The Evolution of Everything audiobook

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)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 andBe Blessed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book isn’t about just evolution. It presents a very different way of looking at just about everything, from global politics, economics, and religion to our own minds and morality. We are not here living in a world bound by laws and preordained by history but are riding the roiling crest of a wave pushing into an undetermined, unpredictable future. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but it describes the sort of excitement and fear this outlook inspires if you perform a thought experiment and flip your brain into seeing things that way for a few moments.Ridley’s arguments are clear and seem well backed up by lots of facts. He’s not promoting some new or old dogma. At one point early on, I did get a little suspicious that the book might be a disguised libertarian manifesto, but that didn’t pan out; his criticism of historical and current politics covers the globe and leaves no ism unscathed. You may not agree with everything he says, but that’s not the point. Just thinking about these ideas will make you smarter.

The word ‘evolution’ originally means ‘unfolding’.It has come to carry a connotation of incremental and gradual change, the opposite of sudden revolution.It also usually implies change that has no goal, but is open-minded about where it ends up.Thomas Newcomen in 1712 hit upon the first practical method of turning heat into workThey are evolutionary phenomena, in the original meaning of the word – they unfold.He was with modern philosophers and historians in suggesting that the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival. He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.Thanks largely to Greenblatt’s marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Pierre Bayle, in his Thoughts on the Comet of 1680, closely followed Lucretius’s Book 5 in suggesting that the power of religion derived from fear.the ‘anthropic principle’. In various forms, this argued that the conditions of the universe, and the particular values of certain parameters, seemed ideally suited to the emergence of life. In other words, if things had been just a little bit different, then stable suns, watery worlds and polymerised carbon would not be possible, so life could never get started. This stroke of cosmic luck implied that we lived in some kind of privileged universe uncannily suitable for us, and this was somehow spooky and cool. Certainly, there do seem to be some remarkably fortuitous features of our own universe without which life would be impossible. If the cosmological constant were any larger, the pressure of antigravity would be greater and the universe would have blown itself to smithereens long before galaxies, stars and planets could have evolved. Electrical and nuclear forces are just the right strength for carbon to be one of the most common elements, and carbon is vital to life because of its capacity to form multiple bonds.As David Waltham puts it in his book Lucky Planet, ‘It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed.The moon was a particular stroke of luck, having been formed by an interplanetary collision and having then withdrawn slowly into space as a result of the earth’s tides (it is now ten times as far away as when it first formed).Denis Diderot’s new Encyclopédie, with its relentless interest in bottom–up explanationsMorality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.As so often with Adam Smith, he deftly avoided the pitfalls into which later generations would fall. He saw straight through the nature-versus-nurture debate and came up with a nature-via-nurture explanation that was far ahead of its time.Smith makes the point that the laws of language are an invention, rather than a discovery. language is an ordered system, albeit arrived at spontaneously through some kind of trial and error among people trying to make ‘their mutual wants intelligible to each other’. Nobody is in charge, but the system is orderly. What a peculiar and novel idea.What a subversive thought. 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?morality is an accidental by-product of the way human beings adjust their behaviour towards each other as they grow up; saying that morality is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously among human beings in a relatively peaceful society; saying that goodness does not need to be taught, let alone associated with the superstitious belief that it would not exist but for the divine origin of an ancient Palestinian carpenter. Smith sounds remarkably like Lucretius (whom he certainly read) in partsA Distant Mirror gives an example of a popular game in medieval France: people with their hands tied behind their backs competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it with their heads, risking the loss of an eye from the scratching of the desperate cat in the process.These guides are full of suggestions about table manners, toilet manners and bedside manners that seem unnecessary to state, but are therefore revealing: ‘Don’t greet someone while they are urinating or defecating . . . don’t blow your nose on to the table-cloth or into your fingers, sleeve or hat . . . turn away when spitting lest your saliva fall on someone . . . don’t pick your nose while eating.’ In short, the very fact that these injunctions needed mentioning implies that medieval European life was pretty disgusting by modern standards. Pinker comments: ‘These are the kind of directives you’d expect a parent to give to a three-year-old, not a great philosopher to a literate readership.’ Elias argued that the habits of refinement, self-control and consideration that are second nature to us today had to be acquired. As time went by, people ‘increasingly inhibited their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into consideration’. In other words, not blowing your nose on the tablecloth was all one with not stabbing your neighbour. It’s a bit like a historical version of the broken-window theory: intolerance of small crimes leads to intolerance of big ones.Elias realised that we have internalised the punishment for breaking these rules (and the ones against more serious violence) in the form of a sense of shame.Elias and Pinker give two chief reasons: government and commerce. With an increasingly centralised government focused on the king and his court, rather than local warlords, people had to behave more like courtiers and less like warriors. That meant not only less violent, but also more refined. Leviathan enforced the peace, if only to have more productive peasants to tax. Revenge for murder was nationalised as a crime to be punished, rather than privatised as a wrong to be righted. At the same time, commerce led people to value the opportunity to be trusted by a stranger in a transaction. 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.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. ‘Richer and more urban people, contrary to what the magazines of opinion sometimes suggest, are less materialistic, less violent, less superficial than poor and rural people’How is it then that conventional wisdom – especially among teachers and religious leaders – maintains that commerce is the cause of nastiness, not niceness?Well, this is just one of those conventional wisdoms that is plain wrong. There has been a decline in violence, not an increase, and it has been fastest in the countries with the least bridled versions of capitalismThe ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.British and American law derives ultimately from the common lawBefore the Norman Conquest, different rules and customs applied in different regions of England. But after 1066 judges created a common law by drawing on customs across the country, with an occasional nod towards the rulings of monarchs. Powerful Plantagenet kings such as Henry II set about standardising the laws to make them consistent across the countryBy contrast, European rulers drew on Roman law, and in particular a compilation of rules issued by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century that was rediscovered in eleventh-century Italy. Civil law, as practised on the continent of Europe, is generally written by government.In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities, and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand. Past judgements are no more than loose guides. When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.Daniel Hannan frequently reminds his colleagues of the bias towards liberty of the common law: ‘This extraordinary, sublime idea that law does not emanate from the state but that rather there was a folk right of existing law that even the king and his ministers were subject to.’They vaguely assume in the backs of their minds that the law is always invented, rather than that it evolved.Darwin read in the autumn of 1838 economist Robert Malthus’s essay on population, and was struck by the notion of a struggle for existence in which some thrived and others did not, an idea which helped trigger the insight of natural selection.If a watch implies a watchmaker, then how could the exquisite purposefulness of an animal not imply an animal-maker?‘Whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence.’all the more persuasive since it came fromin favour of empirical evidence.

