The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

Human beings are plainly highly susceptible to superstition. We are ready to attribute agency to inanimate objects at the drop of a hat, and to believe that crystals have healing powers, old buildings house ghosts, certain people are capable of witchcraft, some foods have magical health properties, and somebody is watching over us.

It makes evolutionary sense for people to have this intentional stance, because it must have saved lives in the Stone Age. You probably lived longer if you treated every rustle in the grass or every sudden sound as suspicious, and made by a potential enemy. And if occasionally this led you to mistake natural coincidences for malevolent spirits – well then, no harm done.

the paradox of this realisation is that if belief (in the broad sense of the word) is universal, then no amount of argument can extinguish it, and in a sense therefore, gods really do exist – but inside our heads rather than outside.

And the inevitable consequence is that, as G.K. Chesterton said, when people stop believing in something, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

the decline in Christian worship in Europe has been accompanied by a rise in all sorts of other superstitions and cults, including those of Freud, Marx and Gaia.

I have become steadily less, rather than more, confident in my ability to distinguish pseudoscience from true science. I am close to certain that astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience. Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience. Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience. Vaccination is science; vaccination scares are pseudoscience. Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience. Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience. I am also pretty sure that the belief that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Princess Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, and 9/11 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster, alien abductions and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal.

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.

Homeopathy is based on vitalism. Its founder Samuel Hahnemann believed that diseases ‘are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body’. Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order ‘to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces’, it was necessary to ‘stimulate vitalizing and harmonizing processes in the soil’, an insight he acquired through clairvoyance. The

Simplistic cause-seeking is characteristically religious.

Observation and experiment trump scripture. To hear even some scientists, at least in the field of climate, insisting that there is only one true voice of authority, is to be reminded of religion, not enlightenment.

Blaise Pascal argued that even if God is very unlikely to exist, you had better go to church just in case, because if he does exist the gain will be infinite, and if he does not the pain will have been finite. To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom. This was exactly the argument used by eugenicists: the noble end justifies cruel means.

Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds of thousands of people each year by putting up the price of food.

We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their private jets, but none must depart from faith (in carbon dioxide) as set out in scripture (the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It is the duty of all to condemn heretics (the ‘deniers’), venerate saints (Al Gore), heed the prophets (of the IPCC). If we do not, then surely Judgement Day will find us out (with irreversible tipping points), when we will feel the fires of hell (future heatwaves) and experience divine wrath (worsening storms). Fortunately, God has sent us a sign of the sacrifice we must make – I have sometimes been struck by the way a wind farm looks like Golgotha.

So when every storm and flood of recent years, every typhoon, hurricane and tornado, every drought and heatwave, every blizzard and ice storm is attributed (mostly by politicians rather than scientists) to man-made climate change, ignoring all the other factors that have contributed – including man-made ones such as vegetation changes or changes to land drainage and development – what is the difference from the man who blamed it on gay marriage? Both are attempts to turn the weather into the wages of sin.

‘Each natural event is supposed to be governed by some intelligent agent,’ wrote David Hume. Somewhere deep in our psyches, we have just never really accepted that a thunderstorm does not have an agency behind it, that a drought is not a punishment for some misdemeanour.

And trickles of silver and gold, also copper and lead, would stream And pool in the earth’s hollows. When cooled, men saw the gleam Of their glinting colours in the soil, and drawn to what they’d found – The shiny smoothness of the nuggets – pried them from the ground, And saw these bore the shapes of the depressions where they lay. Then this drove home that they could shape the nuggets in this way – Melting them down and pouring them into any mould they made. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 1255–61

Thomas Williams, had a better idea. After striking coins with lettered edges that would be hard to clip, he tried to interest the Royal Mint in the new designs. No response. So in 1787 he began producing copper coins from his mine at Parys in Anglesey. He did not pretend they were pennies, but merely ‘tokens’ that could be exchanged for pennies, which was legal. The copper tokens were called ‘druids’. Beautifully designed and smoothly executed, they had a low relief of a hooded, bearded druid on one side, wreathed in oak leaves, with the letters ‘PMC’ – for Parys Mine Company – on the other side, and around the edge the legend: ‘WE PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ONE PENNY’.

