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The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

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The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

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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 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.

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 assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

‘The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.’

Morality, in Smith’s view, is a spontaneous phenomenon, in the sense that people decide their own moral codes by seeking mutual sympathy of sentiments in society, and moralists then observe and record these conventions and teach them back to people as top–down instructions. Smith is essentially saying that the priest who tells you how to behave is basing his moral code on observations of what moral people actually do.

There is a good parallel with teachers of grammar, who do little more than codify the patterns they see in everyday speech and tell them back to us as rules. Only occasionally, as with split infinitives, do their rules go counter to what good writers do.

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed.

In the last book that he published, in 1802, the theologian William Paley set out the argument for biological design based upon purpose. In one of the finest statements of design logic, from an indubitably fine mind, he imagined stubbing his toe against a rock while crossing a heath, then imagined his reaction if instead his toe had encountered a watch. Picking up the watch, he would conclude that it was man-made: ‘There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.’ If a watch implies a watchmaker, then how could the exquisite purposefulness of an animal not imply an animal-maker? ‘Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience.

Something that was once learned can become an instinct.

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity.

The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

each person ‘intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’.

Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward.

In practice, inventions rarely run late. They turn up at just the moment in history when it makes most sense that they do so.

Technology is in that sense a continuation of biological evolution – an imposition of informational order on a random world.

The original idea of a patent, remember, was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits, but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this.

Technology comes from technology far more often than from science. And science comes from technology too. Of course, science may from time to time return the favour to technology.

That is to say, if the government spends money on the wrong kind of science, it tends to stop people working on the right kind of science.

Leave people free to exchange ideas and back hunches, and innovation will follow.

The self is a consequence, not a cause, of thought. To think otherwise is to posit a miraculous incarnation of an immaterial spirit.

The human freedom we all boast we possess, said Spinoza, ‘consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined’. In that sense we are no more in charge of our lives than a stone rolling down a hill is in charge of its movement.

‘The mind exists for the body, is engaged in telling the story of the body’s multifarious events, and uses that story to optimize the life of the organism.’

All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.

Our policy on free will has evolved away from blame.

‘Punishment can be fair, punishment can be justified, and in fact, our societies could not manage without it.’

My point is that the illusion of an individual, immaterial ego, with power to take decisions, is not necessarily any more just than the opposite assumption, that each person is the sum of their influences.

We treat a child who kills a parent by accident more leniently than a sadist who murders a child in a premeditated way, but not because one had more free will than the other. The murderer’s action was a product of events and circumstances and genes; the child’s was mainly a product of accidental events. That alters how we punish them, but it does not mean one had more free will.

‘Johnny comes from a broken home.’ ‘I am not surprised – Johnny could break any home.’

Children get their personalities mostly from within themselves.

And your personality is yours; you are not a creature of other people. Natural selection made sure that brainwashing was not easy. And it’s time we stopped looking to parenting for the credit or the blame.

Instead, the truth is that personality unfolds from within, responding to the environment – so in a very literal sense of the word, it evolves.

‘any creature that is recognizably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory’.

Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun.

a person who is free to make a 500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small ones (firms whose chief executives attend the annual World Economic Forum schmooze-fest in Davos tend to underperform the stock market), and big public bodies have worse reputations than small ones.

what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city.

He asked the question: ‘What kind of company do we want this to be?’, and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people are ‘thinking, energetic, creative and caring’; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves.

‘Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’

This is a form of Pascal’s wager: Blaise Pascal argued that even if God is very unlikely to exist, you had better go to church just in case, because if he does exist the gain will be infinite, and if he does not the pain will have been finite.

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

that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes.

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