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Before you listen to this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pullia Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
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Kick-ass podcast in Hindi, it's amazing.
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Imagine that you are the minister in charge of Mumbai breakfast.
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All the millions of people in Mumbai want breakfast every morning and you have to make sure that
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whatever they want to eat reaches them in time.
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Some people want eggs, some want dosa, horror of horror some even want poha, but who are
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This means that you have to calibrate egg procurement, dosa batter procurement, poha
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procurement, tea and coffee and milk procurement and make sure that everyone gets their breakfast
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all right and the system never breaks down.
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Do you think you'd be able to do that planning?
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All the logistics, the thousands of excel sheets, the contingency plans for everything
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Is that a job you'd like?
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What if you failed at it and the people of Mumbai did not have breakfast for a day?
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A city of hungry people sounds like a dystopian nightmare, doesn't it?
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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The question I just posed is plainly absurd, no one person or agency can coordinate the
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logistics involved in producing breakfast for an entire city and feeding it.
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But that doesn't mean that people haven't tried.
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The Soviet Union once attempted to manage a nation's food supplies that way and it
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led to famine, starvation and food lines.
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You cannot, as we now know, plan an economy from the top down.
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Mumbai feeds itself because millions of people pursue their own self-interest and manage
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to feed themselves by fulfilling each other's needs.
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Society works best in a bottom-up way.
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Languages evolve, culture grows, cities form, economies run in a bottom-up way through
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what economists call spontaneous order.
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And our universe and life itself was formed in a bottom-up way.
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What we call spontaneous order can also be called natural selection.
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They're basically the same thing, processes that lead to intricate and complex mechanisms,
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without the need for a designer.
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Because of natural selection, we don't need a god to explain this wonderful complex universe
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Equally, spontaneous order explains why we do not need government, another false god,
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to run an economy or a society.
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We do need government, but not to direct things from the top.
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And yet, humans tend to instinctively think in top-down ways, to seek command and control
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and resist bottom-up explanations.
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In fact, it's so absurd that many on the right hold on to the religion of god and deny
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natural selection, while many on the left hold on to the religion of government and
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deny spontaneous order.
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They are both making exactly the same creationist mistake.
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My guest for today is Matt Ridley, author of many fine books, including the one we'll
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discuss today, The Evolution of Everything.
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In this book, he writes about how the universe, life, culture, language, cities, our brains,
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our economies, and even our future, all evolve in a bottom-up way.
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And thank god for that.
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But before we move on to the conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Matt, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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It's great to be on the show.
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Matt, it's very interesting how humans tend to think of the world in top-down ways in
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all its different aspects.
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We've invented God to explain the universe.
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Whenever we think of something that needs to be done, we say, hey, government should
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do it because someone has to centrally plan it, and so on.
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Now, you studied zoology in college.
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At what point did you sort of become firstly aware that the bottoms-up approach to the
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world is a better way of looking at it, and when did you begin to look at all of the world
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this way, not just zoology and not just natural life?
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It's a good question, and I don't really remember when this dawned on me.
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It dawned on me gradually.
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It dawned on me in a bottom-up way, perhaps.
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But you're right to say that this, for me, begins with the natural world, with biological
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evolution, natural selection, and Charles Darwin's theory, which I learned first about
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in school and then in more detail at university when I studied zoology, as you say.
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I wrote several books about evolution and genetics, and it became more and more clear
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to me that there is an incredible complexity in the natural world, I mean, unbelievable
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complexity in your body and mind as we sit here with trillions of cells, millions of
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proteins, tens of thousands of genes, all working in coordination at exactly the right
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levels of speed and concentration.
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I mean, it's more complex than any machine that human beings have ever devised or even
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could imagine devising.
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And yet we have satisfied ourselves, those of us who understand evolution, and indeed
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a large chunk of the world, that this can happen without direction, without creation.
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And it just struck me relatively recently, actually, just in the last few years, that
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we were being equally creationist about the human world as we used to be about the natural
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And we were thinking of the complexity of a city.
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We're sitting in Mumbai, it's an enormous city, it's incredibly complicated, lots of
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people will have lunch in Mumbai today.
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Who's in charge of making sure they get enough to eat?
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The answer is nobody and everybody.
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It's a bottom-up system.
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So what I want to do in this episode is really talk about your book, The Evolution of Everything,
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which deals exactly with this.
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I'll just quote a sentence from your book so listeners get a sense of what the book
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The way that, quote, the way that human history is taught can therefore mislead because it
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places far too much emphasis on design, direction, and planning, and far too little on evolution.
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And your book, of course, is called The Evolution of Everything and in a series of like 16 chapters,
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you take readers through essentially starting from the universe all the way to the internet
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talking about how everything in between cultures, cities, languages, all of them emerge bottom-up
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and at best they can be taught, but you know, the people who try to teach them are making
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They can only be learned as in the case of languages, for example.
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So I thought we'll just follow the structure of the book and just go kind of chapter by
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chapter because that made intuitive sense to me when I was reading it.
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And your first chapter was called The Evolution of the Universe and there's a very interesting
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concept in there called Sky Hooks.
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Can you explain what that's about?
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This is a phrase that Daniel Dennett first brought into the conversation, although it
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was actually invented by a pilot in World War I who was told to stay up there till we
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And he replied, this machine is not fitted with sky hooks.
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I can't attach myself to the sky.
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And you obviously you can't build a building with a sky hook, which is a pity because it
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would be a nice way to build a building if you could hook a device to the sky and start
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But that concept, which Daniel Dennett talks about, is a metaphor for the way we talk about
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human society all too often and the way we talk about the natural world as well when
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So sky hook is really just a euphemism for God, if you like, in the natural world.
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But it's often a euphemism for government in the manmade world.
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But in this chapter on the evolution of the universe, I'm really talking about the way
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it dawns on Isaac Newton and other people that God doesn't need to be moving the planets
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They could be moving under their own force, the pattern and structure of the universe
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could have come about completely spontaneously without intervention by a higher power.
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And that was obviously an idea that started to take root in the 17th century and gradually
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developed and that in many ways was resisted.
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Newton himself conceded that you don't need God to explain the movement of the planets
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today, but something must have started it.
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So perhaps that was God.
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And it's very interesting you talk about this notion starting in the 17th century, but you
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also write a bit about the 5th century BC Roman philosopher Lucretius, who in a sense
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anticipated both natural selection and spontaneous order, both Darwin and Adam Smith in a manner
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Yes, Lucretius is a really interesting character.
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We know very little about him.
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We have this one poem that he wrote.
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It was rediscovered in the 1400s after being lost for a century, even though people had
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And when it was rediscovered and examined, it was found to be unbelievably modern in
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its way of looking at the world, and it was heavily influential on philosophers like Spinoza
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and people like Thomas Jefferson had five copies of it in his library.
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A very important part of the Enlightenment was the influence of this one poem by Lucretius.
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And Lucretius himself was harking back to Democritus and Epicurus.
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That was the name I was looking for.
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And it's a poem, so we mustn't get too carried away.
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He doesn't give details, diagrams, or references for his ideas, but he keeps saying things
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like, look, are you sure you need a god to explain this?
