(R)evolution

I just finished Matt Ridley’s new book, The Evolution of Everything. The book’s bold title clearly states its central thesis: Everything that you observe comes from the process of evolution. But what is evolution? Ridley uses the word to denote “bottom-up” change; he wants to clearly distinguish it from “top-down” change, attributed to governments and other bodies that seek to control outcomes. He refers to Darwin’s theory as the “special” theory of evolution, in contrast to the more “general” theory of evolution he is advancing, and perhaps in homage to Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity.

In 16 chapters, Ridley attempts to cover a swath of material. His chapters all begin with “The Evolution of” and the categories are the Universe, Morality, Life, Genes, Culture, the Economy, Technology, the Mind, Personality, Education, Population, Leadership, Government, Religion, Money and the Internet. That’s a mind-boggling list right there, and is symptomatic of the main problem with how Ridley attempts to support his thesis. Basically he tries to shoehorn everything into his general framework by highlighting examples whereby what we humans might consider significant “positive” revolutions are smoothly explicable by his bottom-up evolution framework. Thus, the (r)evolution pun that is the title of this blog post – I got it from Ridley. The top-down approaches by contrast are called “creationist”, a disparaging term that he borrows from the so-called “creation versus evolution wars”.

The problem is he does not take his own advice. He argues that we humans are too easily predisposed to seeing patterns and constructing narratives where they are not warranted, and while I’m inclined to agree with him on this point, he pretty much just cherry-picks examples to support his grand narrative. Worse, he tries to assign positive and negative values to the bottom-up and top-down frameworks respectively, baldly referring to these as good and bad. But in the evolutionary framework he espouses, one cannot do this to historical events – if nothing exists but “atoms and the void”, then history has simply unfolded as it has. Ridley praises Lucretius and each chapter begins with a few relevant quotations from the superb De Rerum Natura. But where Lucretius’ narrative is coherently supported by his (more limited) examples, Ridley’s is not. Ridley even “accuses” philosophers and scientists who started treading the evolutionary path to have not gone far enough but have backed down by adopting a Lucretian swerve. (Read the poem to find out more about this.) But maybe they saw the difficulty with following this path to its logical conclusion, and that the overall evidence so far is lacking. Perhaps that is why Ridley’s grand narrative feels weak to me as a reader.

If we go back to the broader definition of evolution, change over time, without trying to endow it with good or bad qualities based on its purported mechanism, then it is not surprising that you find evolution in everything. This is different from saying that evolution is everything. Ridley does provide some neat examples tracing the evolution in all the categories he discusses, even if a number of them are cherry-picked. I enjoyed learning a number of interesting historical factoids through his narratives. Where he is more knowledgeable, he does a great job. The chapter on Genes is clear, engaging, and has generally well-supported evidence. (I have read Ridley’s earlier book Genome.) Areas in which the bottom-up analysis works well, such as technology development, are more coherent and convincing. His chapter on Education is interesting, but his prescriptions are weak. I think this is because of the cherry-picking examples that take a slice of history that fail to take into account the larger context. That being said, I do agree with him that the over-regulation of education (part of why we are all under assessment assault) is a serious problem.

Here’s his conclusion in the epilogue, The Evolution of the Future: “To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is man-made, top-down, purpose stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.” While Ridley admits that one can find counter-examples, he thinks these are in the minority. However, if free will is an illusion (as Ridley thinks) then there is no purpose and ultimately no way to distinguish his two categories. He could go further and suggest we all try to live unintentionally and let ourselves be subject to our appetites, presumably the ones honed through evolution. But he doesn’t. He does intimate that “incremental, inexorable, inevitable changes will bring us material and spiritual improvements” serendipitously. I think a broader swath of examples muddies his positive outlook. Perhaps that is my swerve.