Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Evolution Of E

CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Evolution Of Everything January 24, 2016

Kinds of awards. Documentaries on public television. It helps. Just things that. Why are you still doing all this . It takes 20 to 30 to do. My smart answer is, trying to figure out how to do it. The real answer is there is this worse looseness. Are you able to drive . I still farm. I was on my tractor the other day. What was your role point. Professor of agricultural education. Prior to that was a county extension agent. I moved to madison. My newspaper work. I have been freelance writing. Freelance columnist for ten years. How many polio survivors are they . Thousands. It is tricky. I have polio. Not very much. We are all going to be dead. Is there polio in the world today . Yes. Pakistan, afghanistan, nigeria. The aids foundation. You have provided guy is of dollars for free vaccinations. Unfortunately they see that is a problem. It is still there in the world. That is another reason why it is important here. Like ebola. Just because we dont have it here doesnt mean it cant come here. As. That is another way of doing it. Our kids getting vaccinations . Exactly right. Unfortunately in my biased opinion is terrible. What was the pain like . Like something i have never had before. It was unbearable pain. Awful. When did you write limping through life . Is that the 1st time people at the University Learned . I dont know if they were surprised. I tried to act like everybody else. My army friends. Professor emeritus. The farm boys polio memoir. Book tv on cspan2. Good evening, everybody. I would like to talk about housekeeping items. If you could turn off or silence your cell phones it would be greatly appreciated. Step up to one of the two microphones. We are being filmed this evening. And lastly it would be a great help if you could fall of your chairs. With that out of the way i am a bookseller here at politics and prose and i would like to welcome you all to tonights event. So much to offer. Started thinking about books for the holiday season. It is an excellent present for the avid reader in your life. Simply tell us the literary interests, favorite authors, genres, and once a month they will receive a book that has been carefully selected. You can even check out the reviews that have come in. Onto the main event. Very excited to introduce a graduate of oxford university. American editor with the economist. His previous book so livered 10 million copies. He is also a member of the house of lords. An ingenious study. The times call that a compelling argument and evidence that the pages flyby. The most important work. The ideas tackle in his book , Natural Selection and evolution still dominates humanity minded me of the debate i had with a friend of mine a few years ago, in firm control of everything, bodies and effectively ended influence and i was kind of astounded. I remember that we debated for quite a while. The very 1st thought was, i wish i had this back in. Put so much profound thought in a dont think he would have won the actual debate. [applause] thank you very much indeed. Three or four nights ago in toronto. And we it is on the web. And we just wiped the floor. That is not really true. They start of the 71 percent and end of the 74 percent. The 1st time i have done a formal debate. As michael said, some of my previous books have been about evolution. Evolution of virtue. I have been dancing around the topic on and off throughout my career. This time the living standards, two thirds reduction in Child Mortality , one 3rd increase comeau where that is coming from and why it is happening. It was all about innovation comes from the recombining. Very like the way we recombine genes to a new species and biology. I began to get more and more interested in the idea that Human Society evolves. Changes inexorably, gradually, incrementally and moves under its own steam without anybody being in charge and produces outcomes that are quite complex and sophisticated. It is a bit procrustean, this book. Every aspect of human behavior. Darwinian evolution is one of the great ideas of all time. Still very difficult, particularly because it produces a fit between form and function. When we look at the human eye it is designed in some purposeful suspense. And yet the purpose and plan was never in anyones mind beforehand. It has emerged as a thing. So if that is the case, could that be the case for social structure, the things that we have in the human world by the way we organize society and technology changes. When we have designed systems of politics or audi that they have emerged in the same way and have sophisticated and a good fit between form and function. I take that as far as i can go. I got this from a friend. Einsteins special theory of relativity. Any Information System will produce evolutionary change. And the crucial ingredient really is trial and error. That is a different word for Natural Selection. You dont come up with one solution to come up with lots. And i think that that is vital. And ingredient of human culture. If you look at the designs of early airplanes you find that are an enormous number of designs being charged. It is not the case to go from one designed to the next. And if i am right spontaneous order and complexity can emerge in this way than perhaps we are all making a bit of a creationist mistake but we look at Human Society. See order and assume there was an intelligent design. Do we look at it and assume someone has to be in charge . In fact we let the solutions emerge. A wonderful phrase. It is a hook that you attached to the sky in order to build a building from the top down. Immensely convenient, and the phrase originated about a pilot who was told that an airplane to stay up there and replied that it is not fitted with sky hooks. That is the origin. So obviously it is not imaginary device. From the bottom up, not the top down which is what i come back to throughout the book that try and make the case. Quite often it is designed topdown. Let me give you a couple of examples. Music, we tend to say soandso invented a new genre. It shows very clear dissent. Each genre, you can see his parentage. You can also see where the to come together and hybridize to produce a 3rd consequently show. They