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Don't you think actually there's a way in which it could have happened spontaneously?
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And he comes agonizingly close to describing the process of natural selection, if you interpret
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And again and again, he has this refreshing way of saying, look, actually you can think
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about this in a bottom-up way.
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You can think about it coming from below.
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And it's tempting to think that we were on the brink of a major intellectual breakthrough
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in the first century AD.
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I mean, Lucretius was roughly lived at the same time as Cicero and Caesar and people
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And then something comes along and we turn our back on this way of looking at the world
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for a very long time and we have to rediscover it in the Enlightenment in the 16th, 17th
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And Lucretius was practically branded as a heretic and his work was lost and forgotten
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and possibly because he challenged those top-down notions that the elite sort of had.
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And that's the same process that anyone who challenged those notions went through.
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I mean, Newton faced it, Darwin faced it, Adam Smith himself faced it.
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And this is one of the fascinating things is that it is the ultimate heresy to go around
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saying, actually, we don't need God.
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We maybe don't need government.
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And as you say, I mean, Lucretius was suppressed actively and violently suppressed, I mean,
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not himself, but his works were by the Christian church when it took over the Western world.
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And fast forward to Adam Smith, a lot of what he says gets him into real trouble and gets
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his followers into real trouble.
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People are prosecuted for saying the kinds of things that he's saying.
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And my feeling about Adam Smith is that if you look at what he's saying both in the theory
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of moral sentiments and in The Wealth of Nations is that he's giving a sort of general theory
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of evolution while Charles Darwin is giving a special theory of evolution by analogy with
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the special theory of relativity in Einstein, a century before Darwin.
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So the theory of moral sentiments comes out in 1759, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species
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And so Smith is saying society evolves, society emerges, and he's talking about a morality,
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how morality emerges, how ethics emerge in the theory of moral sentiments.
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And he's doing so very much with the view of it coming about through the interactions
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of ordinary people, how you calibrate what is moral and what is not through the reaction
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of people in your society.
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And we don't actually need priests to tell us to behave well.
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We work it out ourselves, more or less, depending on how well society is constructed by people's
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In fact, our second chapter is called The Evolution of Morality.
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And one of the things I learned in that chapter is that famous phrase, the metaphor of the
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invisible hand, was not used by Smith in The Wealth of Nations, but before that, in a Theory
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of Moral Sentiments, where he was talking about how morality emerged in the bottom of
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the bay, exactly as you're saying, and that moral strictures are not dictated by gods on high
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or priests or whatever, but they emerge through human interaction as we learn how to get along
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with each other on society, in a manner of speaking.
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And so it's worth remembering that people think of the invisible hand as purely an economic
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idea, but actually, I don't think it was.
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I think it's a delightful phrase, and it's teasing, and it sort of hints at this idea
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And you gave an example of morality emerging, for example, where you contrast the disapproval
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of homosexuality with the disapproval of paedophilia, and how one, that is, the disapproval of homosexuality
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has sort of receded in the past decades, and the other has sort of, you know, more people
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disapprove of paedophilia, for example.
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Very striking, I think, in my lifetime, that, I mean, paedophilia was not condoned, but
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it was, you know, there was very little fuss about it.
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There were a lot of school teachers who were probably behaving badly in the 1950s, and
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you know, they weren't prosecuted.
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They were just, well, you know, get out of the way or something, whereas homosexuality
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was illegal at the time, and people were prosecuted.
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People like Alan Turing, you know, committed suicide under pressure from this.
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Today, quite rightly, we are extremely tolerant in society, generally, of people being gay,
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and we say, well, that's completely up to them.
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That's, you know, that's none of government's business.
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But we've become extremely intolerant of people raping or seducing children.
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But my point is that those changes didn't come about because somebody in charge said,
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look, we're being too lenient about paedophilia and too strict about homosexuality.
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They came about because ordinary people changed the conversation themselves.
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Politicians followed suit in these cases, you know, politicians were catching up with
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the way society was changing its mind about these things.
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And I think that's a very important lesson in how morality changes.
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It tends not to be because some leader tells us what to do, this word leadership that everybody
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uses about how we are going to come onto leadership, I think, exactly, is a great mistake.
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And I was particularly struck by one paragraph in that chapter, and I'm just going to read
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Quote, a Smithian child, you mean a Adam Smithian child, a Smithian child developing his sense
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of morality in a violent medieval society in Prussia, say by trial and error, would
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end up with a moral code quite different from such a child growing up in a peaceful German
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The medieval person would be judged moral if he killed people in defense of his honor
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Whereas today he would be taught moral if he refused meat and gave copiously to charity
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and thought shockingly immoral if he killed somebody for any reason at all, and especially
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Isn't that interesting?
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I know it's it's this is the Norbert Elias theory of how culture has changed, which Stephen
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Pinker also writes about it at great length.
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And what was virtuous in the Middle Ages?
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It was often to kill bad people, whereas today it's virtuous not to kill people at all, except
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possibly in self-defense.
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In fact, recently, I saw this meme on the Internet about some 1920s advertisement which
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told women how they should be the ideal wife.
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And you and you kind of read all of that.
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And it's completely shocking.
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And thankfully, social mores have sort of evolved away from that and changed completely.
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But would you say that morality always evolves in the right directions?
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I mean, of course, we're defining right from our vantage point, but isn't that interesting?
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Why should it evolve in the right direction rather than the wrong direction?
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We've lived through a couple of hundred years in which morality has tended to evolve towards
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liberalism, towards tolerance, towards being less judgmental, except in cases like pedophilia.
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And to some extent, that must be arbitrary.
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I mean, it must be possible for morality to evolve in the other direction.
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And maybe you see that in some of the more theocratic societies today that Islam has
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gone from on the whole being perfectly tolerant to somewhat less tolerant moral code in some
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countries towards various forms of blasphemy, homosexuality being an example in that case.
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So fundamentalism does emerge by the same process.
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And intolerance can emerge by the same process.
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And some of the things we're seeing today on how intolerant people are of free speech,
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etc., could be seen in that light.
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So I don't think we can take it for granted that morality will continue to evolve in a
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generally liberal direction.
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So moving on to sort of your third chapter, which is the evolution of life.
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And again, one hardly sort of I think most reasonable people now accept natural selection.
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And the interesting thing here is that you talk about how Darwin was inspired by the
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ideas of Locke and Smith, and before them obviously from Lucretius.
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And the great quote which you referred to earlier in this episode is quote, the general
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theory of evolution came before the special theory, stop quote.
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And Darwin sort of got his ideas, were they kind of heretic or were they an idea whose
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I think if Darwin hadn't come up with the theory of natural selection, we'd still have
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got it around the same time.
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I mean, we know that's to be the case because of Alfred Russell Wallace, obviously, who
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simultaneously stumbled upon the same idea.
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Now, Wallace wasn't going to have quite such a good catalogue of anecdotes and evidence
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to buttress it and quite such good connections as Darwin to push the ideas that might have
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struggled more, it might have come forward in different forms.
