The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

they are the result of human action, but not of human design.

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 law has no chief justice, the climate has no control knob, history has no five-star general.

Plato said that society worked by imitating a designed cosmic order, a belief in which should be coercively enforced. Aristotle said that you should look for inherent principles of intentionality and development – souls – within matter. Homer said gods decided the outcome of battles. St Paul said that you should behave morally because Jesus told you so. Mohamed said you should obey God’s word as transmitted through the Koran. Luther said that your fate was in God’s hands. Hobbes said that social order came from a monarch, or what he called ‘Leviathan’ – the state. Kant said morality transcended human experience. Nietzsche said that strong leaders made for good societies. Marx said that the state was the means of delivering economic and social progress. Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

He grasped the current idea that the universe has no creator, Providence is a fantasy and there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

‘unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people’.

O miserable minds of men! O hearts that cannot see! Beset by such great dangers and in such obscurity You spend your lot of life! Don’t you know it’s plain That all your nature yelps for is a body free from pain, And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care? Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 2, lines 1–5

morality is an accidental by-product of the way human beings adjust their behaviour towards each other as they grow up; saying that morality is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously among human beings in a relatively peaceful society; saying that goodness does not need to be taught,

Revenge for murder was nationalised as a crime to be punished, rather than privatised as a wrong to be righted.

commerce led people to value the opportunity to be trusted by a stranger in a transaction.

Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense. So empathy, self-control and morality became second nature, though morality was always a double-edged sword, as likely to cause violence as to prevent it through most of history.

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.

How is it then that conventional wisdom – especially among teachers and religious leaders – maintains that commerce is the cause of nastiness, not niceness? That the more we grow the economy and the more we take part in ‘capitalism’, the more selfish, individualistic and thoughtless we become? This view is so widespread it even leads such people to assume – against the evidence – that violence is on the increase.

There has been a decline in violence, not an increase, and it has been fastest in the countries with the least bridled versions of capitalism

A mistake I strongly urge you to avoid for all you’re worth, An error in this matter you should give the widest berth: Namely don’t imagine that the bright lights of your eyes Were purpose made so we could look ahead, or that our thighs And calves were hinged together at the joints and set on feet So we could walk with lengthy stride, or that forearms fit neat To brawny upper arms, and are equipped on right and left With helping hands, solely that we be dexterous and deft At undertaking all the things we need to do to live, This rationale and all the others like it people give, Jumbles effect and cause, and puts the cart before the horse … Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 4, lines 823–33

Dugald Stewart’s biography of Adam Smith, from which he got the idea of competition and emergent order.

he imagined stubbing his toe against a rock while crossing a heath, then imagined his reaction if instead his toe had encountered a watch.

If a watch implies a watchmaker, then how could the exquisite purposefulness of an animal not imply an animal-maker?

Look around the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines … All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, exceeds the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble. [Dialogues, 2.5/143]

Dennett points out: where there’s design there’s a designer, just as where there’s smoke there’s

‘Only the true Messiah denies his divinity.’

In 1871 in his Descent of Man, he wrote: ‘To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Baldwin effect. A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why? Because the offspring that by chance happen to start with a predisposition to cope with that circumstance will survive better than others. The genes can thereby come to embody the experience of the past. Something that was once learned can become an instinct.

Few adult mammals can digest lactose, since milk is not generally drunk after infancy. In two parts of the world, however, human beings evolved the capacity to retain lactose digestion into adulthood by not switching off genes for lactase enzymes. These happened to be the two regions where the domestication of cattle for milk

the genetic switch plainly happened as a consequence, not a cause, of the invention of dairy farming.

Four billion years ago the ocean was acidic, saturated with carbon dioxide. Where the alkaline fluid from the vents met the acidic water, there was a steep proton gradient across the thin iron-nickel-sulphur walls of the pores that formed at the vents. That gradient had a voltage very similar in magnitude to the one in a modern cell. Inside those mineral pores, chemicals would have been trapped in a space with abundant energy, which could have been used to build more complex molecules. These in turn – as they began to accidentally replicate themselves using the energy from the proton gradients – became gradually more susceptible to a pattern of survival of the fittest. And the rest, as Daniel Dennett would say, is algorithm. In short, an emergent account of the origin of life is almost within reach.

the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.

Consider what must happen every second in your body to keep the show on the road. You have maybe ten trillion cells, not counting the bacteria that make up a large part of your body. Each of those cells is at any one time transcribing several thousand genes, a procedure that involves several hundred proteins coming together in a specific way and catalysing tens of chemical reactions for each of millions of base pairs. Each of those transcripts generates a protein molecule, thousands of amino acids long, which it does by entering a ribosome, a machine with tens of moving parts, capable of catalysing a flurry of chemical reactions. The proteins themselves then fan out within and without cells to speed reactions, transport goods, transmit signals and prop up structures. Millions of trillions of these immensely complicated events are occurring every second in your body to keep you alive, very few of which go wrong. It’s like the world economy in miniature, only even more complex.

‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,’ he wrote. ‘This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment.’

Sex is not the only apparent paradox that becomes less puzzling the moment we learn to think in selfish gene terms. For instance, it appears that the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein. From the point of view of the individual this seems paradoxical. If the ‘purpose’ of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. From the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.

And therefore to assume there was one person gave a name To everything, and that all learned their first words from the same, Is stuff and nonsense. Why should one human being from among The rest be able to designate and name things with his tongue And others not possess the power to do likewise? … Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 1041–5

look at a tree. Its trunk manages to grow in width and strength just as fast as is necessary to bear the weight of its branches, which are themselves a brilliant compromise between strength and flexibility; its leaves are a magnificent solution to the problem of capturing sunlight while absorbing carbon dioxide and losing as little water as possible: they are wafer-thin, feather-light, shaped for maximum exposure to the light, with their pores on the shady underside. The whole structure can stand for hundreds or even thousands of years without collapsing, yet can also grow continuously throughout that time – a dream that lies far beyond the capabilities of human engineers. All this is achieved without a plan, let alone a planner. The tree does not even have a brain. Its design and implementation emerge from the decisions of its trillions of single cells. Compared with animals, plants dare not rely on brain-directed behaviour, because they cannot run away from grazers, and if a grazer ate the brain, it would mean death. So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised. It is as if an entire country’s economy emerged from just the local incentives and responses of its people.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

re-engineering the word ‘the’ so it means something different would be a terrific problem for the world’s English-speakers, whereas changing the word ‘prevaricate’ (it used to mean ‘lie’, it now seems mostly to mean ‘procrastinate’) is no big deal, and has happened quite quickly. Nobody thought up this rule; it is the product of evolution.

The fortuitous adopting of a habit, through force of circumstance, by a certain tribe might have been enough to select for genes that made the members of that tribe better at speaking, exchanging, planning or innovating.

In people, genes are probably the slaves, not the masters, of culture.

Societies that chose ‘normative monogamy’, or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies. That,

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.

Garry Runciman points out in his book Very Different, But Much the Same,

For you will find that everything for which we have a name Is either a quality of the two, or consequence of the same. A quality is what, without obliterating shock, Can never be separated and removed: as weight to rock, As heat to flame, wet to water, the ability to touch To every substance, intangibility to the void. But such As slavery, penury and riches, freedom, war and peace, Whatever comes and goes while natures stay unchanging, these We rightly tend to term as ‘consequences’ or ‘events’. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 1, lines 449–57

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. Above all, it was a decentralised phenomenon, achieved by millions of individual decisions, mostly in spite of the actions of rulers.

that countries like Britain and the United States grew rich precisely because their citizens overthrew the elites who monopolised power. It was the wider distribution of political rights that made government accountable and responsive to citizens, allowing the great mass of people to take advantage of economic opportunities.

The central feature of commerce, and the thing that distinguishes it from socialist planning, is that it is decentralised. No central direction is required to tell the economy how many woollen coats, laptops or cups of coffee are needed. Indeed, when somebody does try to do so, the result is a miserable mess.

For new firms and technologies to emerge, old ones had to die. There is a ‘perennial gale of creative destruction’. Or, as Nassim Taleb puts it, for the economy to be antifragile (strengthened by running risks), individual firms must be fragile. The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

‘Things will happen in well-organised efforts without direction, controls, plans. That’s the consensus among economists.’

Take six basic needs of a human being: food, clothing, health, education, shelter and transport. Roughly speaking, in most countries the market provides food and clothing, the state provides healthcare and education, while shelter and transport are provided by a mixture of the two – private firms with semi-monopolistic privileges supplied by government: crony capitalism, in a phrase. 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?

It is the sea herself who fashions the boats.

Biology and technology in the end boil down to systems of information.

Just as a human body is the expression of information written in its DNA, and the fact that it is non-randomly arranged is an expression of ‘information’ – the opposite of entropy – so a steam engine, a light bulb or a software package is itself an ordered piece of information. Technology is in that sense a continuation of biological evolution – an imposition of informational order on a random world.

As Nassim Taleb insists, from the methods used by thirteenth-century architects building cathedrals to the development of modern computing, the story of technology is a story of rules of thumb, learning by apprenticeship, chance discoveries, trial and error, tinkering – what the French call ‘bricolage’.

What do we want to be free from? We don’t want to be free from our experience of life, we need that for our decisions. We don’t want to be free from our temperament because that also guides our decisions. We actually don’t want to be free from causation, we use that for predictions.