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The way that human history is taught can therefore mislead, because it places far too much emphasis on design, direction and planning, and far too little on evolution. Thus, it seems that generals win battles; politicians run countries; scientists discover truths; artists create genres; inventors make breakthroughs; teachers shape minds; philosophers change minds; priests teach morality; businessmen lead businesses; conspirators cause crises; gods make morality.
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.
get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.
Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place. Patterns emerge, trends evolve.
Unfortunately Epicurus’s writings did not survive. But three hundred years later, his ideas were revived and explored in a lengthy, eloquent and unfinished poem, De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus,
He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
that the pursuit of pleasure could lead to goodness and that there was nothing nice about pain – was incompatible with the recurring Christian obsession that pleasure is sinful and suffering virtuous.
quoting Lucretius on the recombination of atoms and the awe with which we should embrace the idea that human beings are not the purpose of the universe.
His reasoning was that, according to his calculations, the solar system would eventually spin off into chaos. Since it apparently did not, God must be intervening periodically to nudge the planets back into their orbits. Jehovah has a job after all, just a part-time one.
Newton after his rheory if gravity threatened the existence of God
Or, to paraphrase Maupertuis, if God’s as clever as me, he must exist. A blazing non sequitur.
Erasmus Darwin, who helped inspire not just his evolutionary grandson but many of the Romantic poets too, wrote his epic, erotic, evolutionary, philosophical poems in conscious imitation of Lucretius.
James Hutton, a farmer from southern Scotland, in 1785 laid out a theory that the rocks beneath our feet were made by processes of erosion and uplift that are still at work today, and that no great Noachian flood was needed to explain seashells on mountaintops:
Laplace argued that the present state of the universe was ‘the effect of its past and the cause of its future’. If an intellect were powerful enough to calculate every effect of every cause, then ‘nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes’.
The parallel with Smith’s later explanation of the market is clear to see: both are phenomena that emerge from individual actions, but not from deliberate design.
Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: ‘The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.’
It’s an inductive inference, Dennett points out: where there’s design there’s a designer, just as where there’s smoke there’s fire.
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’
‘This inference to design based upon the appearance of a “purposeful arrangement of parts” is a completely subjective proposition, determined in the eye of each beholder and his/her viewpoint concerning the complexity of a system.’
For certainly the elements of things do not collect And order their formations by their cunning intellect, Nor are their motions something they agree upon or propose; But being myriad and many-mingled, plagued by blows And buffeted through the universe for all time past, By trying every motion and combination, they at last, Fell into the present form in which the universe appears. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura,
And where people are baffled, they are often tempted to resort to mystical explanations.
the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.
Far from preaching selfish behaviour, therefore, this theory explains why we are often altruistic: it is the selfishness of the genes that enables individuals to be selfless.
These transposons are sequences that are good at getting themselves copied, and there is no longer a smidgen of doubt that they are (mostly inert) digital parasites. They are not there for the needs of the body at all.
the junk critics have fallen prey to ‘the genomic equivalent of the human propensity to see meaningful patterns in random data’.
The body is an emergent phenomenon consequent upon the competitive survival of DNA sequences, and a means by which the genome perpetuates itself.
Languages show other features of evolutionary systems. For instance, as Mark Pagel has pointed out, biological species of animals and plants are more diverse in the tropics, less so near the poles.
It’s a sort of iron rule of ecology: that there will be more species, but with smaller ranges, near the equator, and fewer species, but with larger ranges, near the poles.
And here is the fascinating parallel. It is also true of languages.
The defining feature is not culture, for plenty of animals have culture, in the sense of traditions that are passed on by learning. The defining feature is cumulative culture – the capacity to add innovations without losing old habits. In this sense, the human revolution was not a revolution at all, but a very, very slow cumulative change, which steadily gathered pace, accelerating towards today’s near-singularity of incessant and multifarious innovation.
Pythagoras’s discovery of the octave scale was a crucial moment in the history of music.
Hunter-gatherer societies, it turned out once we got to study them starting in the 1920s, are mainly monogamous. Males and females form exclusive pair bonds, and if either sex desires sexual variety it largely seeks it in secret.
Once the man’s role of breadwinner is replaced by a welfare payment, it is an empirical fact that many women increasingly begin to think that monogamy is a form of indentured servitude they could do without.
an almost perfect correlation between prosperity and urbanisation: the more urbanised a country, the richer it is.
the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.
Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity.
Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things.
In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism.
The system is run by the decisions of millions of individuals. In this way, prosperity, when it grows at all, grows entirely organically, without any direction from above.
This decentralised emergence of order and complexity is the essence of the evolutionary idea that Adam Smith crystallised in 1776.
in 1909, Schumpeter was the first economist to insist that the role of the entrepreneur was crucial. Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers.
Schumpeter was explicitly biological in his reasoning, referring to economic change as a process of ‘industrial mutation’.
The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.
Technical advances are not just by-products of growth, he argued, but investments that firms can deliberately make.
‘Things will happen in well-organised efforts without direction, controls, plans. That’s the consensus among economists.’
exchange plays the same vital role in economic evolution as sex plays in biological evolution.
Sex enables individuals to draw upon innovations that occur anywhere in the species.
In a society that trades, the fire-makers can have bows and arrows, and vice versa. Trade makes innovation a cumulative phenomenon.
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.
It is axiomatic among right-thinking people that there are many things the market cannot provide, and therefore the state must. The sheer magical mysticism inherent in this thought is rarely examined.
Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?