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And Darwin was remarkably intellectually consistent in a way that Wallace wasn't, you know, where
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Wallace refused to believe the human brain could have come about through natural selection,
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So it would have been different if Darwin hadn't been there to do it.
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But I think you're right in the sense that evolution by natural selection was ripe to
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appear around that period.
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We had the pieces in place.
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And as I say, to a surprising extent, it comes from these eight these enlightenment thinkers
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from the 18th century, people like Locke and Smith and so on, influencing people like Darwin.
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The milieu that he grew up in was very much based around these ideas of Smith and people
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like that about free markets, about freedom generally.
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And I think, you know, you needed to plough the ground to before you could sow the seeds
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But it was still very heretical.
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I mean, it was still hugely resisted, mainly from the point of view of religion, which
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it was seen as a threat to.
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And of course, still is.
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I mean, in many parts of the world, particularly parts of America, natural selection is rejected
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out of hand because it seems to contradict the Bible.
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No, and it's very sort of interesting that before Darwin, all the thinkers who sort of
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express such ideas, you know, God was a thing you couldn't touch.
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So even Newton, when he would say things which would normally lead you to atheistic conclusions
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or even Descartes would, you know, the hedge at the very end and sort of pay lip service
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Well, I mean, I'm curious as to what, to the extent to which I'm seeing everything
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through the lens of Christianity, whereas, of course, there have been many people living
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under different religious dispositions.
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And I'm curious as to how easy or difficult it would be under Hinduism or under Buddhism
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or under Islam for these bottom-up ideas to emerge.
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And of course, they must have done and sometimes unsuccessfully and been suppressed and sometimes
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come through more successfully.
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It sort of feels like the Buddhists should have been quickest to this because in a way,
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the deity in Buddhism is a bit of a bottom-up deity, if I could put it that way.
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I don't know what you think about that.
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And also, I think Hinduism is evolving in more intolerant directions today.
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There's a tradition within Hinduism that talks about that as an atheist tradition, the Charvaka
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Having said that, most of the Enlightenment ideas, to be quite frank, came from the West.
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You know, a friend of mine was attempting to write a book on the history of liberalism
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in India and actually trying to examine whether there are sort of liberal ideas that took
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root in India spontaneously, and it's very hard to come across them.
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They're all sort of guided by God or other sort of top-down ways.
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So, you know, all of these ideas of spontaneous order and natural selection have definitely
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come to us now from the West, but I think all the world is one now, so it's sort of
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Your fourth chapter was very interesting, especially because the first book I read of
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yours was Genome, all those years ago, and your fourth chapter is about the evolution
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of genes, and where you talk about how most people, even scientists, tend to think of
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genes in terms of a skyhook, that genes are the master plan for the body, but you say
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Yes, this is an interesting one, I think, because when we first decoded the human genome,
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there's a lot of literature out there in genetics talking about wanting to find the master genes,
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the genes that control the other genes and so on, and this is just the wrong way of looking
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This is a network, not a hierarchy.
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Every gene is affecting every other gene and so on, not every gene, but, you know, most
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genes are affecting other genes in different ways, and we had to get used to the idea
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that there were only 21,000 and not more genes, and that while there are genes that switch
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on earlier in life, or whatever, and start a cascade of events that result in other things,
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most genes are contributing proteins that are parts of a machine rather than chains
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in a series of events, and I think that is an idea that hasn't quite sunk in, so even
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geneticists confronted with this extremely bottom-up system, which is the development
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of an incredibly complex body from 20,000 genes, have tended to think in terms of leadership
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by certain genes over other genes, and your point is that every gene, if you use the metaphor
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of acting, because genes don't actually have volition, but every gene in a sense is acting
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in its own self-interest, it doesn't really give a damn about the master plan, you know,
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in the same way as you spoke about feeding lunch to the city of Bombay, and here I am
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in the city of Bombay, and I'm just doing my own thing, but I am in a sense contributing
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to this master plan of giving lunch to all of Bombay, including to myself, but it's not
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a conscious, directed way, it's sort of, I just do what I do, everybody does what they
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does, and the city runs as it does.
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Yeah, and I think that's a very good analogy, a cell is like a city, you know, there's lots
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of individuals going about their business, doing their different things, and for the
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city to function, all it needs is for everybody to do their bit, not to try and tell everyone
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And I'm sort of struck by another quote of yours, which again, harks back to Dawkins
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in his classic book, quote, it is a selfishness of the genes that enables individuals to be
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Well, Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene in the 1970s, very influential on me, I read
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it when I was just starting at university, and he then was one of my teachers.
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And I think he had a blinding insight that the generous behavior that human beings show
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could come about because of the self interest of genes rather than because of genes for
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generosity sort of thing.
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And it's quite a hard concept to get your head around.
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And you know, how could we be anything other than the results of replicating devices trying
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to ensure their progression into the next generation.
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And that is, when you think about it, a very Smithian concept.
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Now, a lot of biologists, evolutionary biologists who are convinced by this kind of selfish
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gene argument, would not find themselves at the free market end of the economic or political
#
spectrum and probably haven't understood that parallel, in my view.
#
And that's a pretty stunning dissonance, you sort of end the chapter by saying, quote,
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the more we understand genomics, the more it confirms evolution, stop quote.
#
Moving on now to your fifth chapter, which is the evolution of culture.
#
And again, I'm going to quote a para from there, start quote.
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One of the great intellectual breakthroughs of recent decades led by two evolutionary
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theorists named Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson is the realization that Darwin's mechanism
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of selective survival resulted in cumulative complexity applies to human culture in all
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I think I read that wrong.
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But anyway, our habits and our institutions from language to cities are constantly changing.
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And the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian.
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It is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective, and in some weak
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sense, progressive, stop quote.
#
And an illustration you give of how culture evolves is language.
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Yeah, I think language is a very good case to think because we can see language changing
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We see pronunciation changing, we see vocabulary changing, we see new words, we see words changing
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their meanings and so on.
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And we know, don't we, that no one is trying to do this.
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No one is setting out deliberately to introduce a new word into the English language or something
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It's coming about very gradually by mutation and selection, by relatively random changes,
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some of which are accepted and some of which are rejected.
#
And one of the things that people used to say is, well, hang on, culture cannot be Darwinian
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because a lot of the things we do are deliberate.
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We are conscious, we're planning things, we're trying to change something.
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That makes it very, you know, that's directed mutation.
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The point of natural selection is that it has to be random mutation in order to discover
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But actually, there's been some good mathematical modeling that shows that while even if most
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of the things people try and do are conscious and are deliberate, as long as there's an
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element of randomness, as long as there's an element of trial and error in there, you
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will get a surprisingly powerful Darwinian evolution happening.
#
And Joe Henrich and his colleagues particularly have made this argument that actually, and
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once you drill down into human culture and understand how it works, it looks much more
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evolutionary and much less led and planned than we have tended to assume.
#
In fact, one of the points you make is that language is learned, not taught.
#
And an example you give of this is top-down language teaching versus bottom-up language
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And top-down would be like, say, if I, at the age of 44, try to learn a foreign language
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like French is for me, and, you know, I'd really struggle, I'd, you know, start learning
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it in a superficial way and it would be really hard going.
