It is worth reading. I hope people will buy it because i wanted to read it and they pitched me an opportunity to do this, cspan has on several different occasions, because i served with you guys, i wanted to do this one. This is a new exercise. Im exercise. Im in this chair are not those chairs. Thank you all very much for giving the listener and the viewer a little bit of insight. Thank you. Thank you. That was afterwards, book tvs Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. Watch past afterward Program Online on book tv. Org. Good evening everybody, welcome to politics and prose and thank you so much for coming out for tonights event. Before we get going, id like to talk about some housekeeping items. Im sure youve heard this before. First of all if you could turn off or silence your cell phones, it would be greatly appreciated. For the q a, please step up to the microphone so we can all hear and partake in thehehone conversation. We are being filmed so think of it as an opportunity to make lasting memories. And afterward, it would be a help if you could fold up your chair and leave the them near the nearest wall. I am the book seller here and behalf of the owners and staff, id like to welcome you all to tonights event. Im. Im sure many of you know, politics and prose had so much to offer including the bookofthemonth club. If youre already thinking about gifts for the Holiday Season or if youre like me and you wait to the last minute, this is an excellent book for the avid reader in your life. You can sign them or yourself up on our website. Tell us the literary interests and once a month they will receive a book that has been carefully selected by our booksellers here in the store. You can even check out some reviews that have come in from previous subscribers. Here to the main event, im excited to introduce matt ridley. Hes american editor with the economist before becoming a selfemployed writer and businessman. His books have sold over 2 million copies and been translated into over 30 languages. His ted talk had over 2 million views on youtube and if that isnt amazing enough, hes hes also a member of the house of lords. His seventh and latest book, the evolution evolution of everything has been called a genius book, a fascinating work, and the pages flyball by. The wall street journal called it his most important work done today. It reminded me of a debate, a a friend of mine a few years ago was up proponent that we were in control of everything from our body to our genes and technology and nature itself and the weather. I was kind of astounded. I remember that we debated for quite a while. He was an excellent debater so im not sure i actually won but my first thought a few weeks ago was i wish i had this book back then. My friend is a great debater, but matt has put so much profound thought into this book that i dont think he wouldve won the actual debate. So now lets get onto the good part of the evening. Please help me welcome matt ridley [applause]. Thank you. I did take on a full debate three or four nights ago in toronto on the question of whether humans best time is ahead or behind. I do believe its ahead and we just wiped the floor with that. [laughter] actually, thats not true. Before the debate it was 71 in our favor and we ended with 74 . This is the first time ive done a formal debate of that kind. As michael said, some of my present previous book have been about evolution. I wrote the evolution of sex, the abolition of virtue and so on. Ive been dancing around the topic of biological evolution throughout my career. My last book was about the Living Standards over the last 50 years and the 23rd reduction in childhood mortality and the one third increase in life expectancy. I talk about why its happening and i argue its all about innovation. Innovation comes from the recombining of technology to make new technology and thats very like the way we combine genes to make new species in biology. So i began to get more and more interested in the idea that Human Society of alls. By evolves, that means changes gradually, changes incrementally , and moves under its own steam without really anybody being in charge. It produces outcomes that are complex and sophisticated without having been planned. Thats what this book is trying to explore. Its a bit procrastinate in the book. I try to squeeze every aspect of Human Behavior and society to fit my feces. Sometimes i succeed but maybe not always. You can be the judge of that. Its one of the great ideas of all time. It produces a fit between form and function without anyone having a plan in mind in the first place. When we look at the human eye, its clearly designed for seeing in some purposeful sense. Yet that plan was never in anybodys mind before. Thats darwins argument that without anyone having intended it to be foreseen, it has emerged as a thing for seeing. If thats the case for biological structures, then could that be the case for social structures, for some of the things we have in the human world. The way we organize our society and the way our technology changes. When we have really welldesigned systems of politics or morality or culture or religion or Something Like that, that they have emerged in the same way. Theyve got very, very sophisticated and it was a good fit between form and function, but actually theyve never been designed by anybody. So i take that theory as far as i can go. I make the arguments in the book, and i got this phrase from a friend, richard webb, darwins idea is the special theory of evolution just as einstein has a theory of relativity relativity. The general theory of evolution is that any subject to recombination and selection will produce evolutionary change. It happens everywhere and anywhere. Of course cultural ingredients are just part of trial and error that you have a different work of natural selection, in a way, way, you dont come up with one solution, you come up with lots of solutions and you pick the best one. I think thats actually a vital ingredient of human culture. We do a lot of trial and error. If you look at the design of early airplanes in the first 20 years after the airplane was invented, you find that theres an enormous number of designs being tried with the propeller in the front or the back and