A wealth of information supplied in short bursts which ultimately help stop several subjects from becoming stale (except the chapter on money - that I skipped through). The downside is that, for many, a lot of important information will be missing, or is glossed over. However, for someone like me who has often found science books reach breaking point when they haven't really moved on, this book kept moving on. While the idea of biological evolution may seem a stretch to apply to all other emergent systems, the key concept is how systems have all been a part of an emerging process, rather than a single idea from a single person that can be pin-pointed to one moment in time. All ideas are a process of development. For many this will seem obvious, especially those with an open mind that can look much further back than just their own time-frame, but for those not much interested in the past, it will certainly be an eye-opener to discover that so many modern concepts have existed for a long time already, and are thus continually being shaped by culture and society as we press forward into the modern era.While the book essentially, is a quick history of the world circa 200,000 years past, it is fascinating to read so many different forms of culture and ideas take shape and fail due to human-intended structuring. Ridley's thesis is that much of the good of the world has evolved through these emergent systems rather than being forced into existence on purpose, or through being controlled by a central government, and throughout there is a very clear point to refute religious creationism along the way, simply by showing that the world is filled with emergent systems. Does it do that? Not really, since people will cling to beliefs no matter what. And, after all, it's impossible to disprove an omnipotent god capable of everything and anything. It may not be as scholarly as some would hope, but it does cover a lot of topics and provides many interesting facts and events from history that support his ideas - these snippets I found fascinating in themselves even without context to the goals of the book. And if snippets aren't enough, there's an 18 page 'Further Reading' reference section to discover more books through.The reader doesn't have to invest in Ridley's concept to start off with - if they do, they can find the attempts to stitch it all together tenuous; however, if they take the book as a fascinating journey through emerging systems that influenced the world, they will gain many great insights into the very world that they live in today.

Brilliant. Distinguishing between a special and general theory of evolution. The latter of which applies to everything beyond genetics. Building on Dennett's "crane" and "skyhook" idea to explain how things evolve as bottom up (crane) phenomena as oppose to top down (skyhook) phenomena. Very well written, and although it is actually quite common sensical, it provides a very well rounded explanation putting the idea in to perspective. In addition to this, it provides a concise overview and background to a variety of ideas, inventions and concepts that play a part in our day to day lives. Admittedly I didn't like the tone of over-confidence felt throughout the book, and the politically biased comments here and there were unnecessary, but nonetheless, a very interesting read.

Matt Ridley's books are all very good and this is probably one of my favorites. Some of the arguments in this book showing how so many things in the universe move from centralized to de-centralized and how it might be one of the best explanation for how consciousness works. While crypto currencies are a tiny % in this book, the entire subject matter really gives a lot of credibility to the rise and importance of bitcoin/ethereum and maybe other crypto currencies for humanity.