#
But every baby born in France just does it so naturally in the bottom-up kind of way.
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And, you know, I think we've made a mistake in trying, I mean, I was taught Latin and
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Greek when I was a child.
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I remember almost none of it now, it's faded.
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And learning from being taught those kind of languages is surprisingly difficult.
#
Whereas if I had lived in France or Germany or India, I would have, as a child, I would
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have very quickly absorbed.
#
And, you know, I did pick up, I mean, I lived in India for a few months, one year, and I
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didn't become proficient in Hindi, but, you know, I absorbed it without anybody teaching
#
Now, of course, it helps to have a language teacher, but essentially what a language teacher
#
is is just, you know, a good one.
#
It's just immersing you in the experience so you can do the learning.
#
And I think that's a good example of how we learn rather than teach.
#
And I found that you also outlined a number of rules on how sort of language tends to
#
For example, frequently used words tend to be short, common words change slowly.
#
For example, the meaning of the you said is never really going to change because, you
#
know, you'd have to make too many people learn a new meaning.
#
But something like prevaricate has in fact changed.
#
So the word prevaricate is now routinely used, certainly in the UK, I don't know about elsewhere
#
in the world, to mean delay.
#
It doesn't mean that it means to lie, actually.
#
People when they say prevaricate, they're thinking of procrastinate.
#
But they actually, for some reason, they use the word prevaricate instead.
#
That's changed in my lifetime, there's no point in getting cross about it and saying
#
we've lost a perfectly good word, procrastinate and we've, you know, we've lost the meaning
#
of the word prevaricate.
#
But it's not going to happen to a small word like me or and or the, you know, those don't
#
Those similarities, those rules look like they were, you know, set down by some Supreme
#
Court of the English language, which of course is not the case.
#
It's a natural pragmatism of all of us.
#
It's natural pragmatism is a very good way of putting it.
#
And in fact, before we started recording this podcast, I told you I'll record the intro
#
And then it strikes me that outro also in a manner of speaking is a word that has evolved
#
because there's really no such word as outro.
#
But well, I would argue now there is because people use it that it's everyone understands
#
When did who started the word outro, you know, who knows if you're listening to this podcast
#
eight centuries later, I'm going to take credit for it.
#
Yeah, no, there's no central planning directory, which marks a date on which it was invented
#
We're now going to take another word that, you know, didn't mean what it now means a
#
while ago, a break, a short commercial break, so we'll be back after that.
#
On the scene and the unseen, Amit Verma is joined by author and journalist Matt Ridley
#
to discuss the evolution of the universe, life, culture, our minds and our futures.
#
On the Geekfruit podcast, the ages and dinkers slowly lose their mind while they're trying
#
to process just how much they were disappointed by the Fantastic Beasts sequel.
#
Next week on IVM Likes, Abbas and Surabhi talk about homecoming the podcast versus homecoming
#
Also, we're reaching 100 episodes of IVM Likes soon.
#
Share your favorite moments from the show with us and your most memorable recommendations.
#
You can write to us at shows at indusfox.com.
#
Also send us a voice note if you can and we'll play it on the 100th episode.
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with the author, Matt Ridley, about the evolution of everything.
#
To go back to your fifth chapter about the evolution of culture, there was one sentence
#
I'm going to ask you to explain to me, which I didn't really quite understand, but it's
#
very intriguing, which is you write that in people, genes are probably the slaves, not
#
the masters of culture.
#
Well, what I think I'm trying to argue here is that gene culture co-evolution is the idea
#
that if culture changes, that could put pressure on the genes to change.
#
So for example, we have tended to argue that in order to become modern linguistic people,
#
something had to change in our brain.
#
And after that, we began speaking because at last we had the circuitry to use language
#
I've argued, and I've published peer reviewed papers arguing this actually, that it could
#
be the other way around.
#
So for example, if we started using our voices a lot to communicate, that would put selective
#
pressure on whoever could articulate particularly well to have more children, because they're
#
better at communicating.
#
So it's the culture that starts the change and the genes that follow.
#
The culture is the horse and genes are the cart.
#
And it's like the virtuous cycle in that case.
#
That's the virtuous circle.
#
But we have very nice examples of this.
#
For example, in tolerance of milk, the ability to digest milk, which is something that Western
#
Europeans have and some Africans have, but is relatively rare elsewhere in the world.
#
I think it's relatively common in India, but I'm not sure.
#
But in the Far East, it's really quite scarce.
#
Why are we talking about adults?
#
I mean, obviously children can digest milk.
#
Lactose is the key thing.
#
Lactose is a sugar founded milk that adult human generally can't digest unless they come
#
Did people say, oh good, I'm lactose tolerant, therefore I'm going to invent dairy farming?
#
Or did they invent dairy farming and get some benefit out of eating milk, because afterwards
#
it's got proteins and other things in it and you could turn it into cheese and eat that,
#
But they all had a bit of indigestion from the lactose.
#
And then people who genetically found that their infant genes for lactose digestion remained
#
switched on throughout life were suddenly at an advantage.
#
They got more energy out of the milk than other people.
#
And so the genes started changing.
#
So we know in that case, I mean, that's far more plausible as to what happened, is that
#
the culture changed towards keeping animals for their milk and that was followed by a
#
But with that sort of natural selection not happening now, it's kind of moot, right?
#
You can look at the past and talk about culture influencing genes, but that's no longer happening
#
I think there are things that are happening today that are bound to be putting genetic
#
It's hard to think of an example.
#
One of the problems with modern culture is it changes so fast and often, you know, not
#
consistently in the same direction for a long time.
#
But you know, suppose there are, you know, there's a lot of people who have relatively
#
small numbers of children today.
#
Now, if there's some cultural habit that's leading people to be less likely to have babies
#
and other cultural habit that's leading people to have lots of babies, then, you know, these
#
And we're in trouble because I always argue that smarter people have less babies.
#
And actually, if you look at all religions around the world, whether you look at Protestant
#
Christianity, Catholic Christianity, different forms of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, on the
#
whole, the more orthodox and fundamentalist people are, the more children they're having.
#
There's a very good book called The Religious Shall Inherit the Earth, I think it's called.
#
And the argument here is that now that we're limiting family size voluntarily, it used
#
to be that everybody tried to have as many children as possible.
#
But now that most people are settling for one or two children, the exceptions are going
#
to be dominating the posterity to a surprising extent.
#
Now those exceptions tend to be fundamentalist.
#
So if there is a gene for fundamentalism, like, watch out.
#
You end that chapter on culture by writing about cities and you point out, you know,
#
in India these days, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeps talking about smart cities.
#
He wants to design new cities and, you know, a huge amount of top down thinking.
#
And what you actually point out is that most big cities emerge spontaneously.
#
They weren't planned by some government or higher power or whatever.
#
And an example you give of this is England in the first half of the 19th century.
#
No, I mean, the growth of industrial cities like Manchester or Birmingham in the UK is
#
an entirely spontaneous phenomenon.
#
There's no, you know, government didn't set out to say, right, we're going to build some
#
It's true that when people realized how cities were growing, they then said, hang on, let's
#
plan the infrastructure so that it's more user friendly.
