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The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

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The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch—the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley’s wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.

Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for nature—these were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2015

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About the author

Matt Ridley

30 books1,993 followers
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley DL FRSL FMedSci (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland) is an English science writer, businessman and aristocrat. Ridley was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford where he received a doctorate in zoology before commencing a career in journalism. Ridley worked as the science editor of The Economist from 1984 to 1987 and was then its Washington correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and American editor from 1990 to 1992.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 393 reviews
May 15, 2020
Q: ... we may be extraordinarily lucky and vanishingly rare. (c)

Overall fascinating. Somewhat simplistic and haphazard, since all kinds of things are demonstrated changing. Still, the author pulls it off with more than a bit of grace. He flutters between different concepts, managing to reveal just enough tantalizing glimpses from varied topics: from morality to universe to population to internet to genome to culture to leadership to personality to tech to money to government to future. A fun ride of ideas.

Of course, some of the ideas are underdeveloped, on many points one could list things excluded from the overview that could add value. So, this is not an encyclopedic work it could have been. Still, I loved the easy progression between the topics and well thought-out chosen tidbits illustrating the author's perception of assorted ideas centered around the topic of change.

Q:
Friedrich Hayek’s, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had ‘fundamental similarity of methods and ideas’, that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. (c) Actually, this was one of the most ludicrous ideas in the history of cherry-picking.
Economic planning does not lead to tyranny. Granting a person or a group of them oversized powers without checks and balances does. And planning, if done properly, could very well be one of these checks and implement extra checks. Free markets also aren't quite as free as we might have thought: all kinds of social processes, stochastic dynamics, behind the scenes effects (think LIBOR debacle, consider lobbying practices that are SO LOVED in some countries), technological effects, interpersonal stuff and ... no, markets aren't exactly conductive of freedom. Also, quite a lot of representatives of 'free markets' traded with the poster-child for fascism, Hitler, all the way into the WW2. I don't really see them being really opposed to fascism, no matter how free or unregulated they were.

Q:
Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency. (c) True enough. And whenever the 'messiah's skin bronzing choices aren't satisfactory, woe to him.
Q:
The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. 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. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’ (c)
Q:
For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves. (c) Yeah. Preach some more to this choir.
Q:
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. (c)
Q:
Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above. (c)
Q:
The history of Western thought is dominated by skyhooks, by devices for explaining the world as the outcome of design and planning. 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. (c)
Q:
With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. 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. (c)
Q:
Epigenetics is a respectable branch of genetic science that examines how modifications to DNA sequences acquired early in life in response to experience can affect the adult body. There is a much more speculative version of the story, though. Most of these modifications are swept clean when the sperm and egg cells are made, but perhaps a few just might survive the jump into a new generation. Certain genetic disorders, for example, seem to manifest themselves differently according to whether the mutant chromosome was inherited from the mother or the father – implying a sex-specific ‘imprint’ on the gene. And one study seemed to find a sex-specific effect on the mortality of Swedes according to how hungry their grandparents were when young. (c)
Q:
Leave the last word on the anthropic principle to Douglas Adams: ‘Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, may have been made to have me in it!”’(c)
Profile Image for Riku Sayuj.
658 reviews7,255 followers
November 10, 2016
Dawkins fanboy tries to dress up an ideological book as a scientific one. Tries to show that Darwin's theory of evolution is just a byproduct or a specific version of the general theory of evolution proposed by Adam Smith about the emergent order that will prevail bottom-up in any free society of selfish actors. In the process ends up unwittingly using just another"skyhook" - that of benevolent evolution - throughout, by arguing endlessly that all the good things happened bottom-up and all the bad things happened top-down.

Except that, as per the core argument, all top-down things also must have been products of evolution. If Everything Evolves, all things good or bad, bottom-up or top-down evolved too. Hence the concept of evolution cannot in itself justify just let everything play out - including economics, institutions and even climate change, for that matter. There is really no guarantee things will always play out well if 'bottom-up' - just look at the latest elections!

Just "Let Everything Be" can't be the ultimate policy outlook unless Ridley truly believes The Invisible Hand to be the Hand of God directing everything as if by providence towards the good of mankind. And if that is not so and Evolution indeed is blind, then perhaps the occasional nudges in the right direction may work too?

As with most left vs right debates, the book only enforces for me the fact that pure free market is not the solution, nor is a command economy - evolution can take us to either side and we need to intervene to keep the balance, and that continuous self-correction is part of our social evolution too, as is the occasional over-correction. No Skyhooks needed, we just need to be less in thrall of 'Men of System'.

There, I have used enough pointed references for one review. Now enjoy the historic day.

11/9/2016
40 reviews20 followers
June 12, 2018
I thought The Evolution of Everything was written by Matt Ridley--the one with a doctorate in zoology, the former science journalist from The Economist, the author of the well-researched Red Queen and Genome. Instead, the Matt Ridley who wrote the Evolution of Everything is a British aristocrat, bank chairman, and Conservative member of the House of Lords. Actually, these two Matt Ridleys are the same person, but the journalist Matt Ridley is a much more compelling writer. The contemporary Matt Ridley seems to prefer quoting Ron Paul to quoting Charles Darwin, even within a book that is ostensibly about evolution.

The Matt Ridley who wrote The Red Queen and Genome seemed to have familiarity with scientific literature and access to leading researchers in evolutionary biology and genomics. The bibliographies of these books are full of peer-reviewed journal articles, and Dr. Ridley had a talent for distilling their contents for the enthusiastic non-scientist to comprehend. The sources of The Evolution of Everything are mostly popular books, newspaper articles, and the occasional talk from a libertarian think tank. Apparently, Ridley no longer has access to academic sources, but this is not a problem for his purposes. He is no longer a science writer and instead is a right wing op-ed writer who finds it convenient to make an occasional biology-based metaphor.

Matt Ridley is not writing as a science writer but as a conservative politician, but these are not sound reasons to dismiss his ideas. Briefly stated, Ridley believes that the best ideas and solutions to problems arise spontaneously when "top-down" forces (i.e., governments in most cases) aren't involved. I would hope that Ridley, a trained scientist, would use an evidence-based method to persuade me that everything will flourish in a libertarian Utopia. He does not. He simply makes things up when convenient, and dismisses or ignores evidence that is inconvenient to his cause.

Ridley asserts that publicly funded academic research results in little innovation compared to what would arise from a system in which all research was privately funded. He concedes that it is hard to find evidence for this assertion, because so much research is currently publicly funded that few private foundations would want to waste their money on research. His evidence for his assertion is an article by Terence Kealey from the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank formally named The Charles Koch Foundation) that says public research and development spending does not result in economic growth. This article peddles exclusively in anecdote. If I may provide my own anecdotes, I will argue the majority of discoveries for which researchers were awarded Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine in the past 50 years would not have been made with profit-driven, private R & D spending. The history of biological discovery is a treasury of cases in which huge, ultimately rewarding, innovations arise from the investigation of topics far removed from profit-seeking. The betting on short-term winners and losers by private investors would be even more of a top-down allocation of resources than the broad federal funding system of the Nation Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in the US. In the dream world of Ridley, the study of zoology or evolution, devoid of immediate economic returns, would be a luxury reserved for members of the aristocracy.

Ridley claims that opposition to fracking in Europe largely arises from the unpleasant sound of the word. Regardless of the merits of the technique, I think he is entirely neglecting the concerns of those who would disagree with him.

Ridley describes the National Health Service of the UK as a New-Coke-like failure in which consumers were stripped of choice and offered an inferior product to that which would be available in a market. His analysis is interesting, but he makes no attempt to compare or contrast the failures of the NHS with the non-nationalized, but more expensive US system. Interestingly, his only reference to US health care is to quote the eminent medical historian, Dr. Ron Paul, who states, that before Medicaid and Medicare, "every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm." As with many libertarian arguments, this is so emotionally compelling that it can exert its effect without factual support.

Most egregiously, Ridley devotes a good portion of the book to dismissing global warming, using mockery as his primary method of persuasion. First, he links concern for the environment to Nazism, by quoting a famous global warming denier: "As Martin Durkin has observed, green thinking was no mere sideline for the Nazis... It was their green anti-capitalism and loathing of bankers which led them to hate Jewish people." Ridley then goes to say that to believe that man-made climate change is dangerous is to take a non-scientific leap of faith. Ridley asserts that because so many scientists argue that man-made climate change is real, the idea is unscientific, because "the whole point of science... is the rejection of arguments from authority." Since both religion and belief in man-made climate change provide explanations for cataclysmic weather, Ridley argues, both are equally ridiculous. Besides, fewer people die from floods now than in the past. This is the crux of Ridley's argument, and it is hard to fathom. Is he denying climate change? He claims not be. He just believes that maybe it might not end up being as bad as many scientists believe; therefore, we should do nothing about it, and if it is bad, we can figure out what to do about it later.

If only more science were exclusively privately supported by Big Oil-funded think tanks, I suppose, Ridley would have stronger evidence to support his belief that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a cabal of Nazi scientists.

This is a strange, strange book, and I suppose it is because Matt Ridley has a strange biography: a scientist, turned journalist, turned banker, turned member of Parliament. He has transformed from an effective communicator of science, to a guy who writes about the books he got at the bookstore and how they remind him of how he was interested in evolution when he was younger.
Profile Image for Holly.
1,054 reviews262 followers
November 25, 2015
This satisfied my dilettantish wish to know something about everything. That's all. But it's not as if Ridley has done original scholarship, right? He is an acolyte of Richard Dawkins, and author of two books I never got around to but still feel as if I read (The Red Queen and Genome). He's a fan of Greenblatt's The Swerve and uses an epigraph from Lucretius's "De rerum natura" at the start of each chapter. Fine. He throws around Dennett's "skyhooks" very liberally and literally. Okay. I liked that Dennett book - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - a notoriously difficult read, and I've read several works of Gould, and Dawkins of course, and Sean Carroll, so I'm conversant in the concepts - but Ridley's strangely conversational and superficially confident tone began to disturb me and I began to feel as if I were being tricked. His short chapters and surveys of everything in human culture began to fell reductionistic, or slyly political in way I couldn't guard against, and I started picking up a weird libertarian vibe: he thinks the Wild West had a better system of governance than modern socialist democracies; he thinks climate change will fix itself; he admires Herbert Spencer . . . . This is about social evolution: everything is human society is evolving by the same mechanisms by which the natural world evolves - religion, governance, education, relationships. But, but?

