

but who decided that I should do that one thing from among the cacophony of other possibilities? Was there some kind of contest? I do not feel like a democratic consensus arrived at by a billion cells; I feel like a single me. And I feel as if ‘I’ am in charge, capable of deciding right now to think a different thought or do a different thing. I have free will – by which I mean (the definition comes from John Searle) that I could have done otherwise than I in fact did. And that, moreover, the things I could have done otherwise were neither the products of preceding forces, nor the products of random quantum swerves at the atomic level. Just as there seems to be no satisfying sense of free will in determinism, so there’s no satisfying free will in randomness.

The biologist Robert Sapolsky argues that our growing knowledge about the brain ‘makes the notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of the criminal justice system, deeply suspect’.

Anthony Cashmore points out that there is no moral basis for excusing a criminal on the grounds of disease, but not excusing one on the grounds of poverty. Advances in neuroscientific knowledge will only shrink the scope of the criminal law.

child-development world was as furious as you would expect when an academic discipline has its entire body of work put into question for failing to check its assumptions. A meeting arranged to discuss the book – over the strong objections of many in the field – by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development saw Harris being openly harangued by the doyens of the discipline, especially Eleanor Maccoby and Stephen Suomi. Articles in the press castigated her for ignoring good evidence against her findings. But when she pressed for chapter and verse, the objections melted away. Suomi’s strong claim that a cross-fostering experiment in calm versus anxious monkeys showed that parenting styles did influence the personalities of monkeys turned out to be untrue. He eventually admitted that the only data was from an unpublished trial with a very small number of monkeys, contradicted by other experiments that found no such effect. Jerome Kagan’s claim that he had seen the same effect as Suomi in human beings (but in the opposite direction) turned out to be based on one study by a student of a small number of fearful babies followed up for just twenty-one months – hardly a lifelong effect. In short, Harris’s case emerged triumphantly vindicated, rather than damaged, by everything the psychological establishment threw at her. The critics fell back on methodological criticisms of behaviour genetics, which proved largely baseless, and on much weaker claims about how paren...