#
So for example, the grid system that you get in the middle of many American cities, and
#
indeed, curiously, in Glasgow, for example, is an example of top down and we're often
#
I mean, you couldn't get around Manhattan so easily if it was a higgledy-piggledy city
#
like, well, you could, I mean, we get around London, okay, we get around Bombay, okay.
#
Obviously, you know, you can't have zero government in a city.
#
You can't have no police, you can't have no ability to build the roads, you can't have
#
You know, that's not what we're saying.
#
What we're saying is that you do have to take into account that these things will change
#
spontaneously and you may be wrong if you plan for them to change in one way and they
#
actually want to change in a different way.
#
It's a bit like the way if you set up a park and you put the paths across the park wrong
#
and people say, no, actually, I want to work from that corner to that corner, not this
#
corner to this corner, then people will make what they call desire lines, which is tracks
#
And you're much better moving your concrete to where the tracks are than trying to put
#
up big signs saying keep off the grass, stick to these tracks.
#
And in a sense, it's much better, therefore, letting a city or an urban settlement evolve
#
as it will and then building the infrastructure to service it and, you know, getting all of
#
that done rather than trying to second guess what people may want and putting that in place.
#
I mean, although, as I say, you can go too far, you do have to anticipate demand to some
#
extent for water or something like that.
#
But it's important to be flexible and say, look, hang on, the way people want to live
#
in cities these days is actually changing and we shouldn't disapprove of it.
#
We should just change the way we're operating so as to make room for it.
#
And a magnificent book I'd recommend to my listeners, and I know you must also be a fan
#
of it, is Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
#
Well, Jane Jacobs is the genius behind these ideas for cities because she was the one who
#
campaigned against the sort of central planning of infrastructure in New York that was ruining
#
Epitomized by Robert Moses.
#
Let's move on now to chapter six, The Evolution of the Economy, which begins by your invoking
#
Frederick Bastia, who is also the inspiration behind the name of this podcast, The Scene
#
And Bastia wrote about, just as you were talking about, you know, giving lunch to the people
#
of Mumbai, Bastia wrote about feeding Paris, where he said that who feeds Paris?
#
That if you have a central planner who tries to feed Paris, the task will simply be too
#
But hey, Paris manages quite fine on its own.
#
I think this is a great insight.
#
It's a great way of looking at the world.
#
And Bastia really nails it here because with food, people immediately get what you're talking
#
about, I find, that if you say, look, there's a better way of feeding Bombay, and that is
#
to put one food commissioner in charge of it, and he can plan well and ahead and make
#
sure that the right amount of food is available to the right kind of people.
#
Well, we know that doesn't work.
#
It's called central planning.
#
It was tried in the Soviet Union and other places.
#
And it's a disaster wherever it's tried.
#
And we know that the way to achieve the feeding of a city is supply and demand, that, you
#
know, if there's not enough demand for fish and there's too much supply, there's not enough
#
supply of bread and there's too much demand for bread, then the price of fish and bread
#
And that will automatically adjust without anyone anticipating it, without anyone ordering
#
it, without anyone leading it.
#
And there's a nice dystopian novel to be written there, the food commissioner.
#
And one interesting point you made, which, you know, and so for a moment, I'll ask you
#
You say here, today, few people appreciate just how similar the arguments made by Smith
#
And the thing is, essentially, to me, the way I see it, it's an identical argument.
#
I mean, natural selection is spontaneous order, which is a term people use for the way the
#
economy sort of forms itself, that you don't need a central planner, that all of these
#
things happen by themselves.
#
And it's a beautiful, almost mystical process, in a sense, like Douglas Adams once said
#
that he didn't need God because the wonder of natural selection was enough to fill him
#
with that kind of amazing awe.
#
But yet we find that when it comes to politics, you have, you know, people on one side who
#
are creationists of one sort and people on the other side, people on the left are actually
#
creationists when it comes to the economy.
#
Why do you think that is?
#
This is a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it?
#
So I've, in my career, mixed with free market economists and evolutionary biologists.
#
And I've often said to them, you guys are saying the same thing.
#
And the evolutionary biologists will all vote for, nearly all, not all, but will mostly
#
vote for a sort of socialist view of the economy.
#
And the free market economists will quite often be found saying, well, no, I don't really
#
think Darwinism is right, you know, because they're on the free market, economists tend
#
to be associated with the right wing, certainly in the United States.
#
Whereas evolutionary biologists tend to be on the left wing because they're academics
#
and scientists and most are.
#
And I long to bash heads together and say, exactly.
#
And you know, forget right and left.
#
This idea of spontaneous order is more important than that.
#
And it's neither one thing nor the other.
#
I mean, it's certainly, you know, if by right wing you mean authoritarian, it's certainly
#
It's the very opposite of that.
#
And you know, what could be more liberating than the idea that ordinary people are in
#
charge of their own destiny through a slightly messy but rather beautiful system of spontaneous
#
And in fact, that's something where you talk about the economy as well.
#
Again, I'll quote from you, quote, free market commerce is the only system of human organization
#
yet devised where ordinary people are in charge, unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery
#
and socialism, stop quote, where you kind of point out that the decisions about what
#
companies should exist, who should make a profit, who is doing a good job of serving
#
others or whatever are made by ordinary people, not some central power.
#
And that look at the way big companies are vulnerable to their consumers.
#
You know, if color launches a product and it's not good, then the color companies in
#
You know, look at the way big companies have to rush to, you know, if they offend their
#
consumers, their customers in some way, they're in real trouble quite quickly.
#
So in a proper commercial system, as long as these big companies don't have the ear
#
of government and can get defense that way, they are very vulnerable and the people in
#
charge are the ordinary people, the customers, which is by the way, one of the reasons I
#
never use the word capitalism for this system, if I can, because capitalism is a much more
#
top down view, I think it's an idea of big capitalists being in charge.
#
And I think that's the mistake.
#
I think we need to think of it as consumers being in charge of the pull from consumers
#
rather than the push from producers.
#
That said, through crony capitalism, through the links between business and government,
#
it is sometimes possible, of course, for big business to behave in a very heavy handed
#
and top down way and insist that rival small competitors don't get a chance and so on.
#
So I think that's, you know, one has to watch out for that.
#
But that isn't free commerce.
#
I mean, I've heard historians who defend Nehru's sort of Fabian socialist vision say that,
#
listen, in the late 40s, he set up, he got a group of industrialists together to form
#
what was called the Bombay Plan to talk about their vision for an independent India, whenever
#
India became independent, what the economy should look like.
#
And they say that, look, they endorse Nehru's view of a top down socialistic planned economy
#
And my reply to that is, of course they would, they are protecting their markets.
#
In an actual free market, no one is protected.
#
The government simply doesn't have the power to protect this player or that player.
#
And, you know, and a classic example of how this kind of creative destruction happened
#
is in the fact that say a company like Kodak, which was such a behemoth a while ago, doesn't
#
And, you know, 12 years ago, if you had to buy mobile phones, you know, Nokia was a big
#
player and people who wanted to send their phone would use BlackBerry and look what happened.
