The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

In virtually every mammal species, for example, the male grows larger than the female, has greater strength in its neck and front limbs, fights more often over mates or territory, is more sexually assertive, is less attentive to offspring, and shows greater variance in reproductive success (some have many children, some have none). How strange that human beings show these features too, even though people are supposedly the products of culture rather than instinct.

‘any creature that is recognizably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory’. Banish the magic of cultural determinism; look to evolution for the causes of behaviour.

verboten.

Some years later the British went down the same route, mainly to create clerks to run their empire. The British, as Sugata Mitra said in his remarkable 2013 TED lecture, set out to create a big computer with which to operate their far-flung possessions, an administrative machine made of interchangeable parts, each of which happened to be human. In order to turn out those parts, they needed another machine, an educational one, which would reliably produce people who could read quickly, write legibly, and do addition, subtraction and multiplication in their heads. As Mitra put it, ‘They must be so identical that you can pick one up from New Zealand and ship him to Canada and he would be instantly functional.’

is nothing short of a miracle, said Albert Einstein, that ‘the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom’.

When Sebastian Thrun, an artificial-intelligence expert, sent out one email announcing that he would teach a course not just to his students at Stanford but to whoever wanted to listen in on the internet, tens of thousands took the course. Over four hundred of them got better grades than the top student at Stanford.

perfidious

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 aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and originality,’ said H.L. Mencken.

Is there any evidence that it was education that drove countries to prosperity, or vice versa? Alison Wolf examined the data in exhaustive detail in her book Does Education Matter?, and concluded that the answer is a surprising ‘no’.

chimera,’

Remember, this is very much not saying that higher education is not a good thing for the individual. It is a wonderful thing, but it is one of the rewards of economic growth, not one of the drivers. And obviously a total lack of education would be catastrophic for a modern economy; but that’s not the same as saying that the best way to improve the economy is to spend more on education. Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

ostensible

heterozygotes

The solution to the population explosion turned out to be the Green Revolution and the demographic transition. Emergent phenomena rather than coercion and planning. Evolution, not prescription. It was an evolutionary, spontaneous and unplanned phenomenon that slowed population growth. Unexpected, unpredicted and unheralded, people started having smaller families because they were richer, healthier, more urban, more liberated and more educated.

epiphenomena:

As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

usury,

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.

‘Mosquitoes,’ says McNeill, ‘helped the Americans snatch victory from the jaws of stalemate and win the Revolutionary War, without which there would be no United States of America. Remember that when they bite you next Fourth of July.’

reverberantly

perquisites,

The economist William Easterly points out that the evidence for a change of leadership being the cause of a growth miracle anywhere in the developing world is wholly lacking: the timing simply does not match. The effect of leaders on growth rates, he says, is close to zero, a conclusion that is ‘almost too shocking to be believed’.

Government at its root is an arrangement among citizens to enforce public order. It emerges spontaneously at least as much as, perhaps more than, it is imposed by outsiders. And over the centuries it has changed form organically, with very little planning.

That is to say, government began as a mafia protection racket claiming a monopoly on violence and extracting a rent (tax) in return for protecting its citizens from depredation by outsiders.

This is the origin of almost all government, and today’s mafia protection rackets are all in the process of evolving into government. The Mafia itself emerged in Sicily in a time of lawlessness when property rights were insecure and plentiful ex-soldiers were prepared to offer their services as paid protectors. The Russian mafia emerged in the 1990s in a similar way: a lawless time, a lot of ex-soldiers looking for work.

Jonah Goldberg points out in his book Liberal Fascism that in the 1930s fascism was widely seen as a progressive movement, and was supported by many on the left: ‘Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact – an inconvenient truth if there ever was one – is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.’ Father Charles Coughlin, the ‘radio priest’ of the 1930s who came closest to imitating Hitler’s aims and methods in American politics, was very much a man of the left: criticising bankers, demanding the nationalisation of industry and the protection of the rights of labour. Only his anti-Semitism could be described as ‘right’. The very phrase ‘liberal fascist’ was coined approvingly by H.G. Wells in a speech in Oxford in 1932. Earlier, in 1927, Wells had mused about ‘the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them.’

The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, ‘because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below’. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. ‘They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.’

It is the expression of what Daniel Dennett calls the intentional stance, the human instinct to see purpose and agency and power in every nook or cranny of the world.

‘We find human faces in the moon, armies in clouds … and ascribe malice and goodwill to every thing that hurts or pleases us,’ wrote David Hume in his Natural History of Religion.

For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions.

Science, said Richard Feynman, is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Observation and experiment trump scripture.

Indeed, it would be helpful if the climate scientists would tell us what weather pattern would not be consistent with the current climate orthodoxy. If they cannot do so, then we would do well to recall the important insight of Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.

The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.

In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups. Remember this when you hear people blame the free market for the excesses of the sub-prime bubble. It is simply a myth that the problem came from deregulation. There was a progressive and enormous increase in regulation during the period in question.

The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’

Money serves three main functions – a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account.

An alternative monetary approach would be to find a form of ‘synthetic commodity’ money that would have no other use, so was not suddenly in demand

elsewhere, but would have an immovable scarcity factor, so could be counted on to retain its value. Printing paper money but then ostentatiously destroying the lithograph, it used to be argued in the pre-computer days, would to some degree serve this purpose. In a similar vein, in Iraq in the 1980s Saddam Hussein issued dinar notes printed in Britain and engraved in Switzerland. After the first Gulf War, sanctions cut him off from the supply of his currency. He started printing money in Iraq, but the quality was poor, counterfeiting was easy and the quantity was too high, causing inflation. However, the Swiss-made dinars remained in circulation, and began to diverge in value from the local ones. Since there were no more being made, people saw them as a store of value and they held their value against the dollar. And then came bitcoins. The implications of crypto-currencies, and their recent evolution, are profound; they go well beyond the subject of money. They give us a glimpse of the future evolution of the internet itself.

This is, to borrow John Barlow’s phrase, ‘dot-communism’: a sharing, swapping community of people who contribute to joint effort and expect no private rewards. What a splendid irony, that from the bowels of the Cold War military-industrial complex in the capitalist United States, there emerged a technology of ‘dense, diverse and decentralised exchange’ that is producing something far more like the ideal of Marxism than communist regimes ever did.

in which he explored a throwaway remark by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins that ‘money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism’ – or money makes it possible to pay back favours indirectly and at any time.

It is hard to get your head around how bitcoin works. One of the pithiest explanations I have come across is in a recent launch by Ethereum, a business built to follow up on bitcoin: ‘The innovation provided by Satoshi is the idea of combining a very simple decentralised consensus protocol, based on nodes combining transactions into a “block” every ten minutes, creating an ever-growing blockchain, with proof of work as a mechanism through which nodes gain the right to participate in the system.’

plebiscites,

psephologist

The point he is making is one that I have tried to develop in this book, namely that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This is also the main way that change comes about in morality, the economy, culture, language, technology, cities, firms, education, history, law, government, religion, money and society. For