start off as vengeful and petty tyrants. And then they gradually become disembodied benevolent spirits of a singular nature. And you could trace the evolutionary progress. Governments involved. Piece in society. And you can see this happening in prison gates today, an example. Prison life is emerging. It is quite common for terrorist movements. Particular features. What kind of things they get to the ratios, the measurements in the cities. Very predictable. But of course that is not because someone is imposing. In the natural order of things. The result of human action but not human design. The whether outside is neither. But there is a category of things that are the result of human action but not human design. We dont have a word for it. But think about the english language, for example. It is manmade, but it is not the result of human design. Or that anyone is in charge of it. The central committee. And you can see the history buried within it. I reached to get inspiration for the origin. It was through his wonderful book that i started understand. Around the time of caesar and cicero. Apparently he died made stands up. And it is such an extraordinary thing. The spirits of gods. The same kind of material as nonliving things. We now know it is an incredibly accurate description. What can produce different forms. And he gets very close. Showing that this was suppressed for many centuries. The german Monastic Library became an enormous influence for me the person who begins his adam smith. He writes a book exactly a century before dawn, morality is something we work out between ourselves. From the reactions of others we learn what is right and what is wrong, what you can get away with what you cant and he is essentially saying morality is not decided by priests and handed down. And goes on to make the same argument about the economy. The system by which we all supply and demand products is an unplanned spontaneous system which produces spontaneous order and therefore there are 10 Million People that have to be fed every day. It would be a disaster. Completely discharged from duty. Innumerable delusions, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient. Directing toward those most suitable for the interest of society. Fa i think there is really quite a direct analogy here between biologicalnr evolution and economicw3 or social evolution. The tropical0rain forestxd with every species having its own nr rq is like a languagec that has grown organically. ccko one or two reviewerscw3 in order toc help the progress of societynrc we should assist biological evolution. nrok we should do this by telling people what i can i can. And even by killing them. Of course this led to eugenics and the holocaust. No. We are not interested in biological evolution. That is a slow process of no significance. There is a very sophisticated theory developed which i talked to the book. They used to be thought this is the main idea. The particles of culture so that they can compete with other particles of culture. But they have argued instead that it does not matter if there are not discrete units of culture. Some degree of error at some degree of selection and you will inevitably get an evolutionary result. It is a slightly subversive book, a bit anti elitist. I can assure you, it is a powerless institution. A little bit of hypocrisy. I am down on the great man theory of history. Then are women changing history whereas the opposite argument is that history produces great men. Lord acton said great men i usually bad men. And of course this leads me to particularly when thinking about the evolution of technology which shows this pattern of dissent with modification pedigrees and gradual inexorable change that leads me to say that perhaps we dont need a great theory of invention. Pretty well every inventor or discoverer is dispensed. Edison came up with a lightbulb. Twentythree people came up with the idea independently. Joseph swan. And no one is wrong, everyone is right. Ready to be discovered. They just needed one or two people to put them together. The same is true of more recent things. The search engine, one of the more useful inventions of my lifetime, google gets the credit but there were about 20 on the market. We would not use the word as a verb if it had not existed but we would still have the calm set. Even einstein was the only man to come up the social relativity. If you go back and read it is pretty clear they would have gotten there quickly. Indeed, as is documented in his book, we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, five of the electric telegraph, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the railroad. The more developed in the 1960s for describing based on very little data, describing the rate of improvement of computing power. And he said its very regular and questioning going at this direction you. Hdz think we could jump ahead and say, by 2000 we should be there. So lets get there now. You cant. Were actually still on track, 40 years later, improving computer at the same rate, despite the fact we know we could do it at this rate and you would think we could learn how to work faster. The biggest and most obvious example of an evolutionary system in our lifetimes, has come into existence in most our lifetime, is the internet. Its ridiculous to say that somebody invent the internet. It came from lots of different places and lots of different people, and even when you identify the people who get credit for part of it, whether its someone, actually they only played very, very small parts, and most of the protocols we use without knowing it when we use the internet actually come from anonymous people. From ordinary people. They come from peer to peer networks, often sharing for no financial gain, as Steven Berlinjohnson puts it, the internet is not a bottomup. It has no bottom or top, just a network. Its something that has simply grown. This is a hem to ordinary people as the source of most innovation if you like. Where is it going next . I dont know. Nobody knows. But i have a sort of suspicion that block change is the technology to keep your eye on next. This is the Technology Behind bitcoin and it is a essentially a method of selfverification, an opensource ledger that enables you to prove you are who youor and you have the val our you think youve got in