Profile Image for Marc.
3,182 reviews1,484 followers
February 2, 2022
I was very excited when I read the introduction to this book: finally someone who confirms that history is not so much driven top-down, but rather is the result of thousands of small decisions and behaviors, and thus always 'emergent'. But when I started reading the different chapters, that enthusiasm gradually died down, sometimes even turning into outright annoyance. Ridley seems to have written a political pamphlet in which he systematically downplays everything that has to do with government, design or planning. Of course, he is right that many topdown decisions, or design and planning in general, have negative or adverse effects. But to then vehemently throw the baby out with the bathwater, that is clearly a bridge too far.

His previous book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, did already contain some hints in that direction, but I still liked that book quite well. Here the libertarian-conservative that Ridley is (until recently he sat in the British House of Lords) clearly goes over the moon. Beware, he regularly offers interesting arguments, but his evidence usually rests on a very narrow basis; in most cases he seems to have consulted only 1 study about a certain problem, cherry picking his way through (like where he takes over the very controversial theory that the islamic religion didn't start in Arabia, but in Palestine). And in some cases his arguments are downright wrong or he contradicts himself. Take his analysis of what went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis: according to him, this was not the result of too far-reaching liberalization of the financial markets, but, on the contrary, of just too much government control and influence.
At times Ridley's views are tantalizing and thought provoking, but regularly he misses the mark completely out of ideological blindness. I'm afraid this was a turn off. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Profile Image for Христо Блажев.
2,314 reviews1,572 followers
March 14, 2018
Еволюция на всичко – или как се самосъгражда нашият свят: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/e...

Една от книгите, за които наистина съжалявам, че не можах да издам, е Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves на Мат Ридли. Когато излезе, още не бях в “Сиела”, те си имаха първа опция като издатели на “Геномът” и “Червената царица”, но така и не я издадоха, не знам защо. Сега, години по-късно, обаче мога в общи линии да поправя това с “Еволюция на всичко” – книга, която в някаква степен обединява в едно всичките му предишни, описвайки еволюционните процеси в разнообразни области – създаването и развитието на Вселената, морала, живота, гените, цивилизацията, икономиката, технологията, ума, личността, образованието, популацията, водачеството, правителството, религията, парите, интернет и бъдещето. И не е случайно, че на предната корица сложих надпис “Знания от хиляди книги – събрани в една!”, защото обхватът и ерудицията на Ридли са повече от впечатляващи.

CIELA Books
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/e...
Profile Image for Peter Tillman.
3,727 reviews406 followers
February 8, 2021
An important book, if somewhat scattershot. Ridley prefers things to be done from the bottom up, instead of from the top down, and so do I. But. Even though I’m sympathetic to what he’s writing, he does get carried away at times. But he’s likely right, and almost always interesting. And he’s done his homework.

From my notes:
1779-81. Gen. Cornwallis’s army decimated by malaria in South Carolina and Virginia, in what one US historian called “covert biological warfare.” Cornwallis’s weakened troops defeated by Gen. Washington at Yorktown, 1781. US wins independence.

Thomas Malthus’s evil legacy:
A million people dead from the Irish famines, 1840s. “An effective mechanism for reducing surplus population,” wrote one British official. ☠️ ☠️
Up to 10 million dead from starvation in India, 1877. Not only did the British Viceroy not feed them, he forbade multiple private attempts to feed the starving people. ☠️ ☠️ ☠️
People on the receiving end have long memories for this sort of thing. Barbara Tuchman's comments re "The March of Folly" come to mind.

Eugenics, neo-Malthusians: In the US, starting in the 1930s, 30 states passed laws allowing compulsory sterilization of “defective” people. 63,000 sterilized by the 1970s, when the laws were struck down. California was the leading state in this program.
Nazi Germany explicitly modeled their eugenics program on California’s. By 1934, Nazis were sterilizing 5,000 people per month. 400,000 people sterilized in Hitler’s first 6 years in office. Then the mass-murders began. ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ ☠️

India, 1966: US refuses to give famine aid until India sets up “massive” population control. 3 million sterilizations per year, 1972-73. 8 million sterilized, 1976. Congratulations from Robert McNamara! Paul Ehrlich is “astounded” at criticism of the massive Indian sterilizations. Very disturbing chapter.
By then, India’s birth rates were already falling, and their food production rapidly rising, from new breeds of grain from Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.

Sample quote:
“Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organizing, self-changing place. Skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, termites build cathedrals without architects, bees make hexagonal honeycombs without instruction, brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching, political events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.”

The review that led me to read the book, by Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-plann...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
Another good review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/bo...
Profile Image for Jim.
Author 7 books2,051 followers
January 22, 2020
The idea of a bottom up, generalized evolution theory for so many aspects of our life is new to me & well worth exploring, especially since it flies in the face of the current practice of top down legislation which has failed miserably all too often. It's a really interesting premise that's strained a bit occasionally, but overall makes sense.

Ridley relies heavily on the views of Epicurus (341-270 BC), Lucretius (99 BC-55 BC), Adam Smith(1723-1790), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Richard Dawkins (born 1941), & several others. As a Dawkins fan boy, I'm tickled to see his selfish gene theory stretched so well into so many areas. While this book isn't specifically aimed at showing how ridiculous, outdated, & confining religions are, it winds up doing so quite often. Each chapter begins with a quote from Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura", the only work of his to survive the Christian purge of his works. What a loss!

Very well narrated. Definitely recommended, but keep an eye out for lopsided arguments. Most are pretty well balanced through the first half or 2/3, but get unbalanced after that. Still interesting data, just not convincing or complete.

Prologue: The General Theory of Evolution - Ridley explains his point well in the second paragraph.
This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artifacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.
He goes on to say that we often see a person as the cause of a change when they're really just a focal point of gradual change before them. No one is at the controls.

  1 The Evolution of the Universe - more about Lucretius than I'd ever known before, but otherwise nothing new.

  2 The Evolution of Morality - makes a really good point that Bible-thumpers always ignore. Morals are NOT passed down by a deity, but arise from the common thinking at the time. The Christian Bible hasn't changed in relation to slavery & rape, but our views on those certainly have. The rate of change has also accelerated. Homophobes were once the norm, but now people are being dinged for holding this view of just 4 or 5 decades ago.

  3 The Evolution of Life - has one of the best refutations of the complexity issue that so many Creationists love to spout.

  4 The Evolution of Genes - has a great explanation of 'junk' DNA & why we have so much of it.

  5 The Evolution of Culture - explores language & diversity. Roughly, there are far more & diverse species closer to the equator, but they tend to be in smaller areas. Ditto for languages. People tend to move about more in the northern latitudes, so more trade, less languages, more interaction.

  6 The Evolution of the Economy - I've never understood the economy & I'm convinced no one else does either. Ridley's notion that it is mostly out of individual (including state) control roughly seems to hold true. When the state does clamp down, it's usually for a brief period until too big an imbalance develops with its neighbors.

  7 The Evolution of Technology - goes without saying since we can see it right in front of us, but he delves a bit deeper & shows how it's almost always a product of its time. Even Darwin was competing with Wallace for springing the idea of evolution through natural selection, but there were 2 dozen people inventing the light bulb before Edison grabbed all the credit in the US. Most other inventions have similar stories & so he thinks Nobel Prizes & patents often do a disservice the process. He points out that Mendel & his genetics were an exception since his work was too early. It was 35 years later that several people rediscovered the idea & finally gave Mendel credit. He didn't mention it, but cast iron was developed in the 5th century BC in China where it died out. It wasn't until underlying tech had caught up that it played a pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution in the West over 2000 years later.

  8 The Evolution of the Mind - There are a lot of quotes from Free Will. He does a creditable job of disturbing my sense of self. This is not a worm hole I want to go down too far nor does our society since it would undermine our justice system.

  9 The Evolution of Personality - covers a lot of the nurture versus nature debate, a pendulum of opinion where 'nature' led to the eugenics movement & then swung to the opposite extreme of pure nurture & the blank slate idea that feminists seem to adore. Now it's swinging back & again seems to be going too far, IMO. I think there's more to birth order & parental influence than Ridley suggests.

10 The Evolution of Education - from informal class rooms to a top down system that is so structured that it stifles learning. He mentions Montessori schools & seems to think private ones are the best. He thinks conformity has gone too far, but he didn't look enough at the USA in the 1800s. We're a special case with our large, diverse population. Some conformity is needed, especially to stop elitism & religious fanatics. All schools indoctrinate, so his argument there isn't a good one.

11 The Evolution of Population - shows how top down efforts at population control aren't very good. They're either inefficient or brutal, such as eugenics. He does a creditable job covering that. Also discussions of food supply (He never named Borlag.) & foreign aid. The latter doesn't work well, usually just leads to corruption.

12 The Evolution of Leadership - not a terribly convincing chapter, but interesting. Again he is arguing that it is a combination of factors, not one person, who really makes a difference.

13 The Evolution of Government - argues for free markets & trade. I especially enjoyed finding out that others share my view that there isn't much difference between fascism & communism in reality. He also shows how the Right & Left have swapped places over the years.

14 The Evolution of Religion - Excellent overview, especially since he works his way up to our current beliefs. Great anecdote about crop circles. He's right that Climate Change & Organic are too often resembling new religions.

15 The Evolution of Money - some interesting examples, but I'm not sure banking practices from 200 years ago are on point. Seemed more like preaching his point. That's gotten more blatant as the book has gone on & now Ron Paul is quoted often. He ignores problems with the exchange & storage of Bitcoins, but has other great points about them & the 2008 US housing bubble.

16 The Evolution of the Internet - Pretty good, but again one-sided. No mention of Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, search/index manipulation & biases, or the Dark Web.

Epilogue: The Evolution of the Future - There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology. I wrote a whole book about the latter story, and wondered why it seemed original and surprising to do so...
Life is getting better & the future does look bright if we pay attention to what's really happening, not what the 'news' shoves in our faces. It's even more hopeful because the Internet is decentralizing business & other aspects of our lives allowing us more personalized experiences & services.
Profile Image for Sense of History.
477 reviews579 followers
February 28, 2022
Matt Ridley does not shy away from using the big words: in this book he aspires to offer nothing less than a general theory of evolution, for which Darwin's of course is a source of inspiration but only limited to the field of biology. Ridley wants to go much further, and just as Einstein formulated a general theory of relativity after his special one, also formulate principle(s) that cover the evolution of everything. Yes, everything.

His approach is appealing: “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. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect”. And his hypothesis is that “far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place. Patterns emerge, trends evolve.” Frankly, I couldn't agree more, so that was very promising.

