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How Small Changes Transform Our World
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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
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
The General Theory of Evolution
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.
The way that human history is taught can therefore mislead, because it places far too much emphasis on design, direction and planning, and far too little on evolution. Thus, it seems that generals win battles; politicians run countries; scientists discover truths; artists create genres; inventors make breakthroughs; teachers shape minds; philosophers change minds; priests teach morality; businessmen lead businesses; conspirators cause crises; gods make morality. Not just individuals, but institutions too: Goldman Sachs, the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda – these are said to shape the world.
That’s the way I was taught. I now think it is more often wrong than right. Individuals can make a difference, of course, and so can political parties or big companies. Leadership still matters. But 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