the number of wings varying and et cetera. It isnt the case that we go from one designed to the next design. We do lots of trials. Then we select one from each. If im right that this spontaneous order and complexity can emerge in this way without anyone being in charge, then perhaps were all making a bit of a creationist mistake when we look at society. That is to say that the mistake is to see order and assume there was a designer. The intelligent design argument if youd like. How do we look at Human Society. Do we look at it in assume someone has to be in charge or someone has to design it . Theres a wonderful term called the skyhook to describe this. Its a hook you attached to this guy in order to build a building from the top down. It would be very convenient if one could do that. The phrase originated in a newspaper report from the First World War about a pilot who was told in an airplane to stay up there because we dont need you for the moment. He said this machine is not fitted with skyhooks. According according to the dictionary that the origin of the word. Its an imaginary device, it doesnt exist. Thats the theme i come back to throughout the book when i try to make the case that quite often we look at an aspect of Human Society, we think its being designed from the top down when in fact its being designed from the bottom up. Let me give you a couple examples to get you thinking about the kind of examples im talking about. Music. We tend to say soandso invented a new genre of music, but if you look at the history of music, theres very clear modifications. You can see where its coming from in the genre before and you can see where two genres come together and produce a third genre or Something Like that. Then you can trace this evolutionary progress. Governments evolve. Ever meant start out back in the stone age as a protection wreckage or a monopoly on violence. We will impose peace in your society if you like let me have a monopoly on the violence. You can see this happening in prison gangs today. Thats an example of how a monopoly on violence within certain aspects of prison life is emerging as if it was a form of typical government. In fact, its quite common for terrorist movements to turn themselves in when they have a monopoly. Cities evolve. Cities change as they grow. They have predictable features about how they grow and about what kind of things they get as they grow or what kind of ratios between different measurements in cities. Very predictable. You can write rules about how cities grow, but of course thats not for someone imposing the rules, its because thats sort of in the natural order of things. It becomes inevitable becomes inevitable at a certain point. These are things that are the result of human action but not of human design. The weather outside is not, but in in between there is a category of things the results of human action but not of human design. Its a really interesting topic. We dont have a word for it. I actually call them fergusons because if you think about the english language for example, its manmade but its not the result of human design. Its ridiculous to say that anyone planned the english language or that anyone invented it. Or indeed the anybodys in charge of it. There is no chief executive of the english language, thank goodness, it would probably make a mess of it if it did. You can kind of see the history buried in fossils within it. Its a living fossil of a different form of language. Its very much something that evolved. I reached back 2000 years to get inspiration for the origin of this idea and it was really through stephens wonderful work the swerve that i started to get to understand this extraordinary poem written around the time of caesar on the nature of things. Apparently, he died mid stands up because it comes to a rather abrupt ending. Its such an extraordinary poem. It talks about how the world is made of absence and voids. Everything, even living thing is made from material as nonliving thing but theyre recombined in different ways. We now know that to be incredibly accurate description of the world. He says by recombining them different ways, one can produce different forms and he gets very close to getting to the concept of evolution by natural selection. It became an enormous influence on many of the great thinkers of the renaissance and enlightenment. For me the person who begins to put it all together and come up with an example of something emerging through human action but not through human design is that of smith. In 1759 he writes a book called moral sentiments exactly a century before darwin which has a really subversive idea and that is that morality is something we work out between ourselves like kind of calibrating our behavior against the reaction of others. From the reaction of others we learn what is right and what is wrong and what you can get away with and what you cant and so on. Hes essentially saying that morality isnt something that was decided by priests and handed down to us. Its something that weve negotiated amongst ourselves. Its very much a bottom up view of the world. He goes on to make the same argument about the economy, that there is the system by which we all supply and demand products, goods and services among ourselves and its an unplanned spontaneous system that produces really spontaneous order. Therefore, for for example in a city like washington, there are 10 Million People who have to be fed every day and nobodys in charge of feeding them and yet they get fed. It would be a disaster if someone was in charge of trying to feed them. As adam smith puts it, the suffering is completely discharge from the duty in attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to numerous delusions and no human form could ever be sufficient. I think thats really quite a direct analogy here between biological evolution and economic evolution, if youd like or social evolution. A tropical rain forest with every species having its only should is like a language with every word having its own use. Its grown organically to this great complexity. This idea is the complete opposite of social darwinism. I wanted to review that point. He essentially said, in order to help the progress of society, we should help biological evolution on the