The whole book is an elaboration and illustration of the above thesis, in very different domains (politics, economics, technology, culture, etc.). And, of course, his hypothesis makes sense: many developments are the result of complex, intertwining and interlocking changes and decisions at very different levels. Indeed, in their zeal to provide an insight into history, historians often give the impression that developments were initiated by high-level decisions (monarchs, presidents, business tycoons, geniuses, etc.) and then ran their course, always controlled from above, though sometimes adjusted or thwarted by other (also consciously designed or directed) decisions. From a narrative point of view, this topdown angle offers attractive stories that bring structure and coherence to the chaos of historical factual material.

Ridley likes to go against the grain, and his reasoning certainly makes sense, for example when it comes to the evolution of technology. This indeed often is the result of small changes, hunches and adaptations by an entire army of scientists, engineers, craftsmen and sometimes downright amateurs. Just look at the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, or the industrial revolution itself: of course, the contribution of the known Great Names, certainly not is to be neglected, but behind them hides a whole bunch of lesser figures, whose very small adjustments or small insights into a related sector or area of knowledge caused a shift that made larger strides possible. But – typical for this book – is that Ridley immediately draws the conclusion that scientific research directed from above (state or large corporations) yields absolutely nothing and is simply wasted (tax) money.

The same reasoning in the field of economics, where Ridley predictably swears by the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. Again, that invisible hand is relevant, as economic history proves. But to immediately link to this that every government intervention and every steering (also by 'croony capitalism') almost always ends badly is simply nonsense. Top-down interventions are simply a reality, and to say that their impact is nil (or in the worst case just negative) is to close your eyes to that reality.

Ridley follows the same procedure in almost all areas he covers: adjusting the relatively one-sided top-down story, subsequently stating that only the bottom-up process is relevant, and thus denying the light of the sun. I agree that someone who wants to shed a different light on history may exaggerate a little, overexpose things a bit, but losing all sense of proportion makes your story largely incredible, and that is certainly the case here. It's a pity, because this book contains quite a few views and ideas that are enticing. Clearly the libertarian temperament of Ridley has affected him a bit too much. Or is it the political or other agenda, for instance when he accuses the ecological movement of being born out of the eugenetics movement, or when he propagates bying bitcoins and other cryptocoins as (not-government controlled) money of the future? It's a pity such an inventive thinker spins out of control.
Profile Image for Atila Iamarino.
411 reviews4,425 followers
November 11, 2016
Ótimas ideias sobre como muitos sistemas, incluindo política, economia, cidades e outros, podem surgir espontaneamente e tem todos os traços de um fenômeno evolutivo. Dá uma boa noção realista sobre como muito do que a humanidade é hoje é mais fruto de acaso e seleção do que indivíduos abençoados (de criadores a líderes políticos). Reflete bem um amarrado das ideias dos últimos livros do Matt Ridley: emergência de evolução do The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, surgimento de ideias e invenções do The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves e genes vs. criação do Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human.

Mas, e é um grande mas, mantenha longe de anarco-captalistas ou eles poderão se intoxicar. O livro me marcou muito pela defesa de menos regulação e mais competição capitalista em toda e qualquer frente, saúde, educação, meio ambiente, pesquisa ou o que quiser. A mão do mercado, digo, a seleção natural e a evolução podem cuidar de tudo. Só não discute se o que é bom para o mercado é bom para pessoas. Aqui vale o disclaimer do Otimista Racional: o Matt Ridley é o Quinto Visconte Ridley e Barão de Wensleydale, chairman de banco, político do Partido Conservativo inglês, dono de ações em empresas de carvão e por aí vai. Ou seja, não é a pessoa mais livre de conflitos de interesse. Tenha isso em mente quando ler.

[update] Quanto mais penso neste livro, mais discordo do que Ridley escreve aqui. Ele entende de evolução e conhece perfeitamente bem o prejuízo mútuo quando aparecem trapaceiros em uma dinâmica, ou quando a competição evolutiva (dinâmica da Rainha Vermelha ou The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, nome de um livro que ele escreveu sobre o fenômeno) faz com que todos participantes saiam prejudicados. Mas ele ignora completamente estes pontos no livro e solta o clássico "mercado cuida de tudo". Além de culpar uma série de problemas como a bolha econômica americana no excesso de regulação, não na falta de, ignorando o vizinho Canadá, com um mercado mais regulado e nem de longe afetado como os EUA. Enfim, quanto mais penso sobre o livro, mais me convenço de que ele convenientemente ignorou uma série de fatos bem conhecidos para fazer um argumento forçado. Curiosamente, o disclaimer de conflito de interesses que ele coloca no livro anterior não aparece nesse (na cópia que ouvi).
Profile Image for Viktor Stoyanov.
Author 1 book181 followers
May 16, 2022
"Не можеш да спреш гората да се разлисти"

е побългарената версия на квинтесенцията в тази книга за еволюцията като такава - нейната природа, разбиране и ползи. Да, най-вече ползи. Мат Ридли се признава за върл Лукрецианец (Лукреций - древноримски поет и философ, живял във века преди раждането на Христос). Това, няма лошо. "De rerum natura" е действително изпреварила времето си творба, особено като се има предвид, че най-вероятно предава много от философията на още по-древния Епикур. Всяка от главите на "Еволюция на всичко" започва с цитат от "De rerum natura" и ако не друго - то със сигурност ме мотивира да изнамеря пълния текст на Лукреций за домашна употреба (четене с размишления и съзерцаване).

Сега, за Ридли. Това е авторът, който съм чел най-много да опонира на всякаква форма на регулация (визирайки най-вече държавна). Такава беше книгата му за иновациите, такава е и тази. Това не ставаше ясно от самото начало, защото в него се разглеждаха как са се променяли някои философски едеи от древността - почти до съвремието. Това беше твърде приятна за мен част и си казах, че тази му книга ще ми достави много повече удоволствие от гореспоменатия първи опит. Всичко твърде приятно обаче приключи някъде след Дарвин.

Втората част на книгата се занимава ексклузивно с това как всичко ще е "саморасло", така да се каже, под някаква частна инициатива, е добро и всичко що е спуснато отгоре (регулация) е лошо. Това е широко застъпена теза сред западните автори и не е изненада. Изненадата ми беше по-скоро в намесата на едва ли не злободневни теми от последните 20 г. в една книга за "еволюция". Да, "на всичко", но преди да се стигне до финансовата криза и др. от сорта, не би ли следвало да се мине през по-важни теми? Може би само мое криво очакване.

Накратко - първата половина ми хареса повече от втората половина на книгата, която се занимаваше със съвремието.

За великата му анти-регулаторна идея, че всичко трябва да се остави на самотек. Бих му припомнил само, че дори и спазвайки принципите на изложената от него философия, държавите също са се сформирали по някаква еволюционна нужда и ако такава нямаше, досега да са се разпаднали. Може и това да стане, но ролята, която са изиграли в историята не може се отрече като нещо изкуствено привнесено на фона на всичко друго, което било естествено еволюирало. По тази логика, всесилната еволюция нямаше да допусне някакви си хора и организации да се правят на регулатори напреко естествения ход на нещата. Светът не е разделен на черно и бяло, креационизъм и еволюционизъм. Много прости обяснения на много сложни въпроси прочетох тук. Може и за някои да им паснат тези обяснения на автора, мен - само частично. Много малка част.
Светът е цветен, стига да имаш очи да го видиш във всичките му нюанси.
Profile Image for Matt Gough.
93 reviews1 follower
November 9, 2015
Matt Ridley has an interesting theory here, and there are a few parts of the book that really shine. For instance, his chapters on the emergence of life, genes, culture, and technology are well-supported by his research, and with those subjects he makes a compelling argument for bottom-up evolution. However, I thought the theory felt forced with the other subjects he chose to focus on, especially education, population, and the economy. When writing about these topics in particular, Ridley seemed to be guilty of confirmation bias, really only looking at the evidence that supported his theory and paying no heed to contradictory evidence. Particularly in those chapters, Ridley's conservative political beliefs were too apparent, which ultimately hurt his argument. Overall, an interesting premise that I thought was stretched a little too thin.
Profile Image for Miloš Kostić.
40 reviews50 followers
October 31, 2019
Vredna je vremena. Ima neke ozbiljne nedostatke ali je svakako zanimljiva. On veruje da sve u prirodi i kulturi evoluira. I to pokazuje u raznim oblastima, od svemira i biologije, morala, religije, tehnologije, obrazovanja, ekonomije do interneta. U suštini, njegova teza je da ako se stvari planiraju ispašće loše a ako se pusti da se razvijaju svojim tempom sve će ispasti bajno. U tome pravi logičku grešku da samo dobre stvari evoluiraju a sve što ispadne loše je planirano odozgo. Zar ne evoluiraju i loše stvari?

Iako polazi od prirodnih nauka, mislim da je koren njegove teze u ekonomiji, i to u najslobodnijem od svih slobodnih tržišta - tzv. laissez-faire kapitalizmu. U tome me nije ubedio, jer verovatno stojim politički na suprotnoj strani od njega. Odatle idu i svi njegovi ostali stavovi, pa tako ide u ekstreme u raznim poljima, kao npr. što tvrdi da teorija o globalnom zatopljavanju verovatno nije ispravna jer, pobogu, ništa ne može samo po sebi da bude uzrok bilo čega, pa tako ni ugljen-dioksid ne može biti razlog za klimatske promene. Glavni problem ove knjige je što bira dokaze koji potvrđuju njegov stav a sve ostalo zanemaruje, to je baš uočljivo. U tom smislu, dokazi su mu često anegdotalni, pokupljeni tu i tamo. Znači, nije toliko sistematična knjiga. Ako se pod sistemom ne smatra slobodno tržište iz koga izvlači sve. Ali ima puno zanimljivih stvari, baš puno, tako da se može smatrati da je većina knjige dosta dobra. Neke od stvari koje su mi se najviše dopale su poglavlja o obrazovanju, gde daje primere gde neplanirano obrazovanje daje odlične rezultate, i poglavlje o novcu gde ima zanimljivih istorijskih crtica o nastanku neplaniranog novca koje odlično funkcioniše. Dakle, dobra je knjiga, zabavna za čitanje, sa ovim manama koje sam ovde naveo.
846 reviews36 followers
May 25, 2016
I was on page 10 when I first got the feeling that author Matt Ridley might be completely full of shit. And he never gave me any reason to go back on that impression. I plowed through the book anyway, because I'm into completing things, but can't say I liked it.

The part on page 10 that first set off my BS detector: Ridley writes about his discovery of Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius, Ridley fumes at his schoolmasters, "How could they have made me waste all those years at school plodding through the tedious platitudes and pedestrian prose of Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar, when they could have been telling me about Lucretius . . . . Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did."