something. Imgetting a hand wave but i dont fully understand it. Im not sure anybody does. The beautiful thing about this, the thing i love about lock chain, is that we still dont know the name of the man who launched it on the world. He is called nakamoto, a german web address, uses british english, he uses east coast american probably in california. Were pretty sure we know who he is by now but he is still denying it. I think thats rather beautiful. The reason he is denying it because if you invent a potential rival currency, they dont like and it they come after you. He thinks its worth retaining his anonymity, and good luck to him i say. The point is, he just started the ball rolling. Theres lots of people working on block chain now. And taking it in directions nobody expected, disenter mediating things like law so we wont need lawyers in the future. What a shame. And so on. I think ill stop there ive given you a taste of some of the things talk about in the book. Its called the evolution of everything so theres a chapter on literally everything. Id love to take some questions, and try to answer them. But dont promise ill be able. To. [applause] theres official selection with animals and would there be an equivalent with all the other forms of evolution as directed evolution . Of course in one sense, every thing in evolutionary change is going to be artificial because were doing the selecting, which i why i think this process is benign. We can select the good and reject the bad. There are certainly cases where you can imagine a policy, a Public Policy being to encourage experimentation and then choose the best result. So, for example, the longitude prize. The famous 18th century admiralty prize which they kind of screwed up because they refueled to give the prize to the man who deserved it. Saying go out there do experiments, find out how to measure longitude and come back and well give a huge prize to whoever has the best. That a deliberate stimulation of an evolutionary competition itch you like, with a deliberate artificial selection at the end of it, a bit like breeding a champion pigeon or whatever artificial selection is. Answered the question. I have another one ready. Another recently published book that has a good deal of similarity to you. Maybe its a little narrower. One by cesar hidalgo. Are you familiar with that. I dont think ive read that. Seems a little narrower. Just makes the case that not only do biological systems evolve but economies especially evolve, and even social systems and so forth. Right. I had the book sitting right there. The second half of the title is the evolution of everything not of everything sorry the evolution anyway, my question is whether you had any took any differences evolution of one thing i can say just as i said 23 people came up with the idea of the light bulb, roughly 23 people seems to be coming up with this idea, too. I know Brian Arthurs book spoke to nature of technology, tim arthurs book, and berlinjohnson how things cant remember the rest of the title. There are about five books kind of making this point at the same time. And it does seem to be in the air, seems to be ripe as an idea. This miss take on it. Its quite idio sincrat trick and not a book of the theory. Its anecdotes about what the world looks lime from my point of view. Based on minimum limited reading i thing yours is closer to the general theory of evolution of everything and that one may be more narrow. Im definitely going to buy that. Thank you. Id like you to reflect on the potential application the theory of anything, and that is basic income. Getting a lot of attention in the rest of the world, in england they call citizens income, and its saying that, lets provide everyone as a right with a basic income to ensure we have food and shelter to live our lives and explore and experiment, and it seems to be a marvelous example of taking what youre presenting and generalizing until the sphere of social evolution and Economic Policy and politics and democracy, and just wondering if you have any thoughts. I arent haley thought about that. I have to think about it. Havent got anything very intelligent to say. Its not anywhere close to being applied in britain as far as i know. But closely to being applied in finland and brazil and a few other places. Right. A number of cities throughout europe. The issue is i mean, its not dissimilar to the idea you talk about income to lowpaid people, something were in a boggle about in you end up subsidizing supermarkets to pay people less. So, there are perverse consequences of some of these things. So i have to think about it. It feels to me like its one size fits all policy, which i dont think an evolutionary policy would be. Evolution would say let a thousand flowers bloom see what happens. I think think about it. My sense is the way to ensure that everybody can pan temperatures pate in letting the flowers bloom. Right. Thank you. How would you reconcile the notion of the inevitability of Technological Development with the fact that there was no real transport in the americas precolombia. Really good point. Well done. Well, i would cling to my point by saying that the invention of the wheel and the invention of the road have to go together, and theres not much point in inventing a wheel unless you are also inventing forms of wheelbarrows. True, yep. I on the whole, i find it hard to think of examples of technologies that we should have invented a long time ago but didnt. The one i think is the wheeled suitcase. Why didnt we invent that 50 years ago, and i thought, hang on. Lightweight Aluminum Wheels wouldnt have been around 50 years ago. Would have had big, heavy cast iron things, and so they would have added a lot of weight to the suit kaatz, and airways were smaller and train stations were full of porters who had bare row which means you didnt a have to put the wheels on the suitcase. The history of the guy who invented the wheeled suitcase is he was turned down by firm after firm before he found one that did, but arguably, by the time he did find one that did, his technology improved to the point writ was really worth doing. Or Something Like that. So, i dont think theres not that many examples of things that get left on the shelf. But youre right no wheels in the

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