The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

There’s a fascinating finding in economics that taller men earn more money throughout their careers, but that it is their height at sixteen, not at thirty, that best predicts their earnings. The reason for this, as other studies have shown, is that this is when men decide their status, and shape their personalities accordingly. So what employers are rewarding are the attributes of self-confidence and ambition that came partly from being a tall, strong football player at school, rather than the height of the person today. Women tend to decide their status based largely on relative attractiveness, and they judge their attractiveness based on how others seem to judge them. In both sexes therefore, says Harris, there is a tendency to settle some aspects of your personality in the mid-teens, based on how high you think your relative status is amongst your peers. That, she thinks, is the likely cause of the differences in personality that are not directly or indirectly genetic.

Experiment after experiment has shown that given a choice, girls will play with dolls and boys with trucks, no matter what their previous experience. Most parents are happy to reinforce sex differences, but have no interest in starting them from scratch.

men of all ages find women of the age of maximum reproductive fertility most attractive.

Women who found strong, confident, mature and ambitious men attractive tended to leave more descendants than those who fell for weak, fearful, youthful or retiring men. It is truly strange that in my youth such explanations for universal human characteristics were verboten.

The economic historian Stephen Davies dates the modern form of the school to 1806, the year when Napoleon defeated Prussia. Stung by its humiliation, the Prussian state took the advice of its leading intellectual Wilhelm von Humboldt, and devised a programme of compulsory and rigorous education, the purpose of which was mainly to train young men to be obedient soldiers who would not run away in battle. It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

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.’

spider controls everything that happens on its web through the single node of its brain: it is highly centralised. A starfish has no brain and is a radically decentralised organism with local neural control of its arms. In education, spider systems were designed in the nineteenth century, essentially to build nations to legitimate regimes. Those centralised systems are worse than useless at facing the educational challenges of today, and of innovating. Pritchett’s solution is to encourage local evolution of an education system open to variety and experimentation: to make education much more like a starfish.

schools are little more than devices for signalling to employers that a young person has been sufficiently indoctrinated to stick to a task and do as he is told,

The countries that devoted the most resources to expanding their education systems grew less rapidly than those that devoted fewer resources to education.

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.

Leave the last word to Jacob Bronowski, speaking at the end of his television series The Ascent of Man. Standing in a pond at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where many of his relatives died, he reached down and lifted up some mud: ‘Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.’

It is far preferable to live in peace and to obey Than to wish to reign in power and hold whole kingdoms in your sway. Let others wear themselves out all for nothing, sweating blood, Battling their way along ambition’s narrow road. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 1129–32

Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

Anderson and Hill conclude that in the absence of a government monopoly of coercion, multiple private law enforcers emerged, and competition among them drove improvements and innovations that thrived by natural selection. In effect, the cattlemen of the nineteenth century rediscovered what medieval merchants had found – that customs and laws would emerge where they were not imposed. It was very far from anarchic.

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.

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

government originated as a group of thugs who, as Pope Gregory VII trenchantly put it in the eleventh century, ‘raised themselves above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder – in short by every kind of crime’.

George Washington said that ‘Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.’

‘The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.’ Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not.

Government was something that lived parasitically off the backs of the working people, spending the money it extorted on war and luxury and oppression. ‘The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern,’ said Lord Acton. ‘Every class is unfit to govern.’ The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse.

‘Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’

Government was to be the tool by which to engineer society. Around 1900 this was true whether you were a communist wishing to bring in the dictatorship of the proletariat, a militarist wishing to conquer your enemies and regiment your society, or a capitalist wishing to build new factories and sell your products. Once again, this notion of the role of government as planner had not been invented; it had emerged.

‘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.’

Communism, fascism, nationalism, corporatism, protectionism, Taylorism, dirigisme – they are all centralising systems with planning at their heart.

Little wonder that Mussolini began as a communist, Hitler as a socialist, and Oswald Mosley became a Labour MP very soon after being elected as a Conservative and before turning fascist.

Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state. They are a form of intelligent design. They worship at the feet of a political leader in exactly the way that religions worship at the feet of a god, claiming for him at leas...

In communism there is usually an initial pretence that the leader is not a person but a party, and that the god is a long-dead bloke with a long beard, but it never lasts long. Soon the name of the le...

Hitler hated communists not because of their economic doctrines, or because they wanted to destroy the bourgeoisie – he liked those notions. He championed trade unions in Mein Kampf, and attacked the greed and ‘short-sighted narrow-mindedness’ of businessmen as fervently as any modern anti-capitalist. No, he hated communism because he thought it was a foreign, Jewish conspiracy, as he made clear throughout Mein Kampf.

Then when the whole earth moves beneath our feet, and cities tumble To the ground, hit hard, or cities badly shaken, threaten to crumble, Is it surprising mortal men are suddenly made humble, And are ready to believe in the awesome might and wondrous force Of gods, the powers at the rudder of the universe? Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 1236–40

In first-century Rome, every city had scores of cults and mystery religions competing alongside each other, usually without much jealousy – only the god of the Jews refused to tolerate others. Temples to Jupiter and Baal, Atagartis and Cybele, lay one beside another. Consolidation was inevitable: just as thousands of independently owned cafés were replaced by two or three mighty chains such as Starbucks, with superior products more slickly delivered, so it was inevitable that religious chains would take over the Roman empire.

