The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

Evolution is a story, a narrative of how things change.

People are the victims, more often than the perpetrators, of unintended change.

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.

Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.

Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs.

Freedom to influence your own fate is an almost infinitely variable thing that is the product of biology.

The cost, incidentally, of an education is not much greater in the private than the public system. The difference is that the money comes from the parents in the private system, and from the taxpayers in the state system.

So long as exams remain tests of memory and mental regurgitation, there is little point in self-education, and schools will be prevented from evolving new forms.

‘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.

great men are mostly bad men.

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

Government was something that lived parasitically off the backs of the working people, spending the money it extorted on war and luxury and oppression.

Put an ‘ology’ after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your tame propagandists.

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.