Well now, I could day several things about that. Some are ticky-tack things (both the Bible and Caesar actually are well-regarded as literature). But more importantly, does this strike anyone as overstating things by a lot? Not only is Lucretius important to him, but he could/should've made a huge difference to world society -- he even feels the need to throw in a SURELY to describe the obviousness of ... what's just his opinion. Also, this came right after Ridley went over the history of Lucretius - he'd been redisocovered in 1417. Does Ridley really thing the theory of evolution would've broken out in 1143 or something? Theories and ideas are nice, but the real problem was that Rome fell, taken over by semi-barbarian tribes that couldn't keep much in the way of civilization going. Things broke down and fell apart into internal warfare, trade suffered - and literacy fell was nearly completely lost. I mean, if we still have this guy's poems, that's all happening anyway. Finally, that leads to a final problem with the above quote: Christian suppression? His real problem was that civilization collapsed. Sure, churches didn't do much copying of his works, but -1) they focused more on copying church documents, which yeah - they were a church, and 2) they copied his poems down, too - which is how they survived. (Oh, and in a final bit of irony, later on in the book Ridley attacks the Great Man Theory of history -- but Lucretius by himself could've jumpstarted modern science by centuries. Surely).

Look, I just spent far too much time on that little piece. It's what first set off my BS detector, but more importantly is why the BS detector kept going off.

One major issue is the too broad definition he gives to evolution. It starts off fine, as he discusses actual evolution in the early chapters - Darwin's theory, and DNA, and the like. He then starts to make a series of analogies later on when discussing modern issues, like economics. There is some similarity there (but I'll get to my problems with that in a second). But later he keeps going on to anything that's change. For example, a chapter on education contains a detailed critique of current education systems. OK, fair enough. But how is that evolution? He wants several changes made, and concludes the chapter by stating, "Let education evolve." OK, so he's calling for specific, deliberate changes to be made with a clear end result in mind...... And that's evolution? As this book notes, evolution isn't steps made toward a clear, deliberate goal. They are just gradual changes over time acting spontaneously. But he's pushing an agenda here, and hiding behind the theory of evolution to push for specific steps to make.

And, frankly, even when analogies work better (such as when he talks about Adam Smith), there are still problems. For one, there is a clear sense pervading this book that evolution is good. That the change it brings in progress. Folks, evolution isn't about progression or regression. It's just change. To whit: the overwhelming majority of species that have evolved have gone extinct - including a huge number of ones that thrived for long times.

But there is an even bigger, deeper issue here. It doesn't make much sense at all for evolution to be used as an analogy for modern day social, political, and economic issues - not nearly to extent that Ridley does.

Evolution: it works incredibly gradually. There is no intent and thought in mind. It's just gradual changes and mutations that take place over centuries and millenniums that cause animals to change, stay the same, or cease to exist. It takes hundreds of generations for even the mildest of changes to become readily apparent. And as a result of the fact it takes hundreds or thousands of generations to result in gradual changes within a species ... we should start using Bitcoin. Wait - what? The theory of evolution means that environmentalism is an authoritian example of liberal fascism. Or we should enroll students in MOOCs. I mean - huh?

There is a spector haunting this book - that of Social Darwinism. That was a 19th century movement that, like Ridley, wanted to use the principles of evolution to reorder society. In their minds, evolution could be used to justify laissez faire economics, imperialism and racism. It's all about survival of the fittest, don't you know. Ridley is NOT advocating racism or imperialism. But you could just as easily use evolution to justify those policies as the one Ridley likes. In both cases, you have to overlook how a theory of biological/genetic changes that take centuries to play out really don't relate too well to modern social issues. Ridley barely mentions Social Darwinism at all. He mostly seems to oppose it because the agenda it pushes is more state-centric, where Ridley is fully in the libertarian camp.

There is also some irony at work at the edges of this book. He denigrates religious beliefs, stating that all movements based on faith have a centrality of a single "skyhook" - by which he means a central single, perfect answer that explains all. He even includes Marxism as one example of a faith that suffers from this flaw. He has a point there - but seems completely blind to that this same argument can be used against him. Christians can look to the Bible for their One True Faith. Marxists can look to Das Capital. And Ridley has his libertarian brand of social Darwinism. It's the One Truth Faith that is never wrong and can explain all things.

Some parts make good points - like when he discusses the vacancy of the Great Man theory of history. Also, the book by Tom Holland on early Islam he mentions is really good. But far too often Ridley makes a serious of bad analogies, overstates his case, hand-waives away any info that goes against his One True Faith, and, well - is basically full of shit.
Profile Image for Alan Cook.
Author 41 books70 followers
May 27, 2016
I have given a lot of books 5-star ratings, but this book stands out among them. I won't say it solves all the world's problems, but it certainly points to a lot of things that could be done better, which would improve the freedom and well being of the human race. The premise is that just about everything changes (and improves) by evolution in a bottom-up manner, rather than top-down by the action of somebody on high (such as God, the president, or anybody with power), including the universe, living things, morality and technology. Of course, most politicians, priests and CEOs will disagree with this, but the evidence and examples are too good to ignore. I was particularly impressed with the discussion of changes in technology, including the Internet (which Al Gore didn't invent, by the way), because it reminded me of complex computer systems worked on by my wife, Bonny, at Xerox (see Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling, Traveling the World, and Other Adventures, by Bonny Robinson Cook) that involved teams of people from different departments creating new technology using a trial-and-error approach. The book will have you questioning the "standard" approach to doing everything. For example, the standard method of teaching is to have an authority figure in front of a roomful of captive students pounding into their heads what she wants them to know. When you learn that this system was developed by the Prussians in the 19th century in order to mentally prepare boys to become soldiers and die for their country you might have second thoughts about it. New approaches to education are evolving all the time. It used to be that you had to take a typing class taught by a teacher in order to learn how to type, but now every teenager can type information into a computer at blinding speed without ever having had a typing lesson. Top-down approaches of governments to problems like welfare, drugs, climate change and infrastructure are expensive, cumbersome, and often complete failures. It is said that skeptics about commonly accepted problems and their solutions are subversive and should be shut up (never mind the First Amendment to the Constitution). Count me as a skeptic.
Profile Image for Book Shark.
769 reviews145 followers
April 30, 2019
The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

“The Evolution of Everything" is a book on social Darwinism and it’s wide reaching effect from a libertarian perspective. It’s highly readable and provocative but misses the mark on two very important topics: climate change and the 2008 financial crisis. Well known journalist, scientist and educator; Matt Ridley, makes the persuasive case that evolution explains virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion. This stimulating 368-page book includes the following sixteen chapters covering the evolution of: 1. Universe, 2. Morality, 3. Life, 4. Genes, 5. Culture, 6. Economy, 7. Technology, 8. Mind, 9. Personality, 10. Education, 11. Population, 12. Leadership, 13. Government, 14. Religion, 15. Money, and 16. Internet.

Positives:
1. A highly readable, optimistic and provocative book.
2. An excellent topic, evolution is happening all around us.
3. Ridley is a gifted author; he pulls ideas from multiple disciplines and is able to persuade the reader that successful ideas emerge more so than planned for.
4. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things) and covers a specific topic and subtopics. The books lends itself quite well to be used as a future reference.
5. Does a good job of introducing Lucretius and his influence on major thinkers. “Voltaire’s contempt for theodicy derived directly and explicitly from Lucretius, whose arguments he borrowed throughout life, styling himself at one point the ‘latter-day Lucretius’.”
6. An interesting chapter on morality. “Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.” “Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.”
7. The foundation of Darwin’s grand idea of evolution. “That is the essence of Darwin’s idea: that beautiful and intricate organisms can be made without anybody knowing how to make them.” “The more we understand genomics, the more it confirms evolution.”
8. A very persuasive look at how language emerged. “Languages mutate, diversify, evolve by descent with modification and merge in a ballet of unplanned beauty. Yet the end result is structure, and rules of grammar and syntax as rigid and formal as you could want. ‘The formation of different languages, and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel,’ wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man.”
9. Ridley is a great defender of the free-market enterprise. “The central feature of commerce, and the thing that distinguishes it from socialist planning, is that it is decentralized.” “The Smithian economy is a process of exchange and specialization among ordinary people. It is an emergent phenomenon.”
10. Interesting look at technology and science. “Again and again, once you examine the history of innovation, you find scientific breakthroughs as the effect, not the cause, of technological change.” “Technology comes from technology far more often than from science.”
11. Solid chapter on the mind. “The self is a consequence, not a cause, of thought. To think otherwise is to posit a miraculous incarnation of an immaterial spirit.” “The study of the brain has found no pearl, no organ or structure that houses the self or consciousness or the will. It never will, for these phenomena are distributed among the neurons in the same way that the plan for how to make a pencil is distributed among the many contributors to a market economy.” “We are nothing but the neural signals of our brain, multiply caused by the multiple influences upon us.”
12. An interesting look at personality. “Instead, the truth is that personality unfolds from within, responding to the environment – so in a very literal sense of the word, it evolves.”
13. A very key founding disclosed on sexual innateness. “Never was the consternation of the establishment more acute than in the 1990s, when it became clear that homosexuality was much more innate and irreversible than people had been assuming, and much less a matter of early life experience or adolescent indoctrination.”
14. A fascinating look at violence. “They argued that the cultural-determinist explanations did not fit the facts, and that it was far more likely that men were more violent for similar reasons that other male mammals were more violent – because they had in the past been forced by biology to compete for mating opportunities.”
15. Explains how we learn. “We learn by reading, by watching, by emulating, by doing.” “The lesson that schooling can be encouraged to emerge from below was ignored in favor of the theory that it must be imposed from above.”
16. Debunks myths on how to slow down populations. “The way to get population growth to slow, it turns out, is to keep babies alive, to bring health, prosperity and education to all.” “Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilization programme was wrong; China’s one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy – the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race – was wrong pragmatically as well as morally. The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course contraception, for not only will that make them happier, it will enable them to have smaller families.”
17. A counterintuitive look at poverty. “The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.”
18. How religions evolve. “To anybody who has read the history of the ancient world, it is crystal clear by contrast that, in the words of the title of Selina O’Grady’s book on the subject, Man Created God. God is plainly an invention of the human imagination, whether in the form of Jahweh, Christ, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus or Anygod else.” “My argument will be that this phenomenon can only be explained as an instance of cultural evolution: that all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top–down feature of human culture is actually a bottom–up, emergent phenomenon.” “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 mind to mind, a natural example of cultural evolution.”
19. The emergence of money. “Money is an evolutionary phenomenon. It emerged gradually among traders, rather than being created by rulers – despite the heads of kings on the coins: those just illustrated the tendency of the powerful to insist on monopolies.”
20. The evolution of the internet. “Few can doubt that the internet is a force for liberty of the individual.”
Negatives:
1. No direct links to sources.
2. Libertarian perspective that can rub some folks the wrong way. In his defense, I generally found Ridley to be fair. My personal progressive views at times conflicted with Ridley’s but I’m open to an intelligently written book which this is.
3. My biggest disagreement with Ridley is his lack of concern for climate change to put it mildly. His point is that climate change supporters are acquiring religious overtones against deniers. The truth is that Mr. Ridley is underselling the overwhelming global scientific consensus for climate change. We can disagree on the approach to address this real problem but we can’t deny the scientific facts.
4. I disagree with his characterization of the 2008 financial crash. Ridley defends the free-market enterprise at the expense of the facts. No mention of predatory lending, abuse of the banking industry, golden parachutes, lobbying to benefit the powerful, and the fact that you can help those with lesser incomes to purchase affordable homes without compromising the entire economy. In fact a lot of the financial crisis can be attributed to emerging cancer cells of greed that manipulated the market to their benefit at the expense of society. In short, banks privatized the earnings and socialized the losses.
5. The chapter on money may be above the heads of most laypersons.
6. Underestimates the power of government to fund projects that are too high risk for private industry.

