The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World

The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World
Matt Ridley

‘If there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make … it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.’From the industrial revolution and the rise of China, to urbanisation and the birth of bitcoin, Matt Ridley demolishes conventional assumptions that the great events and trends of our day are dictated by those on high. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the ground up. In this wide-ranging and erudite book, Matt Ridley brilliantly makes the case for evolution as the force that has shaped much of our culture, our minds, and that even now is shaping our future.As compelling as it is controversial, as authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridley’s deeply thought-provoking book will change the way we think about the world and how it works.

How Small Changes Transform Our World

Copyright (#ue27debc1-38af-57a8-87ea-cb95d9f61a8e)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by 4th Estate

Copyright © Matt Ridley 2015

The right of Matt Ridley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007542475

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007542505

Version: 2016-04-13

CONTENTS

Cover (#u275db2ca-2a1a-5133-ae67-a43f10da7720)

Title Page (#u1247ea87-7b65-579a-be86-4c7348fc5048)

Copyright

Prologue: The General Theory of Evolution

1. The Evolution of the Universe

2. The Evolution of Morality

3. The Evolution of Life

4. The Evolution of Genes

5. The Evolution of Culture

6. The Evolution of the Economy

7. The Evolution of Technology

8. The Evolution of the Mind

9. The Evolution of Personality

10. The Evolution of Education

11. The Evolution of Population

12. The Evolution of Leadership

13. The Evolution of Government

14. The Evolution of Religion

15. The Evolution of Money

16. The Evolution of the Internet

Epilogue: The Evolution of the Future

Footnotes

Sources and Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE (#ue27debc1-38af-57a8-87ea-cb95d9f61a8e)

The General Theory of Evolution (#ue27debc1-38af-57a8-87ea-cb95d9f61a8e)

The word ‘evolution’ originally means ‘unfolding’. Evolution is a story, a narrative of how things change. It is a word freighted with many other meanings, of particular kinds of change. It implies the emergence of something from something else. It has come to carry a connotation of incremental and gradual change, the opposite of sudden revolution. It is both spontaneous and inexorable. It suggests cumulative change from simple beginnings. It brings the implication of change that comes from within, rather than being directed from without. It also usually implies change that has no goal, but is open-minded about where it ends up. And it has of course acquired the very specific meaning of genetic descent with modification over the generations in biological creatures through the mechanism of natural selection.

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, artefacts 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. Take, for example, electric light. When an obscure engineer named Thomas Newcomen in 1712 hit upon the first practical method of turning heat into work, he could have had no notion that the basic principle behind his invention – the expansion of water when boiled to make steam – would eventually result, via innumerable small steps, in machines that generate electricity to provide artificial light: heat to work to light. The change from incandescent to fluorescent and next to LED light is still unfolding. The sequence of events was and is evolutionary.

My argument will be that in all these senses, evolution is far more common, and far more influential, than most people recognise. It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion. The way in which these streams of human culture flow is gradual, incremental, undirected, emergent and driven by natural selection among competing ideas. People are the victims, more often than the perpetrators, of unintended change. And though it has no goal in mind, cultural evolution none the less produces functional and ingenious solutions to problems – what biologists call adaptation. In the case of the forms and behaviours of animals and plants, we find this apparent purposefulness hard to explain without imputing deliberate design. How can it not be that the eye was designed for seeing? In the same way, we assume that when we find human culture being well adapted to solve human problems, we tend to assume that this is because some clever person designed it with that end in mind. So we tend to give too much credit to whichever clever person is standing nearby at the right moment.