Before I read this book, I wasn’t aware that I was a creationist. But Matt Ridley tells me I am, in his broad sense of someone who foolishly believes that any good can come of ‘human intentionality, design and planning’. With no little intellectual chutzpah, he offers to treat us to a ‘general theory of evolution’ of everything, surpassing Charles Darwin’s ‘special’ one that applied only to living organisms. According to the author, ‘top-down’ is always bad, ‘bottom-up’ is always good. By what evolutionary method he avoided consciously designing this book itself remains a mystery to the end.
The book’s many short chapters are determined to find evolutionary virtues in different arenas. Thus, Ridley argues that morality evolves, we are all getting nicer, and the unplanned common law is an excellent thing. (There are plenty of criminal statutes too, but never mind that right now.) Meanwhile, the economy evolves, and this is good because ‘lack of trade’ might have been what doomed the Neanderthals. (I’m not sure how we are supposed to know this.) Cities evolve and are good for people. (Carefully planned public transport systems go unmentioned.) And so on. There are some fascinating passages along the way, particularly on the history of genetic science and modern arguments over ‘junk DNA’.
The question does arise of how much of the ‘evolution’ that Ridley perceives really deserves the name. Even his own Apple laptop, he argues, has evolved, because different people invented its various components and they all went through many versions. (Still, it is designed.) And Ridley oddly calls the ‘Green Revolution’ in industrial agriculture of the mid-20th century an ‘emergent’ phenomenon. In fact, many of the important early Green Revolution discoveries were made by research funded by the government of Mexico.
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