#
You know, things change so fast because the consumer is always kind of in charge.
#
And yet there is this sort of tendency to look at government as a solution for everything.
#
And I'm going to quote another sort of paragraph which also spoke to me where you say, quote,
#
take six basic needs of a human being, food, clothing, health, education, shelter and transport.
#
Roughly speaking, in most countries, the market provides food and clothing.
#
The state provides health care and education, while shelter and transport are provided by
#
And what is kind of obvious to anyone listening to this is that, look, in terms of what the
#
market provides in terms of food and clothing, we have like far greater variety than we ever
#
We get far greater value for money.
#
Anyone can kind of afford those.
#
But when it comes to health care and education, which the government provides, it is such
#
I think this is a very striking point, actually, that, you know, it's not immediately obvious
#
why we haven't got a national food service in the UK and allowed health care to be provided
#
I mean, I mean, there are reasons, but it's, you know, health, you never know quite when
#
you're going to need health care and so on.
#
But as you point out, there was a sort of a national food service we've seen that counterfactual
#
And in the UK, we had food rationing right through in the 1950s.
#
Germany gave up food rationing much sooner than Britain, because they saw that if they
#
stopped food rationing, supplies would rise to meet demand.
#
And Britain kept thinking, no, no, food's still scarce.
#
So we're still going to, well, the reason it was scarce, because you had rationing,
#
you know, I mean, it's a circular argument.
#
Just look at the way food and clothing are cheap, varied, responsive to demand and evolving
#
Just look at the way health and education tend to get stuck in these ways of dealing
#
things and tend to be starved of resources and everybody's complaining that there's
#
an off budget and so on.
#
It's no coincidence that on the whole they are provided by the government, whereas food
#
and clothing are provided by the market.
#
We need to try and find more market mechanisms to deliver health and education.
#
Now, that doesn't mean we dissolve all government intervention overnight.
#
And some countries have found quite good ways of government making sure that poor people
#
don't suffer for lack of health care or education.
#
The obvious thing is a voucher system.
#
You know, you essentially say, look, here's a voucher for education or health, go out
#
and buy it from whichever provider can provide it for you best.
#
That would provoke a ferment of innovation in trying to deliver effective health care
#
and food and education to people.
#
For those of my listeners who don't know what a voucher system is, I've had an episode
#
I've had different episodes on education.
#
A voucher system basically means that the government continues to spend what it is spending
#
on education, but it empowers the parents.
#
So instead of funding the schools, it gives vouchers to the parents.
#
And wherever the parents choose to send their kid, that school can encash the voucher, whether
#
it is a government school or a private school.
#
And parents are really in the best place to make decisions about their children's education
#
I've got a couple of episodes of this in the past, which will be linked from the page of
#
So you can kind of have a look at that.
#
The analog I tend to give to people about, you know, the difference between private provision
#
and government provision is that back in the 1980s, when I was growing up in India, telecom
#
and airlines were government monopolies.
#
You had one government telephone company and it would take up to five years to get a telephone
#
So if you wanted to, you know, if you want a telephone today, you get on the waiting
#
It takes maybe five years.
#
And a ditto, the one government airline was so expensive, most people couldn't afford
#
But those got privatized in the liberalization of the early 90s.
#
And today anybody can, you know, buy a phone which is like ludicrously cheap compared to
#
And you'll get a phone in five minutes today.
#
And equally, airlines also are extremely cheap.
#
But what the government did not allow the private sector to do enough in was, for example,
#
education and health care.
#
And the argument with education always is that, listen, it's too important to be left
#
And I would actually argue that, damn it, it's too important to be left to the state.
#
I think you're exactly right.
#
You know, we're constantly talking about market failure, but we need to talk about government
#
You know, I mean, the government is chronically bad at delivering certain things.
#
Government failure is literally ubiquitous and market failure only tends to happen when
#
the government doesn't allow the market to operate.
#
On the whole, I think that's true.
#
Let's kind of move on to your next chapter, chapter seven, which is the evolution of technology.
#
And again, you wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal, if I remember correctly, which kind
#
of summarizes the arguments made in this.
#
And this I found really interesting, where you talk about how technological innovation
#
seemed to come about almost as a matter of course.
#
And it's not like there was one great inventor who invented something and without him, we
#
would not have that invention.
#
But it's just like when there is a time for it, they kind of happen.
#
You give an example of the light bulb and everyone says that, you know, Edison was an
#
What would have happened if Edison didn't invent it, it was inevitable someone would
#
have because there were 26 simultaneous.
#
I think it's either 21 or 23, depending on who you count.
#
People who can lay claim, according to Robert Friedle, who has researched this, to have
#
invented the light bulb independently of Edison.
#
And there is no question if Edison had been run over by a tram, we'd still have had light
#
bulbs, because the ability to create a vacuum with a vacuum pump, the ability to blow glass,
#
the ability to make light with filaments had all been developed.
#
And these technologies were bound to come together.
#
And you've got lots of people doing it.
#
And you actually you find this phenomenon with pretty well every technology that there
#
is a phase of simultaneous invention when lots of people arrive at the same idea at
#
the same time, because the idea is ripe.
#
It is in the late 1930s, computing is sort of inevitable.
#
You know, you've got lots of different people trying to some some more electronic than others,
#
But you know, they're basically the ideas that come together to make computing are ready
#
to marry and mate and produce a new idea.
#
And so this makes the changing technology of the world a much more inexorable process
#
than we tend to think of it.
#
We tend to think, my goodness, if Einstein or Edison hadn't come along, the world would
#
have remained stuck in a different state.
#
And that's simply not the case.
#
There's a paradox here, though, which is that if that's the case, then, you know, why didn't
#
we invent everything hundreds of years before?
#
And also, why does it happen in certain parts of the world?
#
You know, why does Silicon Valley have to invent the software or whatever?
#
Why does Victorian Britain have to develop the steam engine?
#
You know, why does it happen when and where it does?
#
And I'm still wrestling with those.
#
And actually, that's going to be a big part of my next book is writing a book on innovation
#
to try and understand this process.
#
But the idea, it has to be seen as evolutionary.
#
It's the combination of ideas, the recombination of ideas.
#
And they turn into new ideas as a result.
#
And Kevin Kelly has a wonderful book, which he writes about, which is called What Technology
#
And he's trying to turn it upside down and say, look, it's technology that's doing the
#
devolving and it's choosing the inventors to do it.
#
And actually, that's a surprisingly fruitful way of looking at it.
#
In fact, there's a great sentence in your chapter which says the same thing, quote,
#
we ride rather than drive the innovation wave.
#
Technology will find its inventors rather than vice versa.
#
And you also use this to sort of make the point that, you know, we should kind of rethink
#
patents, therefore, because patents tend to favor the lucky guy who just happened to file
#
So, you know, technology, in a sense, is inevitable.
#
It's going to happen anyway.
#
Well, I do think that intellectual property is overrated.
#
The more you study it, the more you see that it's actually being used for exactly the opposite
#
purpose for which it's intended.
#
It's intended to incentivize innovation.
#
It has tended to morph into a system whereby people keep competitors out and hang on to
#
monopolies longer than they deserve to.
