Does Darwin’s theory apply to everything,from the internet to leadership? The columnist and disgraced banker has written a bumptious, misguided bookMatt Ridley has made a discovery. The natural selection that Darwin described in The Origin of Species is only a specific example of a universal process. As he tells us at the start of this book, or Darwinism is “the special theory of evolution”. But there is a general theory of evolution,too, and it applies to society, and money,technology, language, and law,culture, music, and violence,history, education, and politics,God, morality. The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they point to “path dependence”; they point to descent with modification; they point to selective persistence.
In the course of the book’s 16 chapters, or which deal with the evolution of everything from the internet to leadership,Ridley repeats this mantra many times: Darwin’s mechanism of selective survival resulting in cumulative complexity applies to human culture in all its aspects, too. Our habits and institutions, and from language to cities,are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, or undirected,mutational, inexorable, or combinatorial,selective and “in some sense vaguely progressive”.
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Source: theguardian.com