In summary, a very stimulating and interesting book to read. I debated myself whether to give three or four stars to this book and concluded that despite my vehement disagreement on climate change and the financial crisis of 2008 that the book is stimulating and well written enough to justify four stars. In general, I agree with the premise that ideas emerged or evolved than planned for from the top down. Despite my aforementioned strong disagreements worthy of four stars. I recommend it!

Further recommendations: If you like books with a libertarian bent you will enjoy anything from John Stossel “No, They Can’t”, “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity” and “Give Me A Break”, “The Rational Optimist” and “The Red Queen” by Matt Ridley, “The Vital Question” by Nick Lane, “The Swerve” by Stephen Greenblatt, “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation” by Bill Nye “The Greatest Shown On Earth” by Richard Dawkins.
Profile Image for Otto Lehto.
453 reviews171 followers
February 19, 2020
Starts off strong but devolves halfway into an unfocused diatribe. A more generous judgment is that the book is an ideological polemic with some scientific pretensions. Ridley starts from the intriguing premise (to which I am very sympathetic) that bottom-up processes of "self-organisation", from Charles Darwin's natural selection to Adam Smith's invisible hand, explain much of cosmic, biological, human, and socioeconomic evolution. In order to elucidate this claim, Ridley takes on the ambitious task of explaining how evolution applies in a dozen different domains of life, from the rise of the internet to moral progress and the schooling of the poor. At its best, it makes a compelling (although biased) case that people need to abandon their love affair with the all powerful government and embrace evolutionary, bottom-up thinking in economics.

The book is ambitious but this is not the problem. The first problem is a lack of focus and order. Since EVERYTHING evolves under a suitably broad definition, Ridley uses this as a license to talk about everything on his mind with the thinnest possible common thread. The second problem is the excessive ideological slant. Instead of developing the central thesis by weighing the pros and cons of various positions, he goes on a shotgun rampage that aims to undermine all the ramparts of the "central planning" school. In so doing, he happily glosses over the nuances in the scientific debate by cherry picking studies and perspectives that support his libertarian thesis.

Even though his arguments on various policy issues are often good (or at least debatable), he mostly doubles down on the idea that "oh, human learning / technological development / moral evolution / [insert X] is a bottom-up process so let me talk about it in libertarian terms." These discussions don't differ much from hundreds of other books. "Oh, market is an evolutionary process? Let me tell you about markets in X, Y, and Z..." These loosely connected diatribes on markets, biology, genes, cosmology, human civilization, schooling, foreign aid, global warming, and the internet contain some nuggets of insight and wisdom - especially for people who are new to them - but most of them are rather generic and, dare I say, libertarian talking pointy. This mostly results in vague insights about everything but precise insights about nothing.

A typical example of this lack of nuance is his discussion of the origin of internet. There, he dismisses the role of government funding with some hand waving. This is a lopsided position, to say the least. Another example is his discussion on global warming: he presents a heterodox position without bothering with a serious engagement with the consensus view (and what does this have to do with Lucretius and Darwin anyway?). Even where he makes some good points, he overplays his hand by claiming too much on too little evidence. Instead of highlighting the need to think critically about the powers of top down organisation, he ends up advocating for the highly implausible thesis that top down programs can never guide evolution or solve its problems.

As a further example of his methodological double standards, Ridley ends up claiming that Mao's Cultural Revolution was a CLEAR example of a top down program but Deng Xiaoping's market reforms were a CLEAR example of a bottom-up process. Both arguments are false. Ridley forgets to mention that Mao's Cultural Revolution - as well as various other cases of human warfare, violence, socialist agitation, and mass starvation - had aspects of bottom-up organization to them. (They were used, for example, by local peasants to vent grievances and to settle disputes.) And plenty of liberal reforms - including privatization, marketization, rule of law, etc. - have aspects of top-down central planning (or what Ridley calls "creationism") to them. (They were facilitated by a few key personnel at the top of the Chinese government hierarchy.) My point with these examples is NOT to reverse his arguments on their head but to show how easy it is to reinterpret data.

I have perhaps been a little harsh. I like much of the book. It synthesizes lots of interesting research. At its best, the prose is thrilling and entertaining. However, it does not quite deliver on its promise. It's not that the material in the book is implausible or wrong, it's just too biased and unfocused. The author paints the whole world in a single colour and revels in its monochromy. As it is, it only gets a modest recommendation. It delivers exceptional ideas in a middling package.
354 reviews149 followers
November 28, 2018
This was a very informative book. It is interesting to find out how new ideas are formed when they are most needed.
I recommend this book to all.
Enjoy and
Be Blessed.
Profile Image for Raghu.
407 reviews77 followers
November 26, 2015
Charles Darwin stated in his theory of biological evolution that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. This happens through a process of trial and error whereby beneficial variations are favored and injurious ones discarded. Author Ridley calls this the 'Special theory of Evolution' and goes on to extend it to a General theory of Evolution by applying it to a broad spectrum of human endeavour such as Religion, Morality, Economy, Technology, Culture, Money and so on. His argument is that all these and other aspects of our culture also change all the time but change very gradually and in a bottom-up manner without really being guided or directed, just like the species do. Just as evolution produces more and more sophisticated species albeit without a conscious goal or master plan, so do these aspects of human culture in an ostensibly progressive way on their own. This is the essence of the book and to substantiate the idea, Ridley discusses over sixteen chapters, the autonomous evolution of the following categories: Morality, Life, Genes, Culture, Economy, Technology, Mind, Personality, Education, Population, Leadership, Government, Religion, Money and the Internet. It is an expansive effort but it failed to convince me with its arguments.

Of all the arguments, I found that I was in agreement only with the ones on the evolution of Genes and Technology. His contention that Technology has its own inherent advance and is independent of great inventors is borne by good evidence. In the same way, 'the genome has no master gene and the human brain has no centralized command node' is also well argued. However, one can advance counter-arguments to many of the other contentions in the book on Society, Population, Government, Economy, Education etc. I shall just touch on a couple of issues as a sample.

Evolution works through trial and error. Ridley does not touch upon the consequences of such an approach when people in society are the ones being experimented upon by evolution. If Society, economy and education are subjected to such bottom-up growth, some of the errors can have disastrous fall-outs for the economy or the people. Surely, no one including the author, would want to suffer these consequences if they can be avoided through top-down planning. Evolution works at its own pace. For example, Dr.Joseph Stiglitz says that the real minimum wage of the US worker has remained stagnant for 45 years now. Globalization was said to trickle down its benefits but, the minimum wage has not seen upward mobility. So, would a minimum wage earner wait for evolution to work its magic or would he prefer active state intervention or protest movements to change his condition?

Author Ridley cites the evolution of cities very approvingly as support for his theory. I wonder if he has ever lived in Indian cities like Mumbai for a prolonged period. Cities in India have mostly 'evolved' bottom-up, without any master plan or ultimate goal. What we have as a result, is mostly chaos. The buses and trains often are at odds with each other by way of service. Population grows in these cities without sufficient supply of water or electricity for its residents. There is hardly enough housing and sanitation. Though some of these aspects are due to poverty, Indian cities are often good examples of un-directed, bottom-up evolution. In contrast, Ridley's own city of London shows great top-down planning of its transport system in integrating its buses, underground trains and boats in a way that complement one another. All those beautiful green spaces that Londoners enjoy, like Green Park, Hyde Park, St.James Park and Kew Gardens came about by top-down planning and not autonomously.

The book really has a go at Governments. Ridley's thesis is that protection rackets are the ones which eventually became top-down governments. He says that government policy planners underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one. History tells us that governments in Western countries never looked at things like employment, welfare, environment etc as part of their job prior to the end of the Second world war. In fact, as recently as the late 19th century, the only affluent sections of Western societies were the clergy and the aristocrats with 80% of the population being considered working class and not middle class. It is only active state intervention to institute the welfare state, organize employment for the citizens and provide substantial safeguards against many of the ills that afflicted society, that has resulted in the pervasive prosperity across all classes that we see today in the West.

The book is as much about Evolution as it is about politics and ideology. Ridley seems libertarian in outlook and possibly also right-wing, even though he denies it in the book. Consequently, in every chapter, we have him lauding unplanned, bottom-up endeavours without government involvement in the manner of far-right Republicans and railing against totalitarianism and planned human endeavours. Unfortunately, Western societies are all about Security and Control and predictability about the future. The Western way of life is not about leaving things to chance but all about gaining control over the unknowns. With such a philosophy, a top-down, planned approach to life is the automatic consequence. For every one of the sixteen categories that the author analyses, it is probably equally possible to show that we are where we are because of top-down planning and directed growth.

The book is good to read for the extensive effort that has been put into it, but in the end, one cannot escape the conclusion that Ridley's General theory of Evolution is not anywhere near the Special theory in its logic or water-tight evidence.
Profile Image for Andrew Carr.
478 reviews103 followers
January 1, 2016
Evolution has always been a subversive idea. Order from chaos, progress without direction, design without a designer. But are humans the last word in natural evolution, or do their societies represent the evolution of evolution; from the biological to the ideational, cultural, and technological?