#
You've obviously got to have a balance here because you can't simply throw open to all
#
competitors something that you've through regulation insisted be tested very carefully
#
before it's released on the market like a drug or something like that.
#
And it's the same with copyright.
#
I think the metaphor that we use for intellectual property for copyright or patents is wrong.
#
It's not a property because the thing about physical property, a building or a house or
#
a field or something, is that I can own it and prevent anyone else having access to it.
#
But if I were to share it, then I lose something.
#
Then somebody else is using my house and we can't both live in the house at the same time.
#
Whereas with an idea, you can give it away and still have it, although you're less likely
#
to be able to make money out of its monopoly.
#
So actually, the way Paul Romer talks about this kind of thing with his endogenous growth
#
theory is that by being the first mover, by getting there first, you get a brief monopoly
#
You know how to put this together and that's enough to keep you going.
#
And if you look at most of the software industry, it hasn't been made possible by patents.
#
It's been made possible by people getting there, being smart, doing it first and doing
#
You know, Apple and Amazon and people like that don't rely on patents to keep their competitive
#
They rely on innovation.
#
And that's the way we should be thinking about the world.
#
Chapter eight is called evolution of the mind and I found it really interesting and counterintuitive
#
because people think that if there is one thing that is dropped down, it is surely the
#
self that I am in charge and my body and my brain are under my control.
#
And I've recently sort of come to rethink free will and I pretty much don't see how
#
free will can be there.
#
I kind of follow on the path of Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky in this.
#
And your chapter does a fascinating overview of that whole debate and shows that how a
#
lot of what we think we are doing, we aren't actually doing it.
#
We are sort of the causation is sort of the other way around.
#
This is a very different chapter to the rest of the book.
#
And I delve into philosophy and as always with the free will argument and I've wrestled
#
with it in previous books before, I'm never entirely satisfied that I've reached the
#
But I do think that we have to move away from thinking of a homunculus in the middle of
#
our brain in charge, sitting at a little control.
#
In the movie Men in Black, they open up a corpse and they find this little person sitting
#
in there with a control panel and of course that's not what's going on.
#
And when it comes to things like responsibility for your behavior, for example, somebody who
#
commits crimes and it turns out to be a tumor in their head that's causing it, that sort
#
of we're clearly then saying, okay, so it wasn't you that was responsible, it was the
#
You know, I mean, who would you be?
#
And actually we need to turn this over and start thinking it the other way up.
#
You know, after all, we know that the mind is simply the product of the brain.
#
There's nothing else in that, you know, we're never going to find some sort of secret source
#
No, and it's always been fascinating to me how personality and identity are so contingent.
#
You know, you tweak the chemical balance of your brain a little bit or you, you know,
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if there's a tumor somewhere, you suddenly become an entirely different person.
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And I think this should introduce humility in a lot of people about who they really are.
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At three in the morning, I'm a pessimist.
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At noon in the daytime, I'm an optimist.
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I don't, you know, it's nothing to do with the world, it's to do with the brain chemistry
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You're a rational optimist.
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I am indeed a rational optimist.
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I know we are running kind of short of time, I need to wind this up.
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So let's kind of go through the different chapters.
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Your ninth chapter is the evolution of personality, where you refer to that classic book by Judith
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Rich Harris and Urchard Assumption, you know, one of my favorite books and one of the most
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important social science books of the 20th century.
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She kind of, I mean, her conclusions essentially are that, to quote you, differences in personality
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are formed roughly half by the direct and indirect effects of genes, and roughly half
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by something else which did not include the home environment at all, unquote.
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And Robert Plowman has now written a book called Blueprint, which makes exactly the
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same argument with it with even better data.
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And this is a remarkable discovery and an unexpected one, I have to say, I'm surprised
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by it, that our parents are not a great influence on our personalities.
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Our personalities are the product of our genes to a large extent, and also to sort of experiences
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which can often be quite ephemeral or quite accidental things that happen in our lives.
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Plowman gives the example of Charles Darwin, who was selected for the Beagle voyage by
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the captain who liked the shape of his nose, and he believed in phrenology that your nose
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told you something about your personality, and he thought this would be a good person
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to share a cabin with for five years because of the shape of his nose.
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Now, because of going on the Beagle, Charles Darwin, you know, obviously his personality
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must be influenced by that, as is, of course, his future life course, et cetera.
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An incredibly accidental thing that should shape his life.
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Some people feel threatened by this.
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What do you mean I just product my genes?
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I would like to be the product of my family.
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Well, actually, being the product of your genes means you're you, you're not what someone
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else has made you, and that actually is a very liberating thought, I think.
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Although it's an accident.
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Although it's an accident.
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And, you know, one of the really interesting revelations in this chapter, interesting factoid,
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if I may call it that, and that's another term that's evolved, factoid, was that people's
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incomes, men's incomes, are actually determined by how tall they are.
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Taller men tend to earn more.
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But this is a height at the age of 16, not their height at the age of 30.
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Isn't that fascinating?
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I'm very tall, but I wasn't particularly tall at 16, so there you go, I'd be richer if
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Listen, you're doing fine.
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Your next chapter is, again, extremely fascinating to me, which is the evolution of education.
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And education is something that's always kind of been dropped down.
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And this is particularly sort of a disturbing subject for me, because in India what we right
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now have is our education system has always been buggered.
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But now what we have is our demographic dividend, what people call is really a demographic disaster,
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where you have more than a million people a month coming into the workforce without
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And one of the key sort of problems there is that not only are there no jobs for them,
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they don't even have any skills.
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Our education system doesn't even give them the skills to go out there and do something.
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And there's this massive mismatch between demand and supply that the education supply
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is not providing the kind of skills that the markets actually need.
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And this is to me a classic fault of it being top down and markets not allowed to operate.
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And you know, I trace this back with the help of the wonderful Indian thinker about this
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Sugata Mitra to the idea that the British Empire decided it needed clerks who would
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be the same in Canada and India, so that the people in the center could understand, could
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And so they needed to be cogs in the machine.
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And so they needed to give them this very systematic similar education, a lot of which
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is still found around the world.
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And here we are in the 21st century with all sorts of technologies and we've not really
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changed the way we educate.
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Enabling children to learn and that often means using new technology is very important.
#
And I also I think touch on James Tooley's work in Hyderabad and other places where he
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finds that actually the people are voting with their feet and seeking out low cost private
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education of a extremely cheap kind, but rather than going for the state provision.
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And this shows how there is demand out there for change.
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It's interesting to hear that in India, you're just as frustrated by the mismatch between
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what schools are doing and what the workforce is demanding.
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The employment world is demanding.
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We feel the same in Britain anyway.
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No, and one quote that really spoke to me was you quoted a gentleman named Albert Shankar.
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And he said, start quote, it's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve.
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It resembles a communist economy more than our own market economy.
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It's correct, isn't it?
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I mean, you know, it really is a centrally planned system, most education systems in
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And he was a union official, actually, American union official.
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Your 11th chapter is about the evolution of population, about the harm that Malthusian
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What I'll do is, because we're kind of running out of time and you need to check out of your
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room where we are recording this, I'll skip over the rest of your chapters.