George Selgin – the outstanding historian of this curious episode in his book Good Money – puts it, Birmingham businessmen had privatised the penny.

Nassim Taleb points out that when Ron Paul, as the libertarian presidential candidate, called for the abolition of the Fed, he was called a crank; but had he called for the setting up of a monopoly with the power to price any other commodity than money, he would have been called a crank for that.

Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones.

The contrast with what happened in Law’s native Scotland is acute. Both countries introduced paper currencies. The one that granted a bank a centralised monopoly backed by the state ruined everybody. The one that plumped for a decentralised, evolutionary system of competition worked beautifully. Central banks tend to behave pro-cyclically, pushing down the cost of borrowing as credit expands and slamming the door shut when it contracts – just as they did in the early 2000s. By contrast, decentralised money has a far better record.

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.

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.

Nothing can be made from nothing – once we see that’s so, Already we are on the way to what we want to know: What can things be fashioned from? And how is it without The machinations of the gods, all things can come about? Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 1, lines 164–7

For a while, we all got the point. We crowd-sourced and wiki-ed and clouded our lives. Journalists, those most anarchic of beasts, found themselves overtaken by bloggers, tweeters and amateur cameramen, and they did not like it. Only top–down journalism could do proper investigation, they said. Scientists had to get used to irreverent and instantaneous discussion of their ideas on forums, rather than stately and opaque clubs of peer review and publication. Politicians had to put up with abuse on Twitter.

The governments of America, Europe and Asia, it emerged, all implicitly agreed that they should be free to listen to each other’s populations’ conversations. Only nobody told those populations that this was the new agreement.

I remain optimistic that the forces of evolution will outwit the forces of command and control, and the internet will continue to provide a free space for all. But only because of human ingenuity staying one step ahead of the dirigistes.

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.

Something as radical as language or government is emerging from the internet. Officials, lawyers, politicians, businessmen may come together to try to stop this, glimpsing their own redundancy, and for a while they may succeed. But the inexorable, inevitable, implacable nature of evolution will eventually defeat them. Remember how technology evolves, whether we want it to or not.

‘It has awakened something magnificently Cromwellian in our democracy.’

Four-fifths of legislation in Britain is now authored by the unelected and permanent civil service, whose job has changed from implementing to making policy.

The traditional political parties no longer meet people’s political needs. The state treats them far worse than business does. People who have better and better experiences as citizens – being able to change suppliers, demand decent service, get instant information online, purchase shoes with a single click – are increasingly frustrated that they are treated so badly as subjects of a government. Why must queries take weeks to be answered? Why must websites be so patronising? Why must forms be so badly designed? Why must fees for service be so opaque? Why must legislation be so inflexible? The opportunity presented by the digital revolution to ‘hyper-personalise’ public services is huge.

If anything, productivity in public services has gone down, not up. That is a truly staggering statistic, when you think about it. Computers and smartphones and dirt-cheap communication and the infinite resources of the internet have arrived in their offices, yet bureaucrats have managed to avoid nudging their productivity up at all? How did they manage that? An earthquake is coming. Let politics evolve.

I could not quite reconcile in my mind this strange juxtaposition of optimism and pessimism. In a world that delivers an endless supply of bad news, people’s lives get better and better.

bad news is man-made, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.

First: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, the Great Depression, the Nazi regime, the Second World War, the Chinese Revolution, the 2008 financial crisis: every single one was the result of top–down decision-making by relatively small numbers of people trying to implement deliberate plans – politicians, central bankers, revolutionaries and so on.

Second: the growth of global income; the disappearance of infectious diseases; the feeding of seven billion; the clean-up of rivers and air; the reforestation of much of the rich world; the internet; the use of mobile-phone credits as banking; the use of genetic fingerprinting to convict criminals and acquit the innocent. Every single one of these was a serendipitous, un...

Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history.

Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

Equating order with control retains a powerful intuitive appeal,

‘Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet’s decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of “complexity” and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos.’