way. We should do this by telling people whether they can or cant breathe, based dare lysing them and even by killing them. Of course this led to the holocaust. Im saying no, were not interested in biological evolution anymore. Thats a slow process of no significance for Human Society. What counts is to get competition going among ideas. Bad ideas can die so people dont have to. There is now a very sophisticated theory of cultural evolution developed and which i touch on in the book. It essentially argues that it used to be thought that this was the meme idea that you have to have particles of culture so they can compete with other particles of culture. But richardson and henry have argued instead that actually doesnt really matter if there arent discrete units of culture. What counts is that there is some degree of replication of ideas, the ideas get spread about in some degree of error to produce mutations and some degree of selection. You will in evitable he get an evolutionary result. Its a slightly subversive book. Its a bit antielitist. You might think thats a bit rich coming from a member of the house of lords, but i but i assure you its a very powerless institution and im a very small cog in it. Im kind of down on the great man theory of history which is what really counts as men or women changing history. In fact, the argument is that history changes men and produces great men. They said great men are usually bad men and i think hes been proved right on that. The people who took history generally did so in the wrong direction. This leads me to, particularly when thinking about the evolution of technology, its something that very clearly shows this modification, pedigree and family trees and gradual change. It leads me to say that perhaps we dont need a great theory of invention either. When you think about it, almost every inventor is disposable. If they had fallen under a bus before they made the discovery, someone else wouldve come up with it. Edison came up with the lightbulb, but 23 people came up with the idea of the incandescent light in that decade, independently. Nobody is wrong, everybody is right. The idea was right. It was ready to be discovered. Were all there, i just needed one or two people to put them together. The same is true of more recent things, if you think about it. The Search Engine which is one of the most useful inventions of my lifetime, i use it every day and im sure many of you do. Google gets the credit, but actually, there were about 20 search Search Engines on the market when google came onto the market. We certainly wouldnt use the word google as a verb if google hadnt existed, but we would still have the concept. Darwin discovered evolution and then was shocked to get a letter from another friend with the exact same notion. If you go back and look at what people were reading at the time its clear that they wouldve gotten that very quickly. We know of six different inventors of the thermometer, four of photography, three of the logarithms, and the list goes on and on. Does that mean we dont need inventors . No, certainly certainly not. Someone will make these discoveries and theyre going to happen at the right place in the right time when the conditions are right, but it does mean that technology is choosing its inventors rather than the other way around. Rather than saying watson and crick made dna, he said dna made watson and crick. If watson had been killed by a tennis ball, i know that i wouldnt of discovered it, but who wouldve . Its very obvious that there are five or six people who wouldve gotten there in the end. This evolutionary view of technology is not meant to disrespect scientists or inventors but just to point out that there is an evolutionary nature to this. You cant cheat it. This comes out quite well in moores law which is the law that more developed in the 1960s describing, based on available data, Computing Power and he said its very regular and its going in this direction. Youd think once we discovered that we could jump ahead and say right, well in this case, by 2000 we should be there so lets get there now. It turns out you cant. Turns out were still on track 40 years later. Were improving computing at the same rate but the fact that we know we can do it at this rate, we could figure out how to do it faster. For me, the biggest and most obvious example of the system in our lifetime is the internet. Its ridiculous to say that someone invented the internet. It came from lots of different places and lots of different people. Even people who get credit for part of it, actually actually they only played very small parts. Most of the protocols that we use, without knowing it, actually come from anonymous people. They come from ordinary people. They come from peertopeer networks and they come from no financial gains. The internet is not even a bad bottom up thing because it had no bottom. It was just a network. Its something that has simply grown from ordinary citizens. Where is it going next . Nobody knows, but i have a suspicion that block chain is the thing to keep your eye on that this this is the Technology Behind bit coin and its essentially a method of self verification. Its an open source ledger that allows you to prove that you are who you are and youve got the value you think youve got in something. I give you a hand weight at this point because you dont fully understand it but im not sure anybody does. The beautiful thing is, the thing i love about it is that we still dont know the man who launched it on the world. He has a german web address, he uses british english, he uses east coast american, were pretty sure we know who he is but hes denying it and i think thats rather beautiful. The reason hes denying it is because if you invent arrival to governmental currency they dont like it and they come after you. He wants to maintain his anonymity and i say good luck to you. The point is, he just started the ball rolling. Theres lots of people working on it now. They hope to make it so we dont need lawyers in the future. What a shame. [laughter] i think ill stop there. Theres a chapter on literally everything because its called the evolution of everything. Id like to take some questions and try to answer them, but i dont promise ill be able to. [applause]. I