This is the argument at the heart of The Evolution of Everything by the science writer Matt Ridley. Not only has life and the universe evolved, so do humans over time. These same basic laws of bottom up, spontaneous order are to be found — and celebrated — everywhere. The book argues that what both explains the human world, as well as creates the best of it, is evolutionary. What is bad or harmful, is attributed to command and control attempts, from creationism to communism.

The book works through 16 chapters, each ostensibly focused on a topic such as Morality, Technology, Education, Population, Religion, Genes and so on. Each chapter is packed with different ideas and arguments, bounding around the topic in an always entertaining fashion. The first part of the book which tends to focus more on science or broad social dynamics (morality, culture etc) is especially engaging.

In one fascinating section, Ridley presents a view of humans as sites of ongoing evolutionary competition, as their genes, impulses, histories and circumstances dramatically shape their behaviour. So much for free will it seems, at least in its populist sense. He also rightly challenges the idea of ‘great men’ of history, whether pointing out that many, many ideas are developed simultaneously around the world, while many celebrated world leaders often simply got out of the way of big changes, rather than being the cause of them.

At the half way mark, I was starting to recommend this book to my friends. The compelling idea within is that if you accept evolution in nature, you should encourage it in civilisation. Focus on open, competitive systems. Look to social norms rather than coercion, and have confidence in innovation and creativity as natural byproducts of humans left to live their own lives as they choose. An unrestrained society is a more moral, prosperous and interesting place.

The problem is that as the book moves evermore from science to social science, this thread goes missing. Or rather, Ridley switches from arguing for a pro-evolution explanation, to arguing against management and direction. While these notions are opposed, they are not exclusive. But this distinction often seems lost, and with it an analysis of the role of evolution in human practice. So instead of offering an easily told but important tale of how governance has changed, been tested, failed, adapted and improved over time (and thus perhaps why we should seek further innovation), we get a somewhat banal attack on government as resistant to change, unable to provide services and generally inclined to authoritarianism.

As Ridley gets out of his comfort zone of scientific issues, the chapters get clearly weaker. Topics bounce around far more, assumptions are less clearly identified and debates and opposing views more quickly dismissed. In one notable case on page 238 the author jumps uses a study of the evolution of social norms in prison to state that “in other words, government begins as a protection racket”. Quite how this study proves this, I never could understand. Worse, we have significant evidence for how government and states have formed, none of which Ridley seems to have engaged (See Fukuyama’s latest 2 volume on Origins of Political Order tome at the very least). Instead Ridley seems to dismiss all government as simply a form of domination forced upon us at the expense of our development and wellbeing.

The Evolution of Everything also seems remarkably unwilling to confront exactly what evolution is or means. We get virtually no discussion of the way it transmits or operates outside of biological environments. And little mention, beyond the noble failures of entrepreneurs of the costs of evolutionary change. Instead, when the development of ideas about human eugenics and survival of the fittest is raised, it is done so to lay the entire blame at the feet of those who believe in government and command and control. Certainly in the application of these abuses government mattered, but it is ridiculous to ignore the logic which motivated these movements. Confusingly Ridley also spends time condemning the British willingness to ignore the potato famine in Ireland even though the ‘we shouldn’t interfere, let god sort it out’ logic was directly shaped by competitive, anti-statist notions.

It’s not that we can’t embrace an evolutionary approach because of these downsides, but rather that an honest and ultimately more persuasive analysis of these ideas would confront, accept and discuss remedies head on. Ridley like many libertarians is quick to say he wants government and social aid, while spending most of his time saying how terrible it is and never drawing clear lines for how to do it with the least harm.

Ultimately, I agree with most of this book. At its best it speaks of a philosophy that operates with human nature rather than against. One that celebrates human flourishing and works to remove any barriers and impediments that stand in its way. But too much of this book puts aside discussing the way evolution operates, and instead tries to attack what the author sees as some of the main barriers to it. All are well-known, and the book lands few if any telling blows against them.

That makes it a frustrating read. I enjoyed it, I am glad I read it. I just wish it fulfilled its promise more effectively so I could recommend it more widely. Ridley is not the first to apply evolutionary ideas to human society, so in the spirit of this book, I hope that maybe those who come after will be more adapted to the task than he was.
Profile Image for Цветозар Бонев.
282 reviews82 followers
February 19, 2018
Опростенчество в книжна форма. Пълна загуба на време.

Не мисля да споря с всичко, което тази книга твърди, от една страна, защото повечето пропуснах и, от друга страна, защото всичко се свежда до една и съща фундаментална грешка. Грешката на опростяването на сложни неща, като, примерно, буквално цялото човешко съществуване. Мат Ридли застава гордо пред читателя и започва или да казва истини, които са невероятно очевидни (като фактът, че хората подобряват неща, които са лоши) или "истини", които са "очевидни" (като фактът, че климатът няма "кранче"). Едно интересно и гениално твърдение на Ридли е, че градовете "почти никога не умират", което, нали, сериозно ли? Троя още седи на брега на Мала Азия и Ангкор Ват все още е най-големият град в света, разбираемо. Но пък повечето твърдения на Ридли карат читателя да си каже "тоя сериозно ли?", затова не е никаква изненада, че толкова много си вярва.

Идеята, че всичко еволюира е леко безсмислена, главно защото може да се опрости до "всичко се променя", което, комбинирано с факта, че хората използват инструменти и мислят за бъдещето (нещо, което гените и мутациите не могат), лесно позволява всичко добро да се сведе до "Ам то еволюирало, бре!". Културата еволюирала, науката еволюирала, религията еволюирала (и помнете деца, религията е лоша, но повече за това по-късно), моралът е еволюирал (тук ако вече не схващате на къде бия няма и да схванете). Преди да премина към главния си проблем с мислите на Ридли ще спомена само, че Мат Ридли, поради идеологията си, смята, че не трябва да се хвалят индивиди, които преодоляват лошите обстоятелства на живота си (все пак свободна воля нямаме, както Ридли споменава, че Харис смята [тук си споменавам, че рецензията ми на есетата на Харис от 2016 г. не са верни спрямо сегашните ми възгледи]). Според Ридли не трябва да се хвалят и учените, защото изобретенията са щели да еволюират и без това. Нали, ако трябва да се придържа стриктно към идеологията (не науката, защото повечето теми в тази книга са идеологични) аз като българин трябва да почна да пренебрегвам саможертвите на революционерите, защото магическата еволюция на Мат Ридли щеше да създаде един Левски, дори ако Левски го нямаше. Този детерминизъм е глупав и ненужен.

Та, главният ми проблем с тази книга е и главният ми проблем с новия атеизъм (тук трябва да спомена, че аз лично също не съм религиозен човек, вярвам в теорията на Дарвин за произхода на човека, но си имам граници спрямо някои атеистични "факти"). Мат Ридли е от онези атеисти, които биха използвали алегорията "Ако атеизмът е религия, то спреният телевизор е канал.", въпреки че неговият тип атеизъм е точно религиозен по природа, защото Мат Ридли просто изхвърля Християнството през прозореца на човечеството като суеверност и мит (въпреки че митовете са едни от най-важните аспекти на човечеството). /rant start warning/ Самият факт, че Мат Ридли може да отрече всичко от Християнството и да гледа своя спрян телевизор, не взима предвид факта, че този телевизор, представляващ цивилизацията в тази моя невероятно интелигента алегория, е построен от същите хора, които пускат религиозните "канали". Мат Ридли с пълна сериозност твърди, че моралът и законите на западната цивилизация са продукт на универсална игра на зарове, а не са построени върху същата митологическа скала, върху която Християнството е основано. Еволюцията не може да е обективна, при това условие как по дяволите може тя да е отговорна за моралът? Не може да се докаже, че неморалното обективно е грешно, но знаем, че е, защото не космически зарчета, а човешката психика и нейната склонност към митовете за богове не е просто случайност, а дори да е не променя факта, че съществува в този свой мит. Няма смисъл да се спори дали Иисус е бил истински, важен е архетипът, важен е митът, който позволява на съвременното човечество да бъде моралната цивилизация, която е, като му подражава. Но това е немислимо за един особен тип атеист, защото религията някак си е абсолютно зло, защото някак си западната култура не е християнска по природа, защото някак си едни от най-видните учени не са били вярващи или някак си Църквата не е запазила писмеността жива през вековете. Ридли споменава, че Иисус е базиран на други по-ранни митове, това е вярно, но не превръща архетипът в нещо, което можем просто да зачеркнем като "измишльотина". Измишльотините на човешката психика не са никак случайни и Ридли би осъзнал това, ако можеше да погледне по-далеч от самодоволния си атеистичен нос, който започва да ме кара да се срамувам, че генерално бих се вписал в неговата група. Да кажеш, че всичко в Библията не е вярно, не те прави интелектуалец, но да кажеш, че Библията не е един от корените на западната цивилизация те прави малоумник. /rant over/

Напълно абсурдно е също как Мат Ридли набеждава християните, че са потискали поемите на неговия любимец Лукреций (което ако не беше станало, щяхме да летим из космоса или нещо подобно, повярвайте ми, атеист съм, знам ги тез работи), при условие, че ако не бяха християнските монаси тези поеми нямаше да се запазят във времето. Християнството позволява да се изкове меча на рационалността, който в съвремието идиоти използват, за да го убият, без да осъзнаят иронията на действията си…

Идеята, че митовете са просто измишльотини и всички религии са потиснически структури е не само малоумна, но и опасна. Това абсолютно отричане на всички религии като ненужни си �� религиозно и този circlejerk, който се получава в тази сфера на нови атеисти вече е на ръба на отврата. След няколко дни това "бижу" ще излезе на български и най-вероятно ще е доста надценено (въпреки че и безплатна тази книга би била прекалено скъпа), но пък това вече го знаете, все пак всички в този сайт ще видим един патрон на тази книга.
Profile Image for David.
Author 26 books175 followers
January 31, 2016
Matt Ridley produces another libertarian classic, to match his earlier The Rational Optimist, with The Evolution of Everything.

Taking evolution out of the strictly biological and to the cultural, technological, political, and about every other arena of human endeavor.

What interests him particularly is exposing the creationism of the Left and government. By creationism is meant top down planning rather than a creator god. Mr. Ridley argues the case against planning and top down control in favor of a bottom up strategy...in other words, an evolutionary strategy in which an idea, concept, technology, etc. is released into a social environment or market and allowed to freely compete with other ideas in order to determine which is better suited to the environmental niche.

The idea of cultural evolution, Mr. Ridley's libertarian variety, is very compelling and fits in very well with his last book -- The Rational Optimist.

