• Complain

Matt Ridley - The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

Here you can read online Matt Ridley - The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2015, publisher: Harper, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Matt Ridley The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
  • Book:
    The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Harper
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2015
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.

The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitchthe endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridleys wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.

Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for naturethese were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.

As compelling as it is controversial, authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridleys stunning perspective will revolutionize the way we think about our world and how it works.

Matt Ridley: author's other books


Who wrote The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
CONTENTS
Guide
If you possess a firm grasp of these tenets you will see That Nature rid of - photo 1

If you possess a firm grasp of these tenets, you will see

That Nature, rid of harsh taskmasters, all at once is free

And everything she does, does on her own, so that gods play

No part...

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 2, lines 10903

A skyhook is an imaginary device for hanging an object from the sky. The word originated in a sarcastic remark by a frustrated pilot of a reconnaissance plane in the First World War, when told to stay in the same place for an hour: This machine is not fitted with skyhooks, he replied. The philosopher Daniel Dennett used the skyhook as a metaphor for the argument that life shows evidence of an intelligent designer. He contrasted skyhooks with cranes the first impose a solution, explanation or plan on the world from on high; the second allow solutions, explanations or patterns to emerge from the ground up, as natural selection does.

The history of Western thought is dominated by skyhooks, by devices for explaining the world as the outcome of design and planning. Plato said that society worked by imitating a designed cosmic order, a belief in which should be coercively enforced. Aristotle said that you should look for inherent principles of intentionality and development souls within matter. Homer said gods decided the outcome of battles. St Paul said that you should behave morally because Jesus told you so. Mohamed said you should obey Gods word as transmitted through the Koran. Luther said that your fate was in Gods hands. Hobbes said that social order came from a monarch, or what he called Leviathan the state. Kant said morality transcended human experience. Nietzsche said that strong leaders made for good societies. Marx said that the state was the means of delivering economic and social progress. Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a topdown description of the world, and a topdown prescription by which we should live.

But there is another stream of thought that has tried and usually failed to break through. Perhaps its earliest exponent was Epicurus, a Greek philosopher about whom we know very little. From what later writers said about his writings, we know that he was born in 341 BC and thought (as far as we can tell) that the physical world, the living world, human society and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, requiring no divine intervention nor a benign monarch or nanny state to explain them. As interpreted by his followers, Epicurus believed, following another Greek philosopher, Democritus, that the world consisted not of lots of special substances including spirits and humours, but simply of two kinds of thing: voids and atoms. Everything, said Epicurus, is made of invisibly small and indestructible atoms, separated by voids; the atoms obey the laws of nature and every phenomenon is the result of natural causes. This was a startlingly prescient conclusion for the fourth century BC.

Unfortunately Epicuruss writings did not survive. But three hundred years later, his ideas were revived and explored in a lengthy, eloquent and unfinished poem, De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, who probably died in mid-stanza around 49 BC, just as dictatorship was looming in Rome. Around this time, in Gustave Flauberts words, when the gods had ceased to be, and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when man stood alone. Exaggerated maybe, but free thinking was at least more possible then than before or after. Lucretius was more subversive, open-minded and far-seeing than either of those politicians (Cicero admired, but disagreed with, him). His poem rejects all magic, mysticism, superstition, religion and myth. It sticks to an unalloyed empiricism.

As the Harvard historian Stephen Greenblatt has documented, a bald list of the propositions Lucretius advances in the unfinished 7,400 hexameters of De Rerum Natura could serve as an agenda for modernity. He anticipated modern physics by arguing that everything is made of different combinations of a limited set of invisible particles, moving in a void. He grasped the current idea that the universe has no creator, Providence is a fantasy and there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. He foreshadowed Darwin in suggesting that nature ceaselessly experiments, and those creatures that can adapt and reproduce will thrive. He was with modern philosophers and historians in suggesting that the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival. He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.

Thanks largely to Greenblatts marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean. Reading his poem in A.E. Stallingss beautiful translation in my sixth decade is to be left fuming at my educators. How could they have made me waste all those years at school plodding through the tedious platitudes and pedestrian prose of Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar, when they could have been telling me about Lucretius instead, or as well? Even Virgil was writing partly in reaction to Lucretius, keen to re-establish respect for gods, rulers and topdown ideas in general. Lucretiuss notion of the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances which the Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana called the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon has been one of the persistent themes of my own writing. It is the central idea behind not just physics and chemistry, but evolution, ecology and economics too. Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did.

The Lucretian heresy

It is by the thinnest of threads that we even know the poem De Rerum Natura. Although it was mentioned and celebrated by contemporaries, and charred fragments of it have been found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (a library belonging probably to Julius Caesars father-in-law), it sank into obscurity for much of history. Passing quotations from it in the ninth century AD show that it was very occasionally being read by monks, but by 1417 no copy had been in wide circulation among scholars for more than a millennium. As a text it was effectively extinct. Why?

It is not hard to answer that question. Lucretiuss special contempt for all forms of superstition, and indeed his atomism, which contradicted the doctrine of transubstantiation, condemned him to obscurity once the Christians took charge. His elevation of the pleasure principle that the pursuit of pleasure could lead to goodness and that there was nothing nice about pain was incompatible with the recurring Christian obsession that pleasure is sinful and suffering virtuous.

Whereas Plato and Aristotle could be accommodated within Christianity, because of their belief in the immortality of the soul and the evidence for design, the Epicurean heresy was so threatening to the Christian Church that Lucretius had to be suppressed. His atheism is explicit, even Dawkinsian, in its directness. The historian of philosophy Anthony Gottlieb compares a passage from Lucretius with one from Richard Dawkinss

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge»

Look at similar books to The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.