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I'll mention them and just end with a couple of broad questions.
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Your 11th chapter is the evolution of population.
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Your 12th chapter is the evolution of leadership, where you question Thomas Carlyle's great
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man theory, and you know, which is again, extremely fascinating.
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And actually, I do want to stop for a moment on chapter 13.
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That's the evolution of government.
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And you begin the chapter by writing about how gangs arise in prisons and what that sort
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This is fascinating work that shows that within prisons, people tend to self-organize into
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gangs and the gangs then impose order on the prisons and tend to suppress violence, actually.
#
And this happens in male prisons where the population goes over a certain size and therefore
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some kind of government is needed.
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And in fact, it's starting to happen in female prisons now, which are on the whole.
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Once a population reaches a certain size.
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And I think this is an analogy for what happened in societies as to when government spontaneously
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Because after all, what is government?
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It is a monopoly on violence.
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Essentially, that's the sort of core point of government is to say, we will have all
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the weapons or most of the weapons ourselves and we will have the right to violently or
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forcibly suppress certain behavior.
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No one else has that right.
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And once you've got that, you can live your life free from the threat of being arbitrarily
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assassinated by one of your rivals.
#
But of course, you've now got the threat of being arbitrarily assassinated by your government
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if it takes against you as indeed people have experienced in communist and fascist regimes.
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And the government can do a variety of things, which if someone else did, would be criminal.
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But the government, because of the government, they can do it.
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They can steal from you.
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They can just do whatever they want.
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It's extraordinary, isn't it?
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I did say steal from you.
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You did say steal from me.
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And they never say thank you either when they do that.
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So there's a great paragraph of yours, which of course I'm going to quote, which is government
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began as a mafia protection racket, claiming a monopoly on violence and extracting a rent
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tax in return for protecting his citizens from depredation by outsiders.
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This is the origin of almost all government.
#
And today's mafia protection rackets are all in the process of evolving into government
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And it's kind of very interesting how in a democracy like ours, for example, what an
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election amounts to is you have different criminal gangs vying to be the one legal mafia
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for the period of five years or whatever.
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It's a very good way of looking at it.
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You know, there's a guy who stands up there says, I want to spend other people's money
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I want to be in charge of spending other people's money on a massive scale for five years.
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And we are expected to find him a moral leader.
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You know, why are we surprised when we end up with people like Donald Trump in charge
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of the world, if that's if that's the recipe why which we're choosing people.
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You will have the most sociopathic, power hungry people coming to power anyway.
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And you end the chapter with by talking about quote, the equally mistaken belief that fascism
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and communism are opposites.
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In reality, they are closely related historical competitors for the same constituents.
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And they're both top down.
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I mean, I think there's much a lot of people realize that there's much more similarity
#
between the different types of totalitarian regime.
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And actually, if you look at the origins of fascism, you know, Mussolini was a communist
#
before he was a fascist, Hitler was a socialist before he was a Nazi, and so on.
#
And you know, they they end up being very, very similar.
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The one difference is that the fascist regimes tend to allow private business to depredate
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on their behalf, whereas communist regimes tend to encourage state owned businesses to
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depredate on their behalf.
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But that's about the only difference.
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Which is the difference of the structure of coercion.
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But the bottom line there in both cases is coercion and top down mass coercion.
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And of course, communism is slightly better at pretending that it's acting on behalf of
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But it isn't really, I mean, it ends up being an incredibly unequal society in terms of
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Your last three chapters are about the evolution of religion, the evolution of money, the evolution
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All really fascinating, but I don't want to hold you up now.
#
So I'll end with these broad questions.
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One of which is that, why is it that people crave top down explanations for everything?
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Is it the way we've evolved?
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Is it possibly selected for?
#
It's a difficult question, this, and I don't really know the answer.
#
But Dan Dennett talks about the intentional stance, which is the tendency to see agency
#
So if there's a thunderstorm, we assume that it's a god.
#
If there's an earthquake, we assume we're being punished for our sins or something like
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And perhaps there is an evolutionary psychology explanation for this.
#
Because if you walk around thinking the world is full of accidental happenings that don't
#
have any agency behind them, you will occasionally miss out on insights into how your fellow
#
human beings are behaving.
#
So if a rock hits you on the back of the head as you're walking down a path, you will think,
#
oh, well, I was unlucky.
#
A rock flew off the ground and hit me in the back of the head.
#
Whereas if you turn around and say, right, who threw that?
#
You've got a point, actually, that you're probably better off having a hair trigger
#
for assuming intentional actions.
#
It probably won't get you into too much trouble and it will enable you to be...
#
But it leads to what is essentially living in a state of constant conspiracy theory.
#
That's what we are as human beings.
#
We're constantly in a conspiracy theory that God created the world, that God is running
#
the world or that government is in charge.
#
These are conspiracy theories.
#
And I guess the world is so complex and mind boggling that it's natural to imagine that
#
this is selected for, that we look for simple narratives to explain the world.
#
And whatever narrative fits as many of the facts as there are, that narrative will make
#
And a top-down narrative can fit everything.
#
So you make sense of the world originally by invoking a God early on, their nature gods
#
and then the gods themselves evolve as religion evolves.
#
Which of course is why this book has not been terribly successful is because this isn't
#
something everyone really wants to hear.
#
I'm fighting against human nature here.
#
I'm trying to get people to reject their instincts.
#
Instead of the evolution of everything, you should have called your book The Design of
#
And then I might have sold more copies.
#
Let me ask my last question.
#
Given the sort of resistance to our ideas of spontaneous order and natural selection
#
and all these beautiful processes which explain the world, what is it that gives you sort
#
of hope and despair, it's a two-part question, about the future of human society, about the
#
evolution of human society, so to say?
#
Well, the track record of the last 200 years is the rational behind my rational optimism.
#
That we have sufficiently managed to embrace enlightened ideas to unleash a torrent of
#
innovation that has improved the lives of millions of people.
#
And it's quite hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
#
But despite ourselves, despite our intentional stance, despite our top-down view of the world,
#
nonetheless, in our interactions, we do enough bottom-up things to cause this increasing
#
amelioration of the state of human beings.
#
And actually, in order to do bad things with technology, in order to release computer viruses
#
or anything, you have to, on the whole, be secretive, cut yourself off from the ferment
#
of experimentation and bottom-up stuff that is driving the good stuff in the world.
#
So on the whole, I think the good will win out for that reason, because it can happen
#
in the sunshine, whereas bad stuff has to happen in the dark.
#
And that gives me some hope for the future.
#
But somebody sitting in the Roman Empire or just before the First World War or something
#
might have said something similar.
#
So I might be the man who's fallen out of the skyscraper and says, so far, so good,
#
as he passes the second story.
#
Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.
#
You've been incredibly perceptive in your understanding of what I was trying to say
#
and said some of the things much better than I say.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do hop on over to Amazon and pick up Matt
#
Ridley's excellent book, The Evolution of Everything.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
And you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragathi.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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A movie, a TV show, a book, and other stuff.
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Brush your teeth, set that alarm, get into your pajamas, and switch off those screens.
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