Rating 5 out of 5 stars

Recommended for those looking for an alternative to big government and an intrusive state. A must read for libertarians.
188 reviews3 followers
September 18, 2019
This book is a wildly biased, full-throated defense of neo-liberal capitalism. I only read about 2/3 of it before I simply couldn't stand it anymore. I have a PhD focusing on inequality and globalized economies, so I'm more familiar than most people are with the research associated with these topics.

At times, Matt Ridley's arguments are simply wrong. He cherry-picks data that supports his assertions and ignores the vast literature that disagrees with him. He's cites data that sounds impressive, and then you realize it's so narrowly focused (for example, economic data from 1990 to 1995 (not an exact quote)) as to be essentially meaningless.

At other times, he's simply illogical. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read something along these lines: "Aside from the internet, government-sponsored scientific research has done nothing to help our economy." (Not an exact quote.) Yes, aside from this giant elephant in the room, there are no elephants in the room.

At his best, he's simply presenting one side of a more complex debate. For example, actual economic research shows that economies do best with lots of unions, or with no unions, but economies suffer when there are a moderate number of unions. To no one's surprise, Ridley quotes the idea that unions are bad for economies, and conveniently ignores any data suggesting that lots of unions might help economies.

I think the thing that bothered me most about this book was the biased way he presents it all. The book is peppered with phrases like, "All right thinking people agree...." or "It is obvious that...." There's absolutely nothing wrong with presenting a free market liberal ideology. I do it all the time in my college classrooms. But I present it as, "Here's one side. Let's talk about it. And then we're going to talk about the other side." His approach is imperious, manipulative, and almost.... bullying, for lack of a better term.

As I was reading, I started playing a little game with myself. After each sentence, I tried to imagine how long it would take me to debunk what he wrote. Almost everything he writes is incorrect, but it would take an encyclopedia's-worth of words to debunk him. This isn't surprising. It almost always takes much more time to debunk a stupid idea, than it took to offer the stupid idea in the first place. I tried to imagine myself actually debunking this book piece by piece and realized I'm too busy for that. I'm not going to even try.

The world is not simple. Economics is not simple, even for PhDs. I can't find anything in his biography suggesting he has even an undergraduate degree in economics. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Don't fall for this book.
Profile Image for Jason Lockwood.
Author 4 books6 followers
January 7, 2016
Some people love Matt Ridley and some people hate him. Whatever your point of view, there's no mistaking that he gets people thinking and challenging assumptions. In his latest book, he gets us all reconsidering the notion that people and societies progress due to a top-down approach. Whether it's politicians who take (or are given) credit for economic progress or CEOs who are viewed as the only source of a company's success, Ridley provides ample evidence that neither are true.

What he presents--and I agree with his basic view if not all the particulars--is that life is evolution in every aspect. He does the unthinkable, too: he criticises both the political left and right, but for different reasons.

Some reviewers excoriate Ridley for being 'right-wing,' (a notion he mocks in the book), but what he really stands for is what writer Virginia Postrel called 'dynamism versus stasis.' He is equally scornful of government controlled and directed economies and religious control of people. This sets him apart from the warmed over left-right dichotomy so commonly put forth today.

Even when I disagree with Ridley, I find that it's a gentle disagreement, because he presents ideas in such a calm way that he comes off not as a polemical crank, but as an avuncular adviser. I highly recommend The Evolution of Everything to anyone who invites challenge to his thinking, even if the book is unkind to many cherished viewpoints.
Profile Image for Ed Erwin.
1,005 reviews118 followers
January 13, 2022
Pretty much everyone now agrees that top-down central planning of an economy doesn't work. Ridley here is claiming that top-down central planning of anything doesn't work and that the best systems evolve from the bottom up. He gives some good examples and gave me plenty to think about. However, especially in later chapters, it feels like he is cherry-picking examples to only support the idea that bottom-up is always better. Even some of his examples of things that evolved from the bottom don't always seem to me like good things. For example, the Sicilian mafia and prison gangs.

While evolved systems often produce good outcomes for some, the process of evolution is cruelly indifferent to individuals.

He has written an entire book on the nature vs. nurture debate. So I would expect him to know that the answer to the question "nature or nurture" is actually "both". I'm sure the same is true in the "top-down vs. bottom-up" question. There is a place for both.

Still, good food for thought and made me question some of my beliefs.
Profile Image for Dan Graser.
Author 4 books110 followers
May 2, 2016
I've enjoyed much of Matt Ridley's work (Genome, The Red Queen especially) and he is frequently an articulate and erudite champion of reason. In this work he sets out with a very ambitious premise and unfortunately never delivers even remotely what he introduces. The huge gulf between his extremely thorough scientific knowledge and his ridiculous over-simplification of the 2008 housing bubble, climate-science, and the evolution of money make this a very uneven read and one that I would not recommend. The notion that bottom-up innovation (evolution) is more prevalent and more likely to be successful in generating better new ideas than top-down innovation (creationism) when applied to many areas of human experience is a good premise, this book does not effectively make that case by a long shot.
Profile Image for Steve.
76 reviews7 followers
March 23, 2016
This was interesting for a while, until Ridley took off his scholarly hat and put on the Libertarian one. I don't have the background to make a judgment on his application of Darwin's ideas in realms other than evolution in the natural world, but when he says, for example, that evolution as it manifests itself in the family is largely a matter of biology and parental behavior has little, if any, effect in how the children turn out, my suspicions are alerted and the book is spoiled for me. He also cites writers from the Cato Institute, that haven for Neanderthal capitalists. I feel I'm being manipulated by a clever propagandist even though I agree that it's a good idea to see how the whole idea of evolution expresses itself in different areas of human culture and not just the biological.
Profile Image for D.L. Morrese.
Author 11 books56 followers
January 20, 2016
The following is a rather lengthy review. I'd apologize for that, but some things just need a bit more explaining than others.

People have a natural tendency to seek agency. If something momentous happens, then someone must have caused it. If something complex exists, someone obviously designed and built it. But this natural human way of looking at things leads to unwarranted assumptions. No one, for example, planned the evolution of life.

Ridley extends Darwin’s insight about biological evolution to human culture and invention. No one planned the development of language. No one planned the industrial revolution. No one planned today’s global economy. These things evolved. They weren’t designed from the top down. They emerged from the bottom up. In this book, Ridley specifically argues that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand guides economics in much the same way that natural selection guides the evolution of life. Both emerge from the complex interplay of individual agents acting out of self-interest with no common goal. They operate without any grand plan, and yet they create (albeit unintentionally) complex, well-ordered, and reasonably efficient systems. He has great faith in the power of the Invisible Hand. Don’t try to direct it, and good things will happen.

To me, his belief in the power of the Invisible Hand seems a bit too…well, utopian. Simplistic. Possibly even a bit mystical. The Hand works in mysterious ways. We don’t know how, exactly, but we must have faith that it is all for the best and let it get on with things. As long as we don’t interfere, all will be well. Society will evolve for the better. The state will wither away, and everyone will live in peace and prosperity. His end state seems ironically similar to the one Karl Marx envisioned, and I think it’s flawed for one of the same reasons Marx’s was—people. They aren’t ready for it…yet. There are those, and I like to believe the number grows with every generation, who do not require coercion or the threat of divine or secular punishment in order to behave properly toward their fellow human beings. But many still do. The state may be an unfortunate necessity at this point in human evolution.

If it’s possible to be a cynical optimist, Matt Ridley qualifies. He makes several valid points in this book. Order can emerge from chaos. Actions motivated solely by self-interest can have unintended and broadly beneficial consequences. Human culture does evolve, and it has progressed and improved over time. But he makes an unjustified leap by concluding that it is therefore a mistake to attempt to bring about cultural change or broad social benefits intentionally. Evolution, both biological and cultural, he seems to argue, are best left to natural selection and the free market. Restraining the Invisible Hand leads to disaster.

Well, it can, except sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the Hand needs a shove. Or maybe it’s better to say that the Invisible Hand has more fingers than he seems to think it has.

Ridley often sounds like a cranky old man grinding philosophical axes*, and in this book, he vents his libertarian spleen on all things that smack of authority. This includes religion and crony capitalism, but his favorite target is government in all its current and historical forms. He doesn’t like government (which seems odd considering that Viscount Ridley is a member of the British House of Lords). He sees it as a top-down intrusion on the proper bottom-up evolution of human society. Let the free market work!

But there is no free market, and I doubt one would last long if there was. (See Saving Capitalism by Robert B. Reich https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...) Markets in our modern society depend on governments to protect capital assets and intellectual property. Governments provide the framework within which individuals and businesses negotiate contracts with one another, and they provide legal recourse in the event of contract violation. Governments maintain competition by restricting monopolies so that large corporations cannot eliminate their existing and potential competitors (e.g. through hostile takeovers, dumping goods, or intimidating suppliers). Governments also help bolster the economy by instilling consumer confidence. Because of governmental regulations, you can be fairly sure that the food and medicine you buy isn’t toxic; that your appliances, cars, homes, and other purchases are reasonably safe to use; and that whatever else you buy will function almost as well as the seller claims it will. If you are in the unfortunate position of having to work for a living, your workplace is probably safer, your workday shorter, your pay better, and you may even enjoy some kind of insurance or even paid holidays because of governmental policies.

A firm believer in laissez faire economics might argue that all of these benefits would come about on their own accord through the magic of market forces, but they didn’t, which is why these governmental policies came about. Worker exploitation, sweatshops, child labor, and unsafe working conditions were rampant only a century ago. The case of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City in 1911 is probably one of the most famous examples. (http://www.history.com/topics/triangl...). In a bottom-up effort, voters demanded that something be done. Government responded by enacting laws. (e.g. the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the Consumer Product Safety Act of 1972). Admittedly, these probably did not all work as well as many hoped, and some may have had unforeseen consequences, but these laws and others were passed because the ‘free’ market had not been able to prevent abuses by private businesses that exploited workers and cheated consumers. Clearly, not all business were dishonest or exploitative, but a top-down mandate was needed, not only to protect workers and consumers, but also to establish a level playing field to protect responsible business owners from unfair competition by those who were not.

So, were these societal changes examples of bottom-up evolution brought about by voter demand or were they top-down impositions on the free market by government? Both? Neither?

Personally, I think it’s a false dichotomy. Let me begin by saying that power bases emerge in human society whether you want them to or not. They form from the bottom up. We can’t prevent them, nor do I think we should try. They exist to pursue the interests of their constituents, and in doing so can provide benefits to each member that they cannot obtain as well on their own. But they can also unjustly impose their will on nonmembers. If one group becomes too powerful, or if two or more combine forces, they can oppress or exploit others. Maintaining some kind of power balance so that this does not happen can be difficult.