In the middle of the first century, the cult of Apollonius of Tyana looked a better bet to conquer the empire. Like Jesus, Apollonius (who was younger, but overlapped) raised the dead, worked miracles, exorcised demons, preached charity, died and rose again, at least in spiritual form. Unlike Jesus, Apollonius was a famous Pythagorean intellectual known throughout the Near East. His birth had been foretold, he abjured sex, drank no wine and wore no animal skins. He was altogether more sophisticated than the Palestinian carpenter. He moved in grand circles: the dead person he raised was the child of a senator. His fame spread well beyond the Roman lands. When he arrived at Babylon, the Parthian King Vardanes greeted him as a celebrity and invited him to stay and teach for a year. He then travelled east to what is now Afghanistan and India, never to re-emerge. Long after his disappearance his cult competed with the Jewish, Zoroastrian and Christian creeds. Yet eventually it petered out.

Whereas Apollonius had a plodding Greek chronicler as his evangelist, named Philostratus, Jesus was blessed with a peculiarly persuasive if rather eccentric Pharisee who set out to reinvent and convert the Jesus cult into a universal, rather than a Jewish, faith designed to appeal to Greeks and Romans. And St Paul was acute enough to realise that the Jesus cult could be aimed at the poor and dispossessed. Its strictures against wealth, power and polygamy were well designed to appeal to those who had little to lose. Quite how the Christians eventually (three centuries on) persuaded an emperor, Constantine, to convert to their cause remains a little mysterious, but it surely had much to do with the populist appeal of the new creed. After that, the conquest of large swathes of the planet by the Christian religion owed as much to power as to persuasion. All competing religions were ruthlessly and violently stamped out wherever possible, starting with the Emperor Theodosius.

In short, you can tell the story of the rise of Christianity without any reference to divine assistance. It was a movement like any other, a man-made cult, a cultural contagion passed from mi...

Contrast the vengeful and irritable Jehovah of the Old Testament with the loving Christian God of today. Or philandering, jealous Zeus with the disembodied and pure Allah; or vengeful Hera and sweet Mary.

Priests discovered that demanding ascetic self-sacrifice induced greater loyalty.

They thrived, argue Baumard and Boyer, by appealing to human instincts for reciprocity and fairness – by emphasising proportionality between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance.

gods evolved by adapting themselves to certain aspects of human nature, the environment in which they found themselves. They were doubly man-made, unconsciously as well as consciously:

The Virgin Mary features more frequently in the Koran than in the New Testament; as do a few concepts shared with the long-lost Dead Sea scrolls, which would have been obscure in the 600s, and must have been passed down from older traditions.

The Koran is too full of details about Jewish and Christian literature to have been a compilation of notions picked up by a trader, let alone one from a pagan and largely illiterate society.

there is nothing to tie the life of the Koran’s compiler to the middle of the Arabian Peninsula at all, but lots to tie it to the fringes of Palestine and the Jordan valley: names of tribes, identification of places and mentions of cattle, olive...

To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many streams flowed, a work of art that emerged from centuries of monotheistic fusions and debates, before taking its final form in the hands of a prophet in an expanding empire of newly unified Arabs pushing aside the ancient powers of Rome and Sassanid Persia. It is, in Tom Holland’s vivid words, a bloom from the seedbed of antiquity, not a guillotine dropped on the neck of antiquity. It contains bits of Roman imperial propaganda, stories of Christian saints, remnants of Gnostic gospels and parts of ancient Jewish tracts.

Nomads have fewer flea-infested rats in their tents than city dwellers do in their houses, which makes plague much less of a problem.

It is only in retrospect that Mohamed is enshrined as a prophet, the Sunni tradition is crystallised and the Hadiths are written down to give Mohamed a realistic and detailed life. By then the Arabs had established a wide empire with firm but brittle self-confidence, and there was clearly a determination to extinguish any hints of intellectual ancestry of Islam within the infidel faiths of Christianity and Judaism. So the sudden, miraculous, a nihilo invention of Islam by Mohamed becomes the story that is told.

Islam was more the consequence than the cause of Arab conquest.

After all, Moses too went up a hill and came down with written instructions from God. All religions look man-made to me.

I have never forgotten that experience – it taught me just how ready people are to believe supernatural explanations, to trust ‘experts’ (or prophets) even when they are blatantly phony, to prefer any explanation to the mundane and obvious one, and to treat any sceptic as a heretic to be shouted at rather than an agnostic to be persuaded by reason and evidence.

people are attracted by higher truths that simplify the world and can explain everything. They are nostalgic for the doctrinal simplicities of medieval religion.

The central theme of the origin of religions is that they are man-made, like crop circles, but also that they have evolved. They are much more spontaneous phenomena than legend later admits. Like technological innovation, they are the result of selection among variants, of trial and error within cultural experiments. And their characteristics are chosen by their times and places. They are also glimpses into just how gullible we are about prescriptive explanations of the world.

Superstition can be very easily aroused, and not just in people.

The psychologist B.F. Skinner kept pigeons in a cage where a machine produced food at regular intervals. He noticed that some of the pigeons seemed to become convinced that whatever they had been doing just before the food appeared was the cause of the food appearing. The pigeons therefore repeated these habits.