Prior to the Enlightenment, government, in the form of a monarch and sundry aristocracy, could be seen as a separate power base, as could the Church, landed gentry, craftsmen, and peasants. Each of these had its own unique interests, which they pursued, sometimes cooperatively but often competitively. If you wish to imagine society as something guided by an invisible hand, these would have been its fingers, the two strongest of which were the monarch and the Church.

Modern Western society has different fingers. These can be generalized as workers, consumers, business owners, and bankers. Religion is still with us, of course, and it does have unique interests and it does exert power, so it may be seen as a finger as well. As in the past, these groups may have overlapping constituencies, but they don’t have common goals, and the conflicts between them create the evolutionary pressures that move societies. Together, these five fingers shape human culture in unplanned ways. (I don’t include government as one of these modern fingers for reasons I’ll explain soon.)

All of these fingers represent their members and push society in some way. Consumers want quality products at affordable prices. Workers want secure, well-paying jobs. Religions want to spread their faiths. Businesses and banks want to earn profits for owners/investors. Democratic government is a bit different in that it represents (or should represent) interests common to everyone. As difficult as it may be to imagine at times, and despite the real differences that may exist between them, all people have more interests in common than not…safety, property, opportunity, freedom…or as the U.S. Declaration of Independence puts it, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A properly functioning democratic government has the unenviable task of ensuring equal rights for all its citizens and for being an impartial arbiter when the goals of the metaphorical fingers come into conflict. Is it more important for consumers to have lower prices or for workers to have higher wages? Are these more or less important than business owners reaping high profits or banks charging high interest? When does a religion’s goal of spreading the faith intrude on the freedom of nonbelievers? These are not hypothetical questions. All have had to be addressed in the past, and it has fallen on governments to do so because market forces can’t, at least not as well. When one group attempts to dominate, exploit, suppress, or even eliminate another, the purely evolutionary solution of allowing the strongest to win is probably not the best one for the long-term survival of a civilization. The government stands in defense of all, regardless of numbers or wealth. It codifies protected rights that apply to all its citizens, and it acts as a societal ratchet to prevent these rights from being denied in the future. Once proscribed by law, such things as slavery, child labor, and racial discrimination are far less likely to reemerge. A democratic government provides a balancing force so that the many cannot dominate the few and the rich and powerful cannot prey on the poor and weak.

The balance breaks down if one societal power base exerts too much influence over governmental policies. Business control of government is just as detrimental to a society as governmental control of business. But democratic governments are self-correcting. They change from the bottom up. The dominating powers will fight to preserve their privileged positions. They’ll try to bend public opinion to maintain their position, but when voters feel that one group has too much influence, they’ll vote for change…and they might even achieve it. We may be seeing something like that happening now in the U.S. Time will tell.

There is much about Matt Ridley’s argument with which I do not agree, but his central point that complex systems evolve in unexpected and unplanned ways is undeniable. They do. No single strategy directed the course of human progress. The scientific discoveries and cultural changes humanity has made since our ancestors first chipped stones into knives two and a half million years ago (or thereabout) have created a world that no one could have imagined, let alone planned. These advancements emerged incrementally, iteratively, one thing leading to another, with all the parts interacting in complex and often unpredictable ways. In short, our society evolved. There was no grand plan, but many of the little steps along the way were planned, which is where the comparison of scientific and cultural progress with biological evolution breaks down. The two processes appear similar from a great enough distance, but they differ in the details.

Biological evolution lacks intent. Cells and microbes can’t imagine the future. They can’t plan. Over time, the individual cells that comprised the earliest forms of life came together, differentiated, and specialized to form larger and more complex organisms. This improved their survivability, but they didn’t adapt to survive. They survived because they adapted. This is an important difference. It’s a matter of cause and effect. It took natural selection billions of years to go from those earliest microbes to creatures like us because it operates without intent. It doesn’t build to a plan. Discrete biological changes (to DNA) are close enough to random to think of them as such, and most of those random mutations are fatal. Natural selection can create astounding complexity in this manner, but it’s hit or miss, and it takes a while.

Cultural evolution is faster. The time span from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens took almost two million years. The time span from steam engines to nuclear power was less than three hundred. Why? Well, a lot of reasons, but complexity isn’t one of them. There are more differences between Newcomen’s steam engine and a nuclear reactor than there are between you and your multi-great grandmother a couple million years ago. A big factor for the difference in time scale is that each evolutionary step from pre-modern humans to us relied on unplanned natural selection. Each development between steam power and nuclear energy was the result of human premeditated action. Each improvement, every new idea along the way was proposed and developed by a human mind with intent.

Ridley summarizes his position in the epilogue of his book. “To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news in manmade, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves.”

Ah, if only reality were that simple. The unfortunate truth is that most evolutionary changes are failures. Unplanned evolution doesn’t always bring success but neither does planned change. Most plans people make fail as well. What Ridley’s argument seems to boil down to is that evolutionary changes that have survived are successful. True, but tautological. Extrapolating from this dubious insight by claiming that unplanned evolutionary change is good and that manmade change is bad is simply absurd. It’s like claiming that doctors shouldn’t cut out tumors, prescribe antibiotics, provide vaccinations, or attempt to cure genetically inherited diseases because the bacteria, viruses, and genetic mutations they are trying to eliminate have evolved through natural selection and therefore must be good.

Let me offer an alternate idea. Human culture and technology have advanced rapidly because when people see problems, they take action to fix them. They don’t wait around for the slow plod of evolution to make things better or, alternately and more likely, to drive them to extinction. Humans are toolmakers. The things we create, from hammers to stock markets, are tools that we intentionally design to accomplish certain tasks, and we improve upon them over time to make them work better.

By all measurable criteria, our species’ quality of life has improved over time. People today (on average) are healthier, eat better, live longer, are freer, safer, and enjoy more material wealth than at any time in history. No one planned the current state of human affairs. It isn’t anyone’s imagined end state or ultimate goal. There is no end state. There is no final goal. Evolution is a continuing process. The reason our cultures evolve faster than our biology is partly that they have something biology does not. When it comes to the components of human culture, such as our religions, laws, forms of government, economic systems, philosophies, ethics, educational systems, music, art, inventions, and all other creations of the human mind, an intrinsic part of all of them is that they include an element of intent. People designed them from the top down in response to conditions imposed from the bottom up. They saw situations that they wanted improved, considered ways of adapting what they knew to the problems facing them, and came up with ideas they thought might work. Some did. Some didn’t. Those that work are more likely to survive. Richard Dawkins calls such ideas memes, but the important point is that these ideas do not spring up spontaneously. They originate in human minds. And although each of these ideas may be intended to address separate, seemingly unconnected issues, each forms a small component of a larger evolving system. Unlike biological evolution, human progress has an aspect of intelligent design.

Which brings me back to Ridley’s issue with government and the free market. The Invisible Hand of the free market is not a separate ineffable force any more than the human mind is separate from the brain and body that create it. Both can be seen as emergent properties. But perhaps a better way to view the free market for this discussion is as a process. Just as evolution describes the process of living matter reacting to its environment, the free market describes the process of humans interacting to improve their lives. To do this, they build tools. If those tools don’t work quite as well as we’d like, we try to improve them.

Businesses are tools. Banks are tools. Government is a tool. All of these are designed, built, modified, and used by people in order to improve their lives, and, over time and not at all miraculously, our lives have improved. Since this was and is the common intent, I’d say we’re not doing too badly. Evolution gave us our toolmaking ability. It would be a shame not to use it.


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*So am I, but that’s beside the point.
375 reviews185 followers
September 1, 2020
I took my time with this, reading a chapter or two every morning, and not just because I was enthralled by the ideas. It was also because of how the arguments were constructed. This is a learned, scholarly book, drawing on the author's earlier works, and yet immensely accessible.

I'm familiar with the subject matter here: The evolution of our material world, as opposed to our physical world, and everything in it. Writers like Tim Harford have written about this, but in its holistic look at historic events and historical institutions, Ridley's book is special and persistently convincing.

I'm not sure of every point in the book, but I've been intrigued enough to explore these ideas more, and maybe look at the world differently. Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Manu.
376 reviews51 followers
November 4, 2018
For a while now, I have believed that Darwin's theory of evolution is the most paradigm-shifting idea to have emerged from a human mind. On a related thought journey, I have also shifted from determinism to free will and back to determinism, all in a few years. This book connects both these thoughts, and is fundamentally an argument for evolution and against creationism. It argues that change is incremental and emergent and has a momentum all of its own, as opposed to the idea that it is directed by a person or a metaphysical force like God.
The author calls Darwin's work "the special theory of evolution" because Darwin had applied this to the evolution of the human species. But as per the author, evolution is all around us, in pretty much everything we encounter - from culture to the universe and from money to population. The book covers sixteen subjects and sees the progress (or sometimes, the lack of it) for each of these through the lens of its evolution. It is fascinating to see how the blind hand of evolution has guided these ideas to where they are now. I say blind because it has no goal in mind and works mostly based on trial and error.
I learned many things from this book beyond the excellent basic framing of evolution in the context of these subjects. About Titus Lucretius and his book De Rerum Natura (The Nature of things) in which he had conceptualised the idea of evolution. About how the role that history credits to one man - whether it is Steve Jobs or Adolf Hitler - is hugely exaggerated because if there is an idea whose time has come, evolution will make sure it manifests - "the sea will fashion the boats". About my mistaken notion that science needs to be funded by government - the portion on technology shows how the returns from private funding trumps public grants.
I also learned that while the Nazis are the ones who blew up eugenics into a completely different level, from 1932 to 1970, ten thousands of people in the US had been forcibly sterilised or persuaded to undergo voluntary sterility. That Indira Gandhi was forced to scale up her government's sterilisation programmes because the "civilised nations" held aid money to India as ransom. About a company called Morning Star Tomatoes that has been experimenting with "self management" for 2 decades and is working just fine. That the government and the mafia have essentially the same roots. That the biggest religions of the world had borrowed their origin myths from a common pool and had gotten lucky with timing. On how environmentalism is now close to being religion and has its myths too! It also validated my view (not original) that both nation states and a central currency were ideas whose exit time has come. I came to know that the roots of the 2008 crisis lay in China!
This is a fascinating book, and I am also awed by the author's knowledge and background work on so many diverse subjects. This goes very easily into my all time top 10 and I would highly recommend it.
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