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The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

Ninay Desai

Many of us have been taught history, economics and politics through somewhat incomplete and at times, inaccurate stories of cause and effect highlighting the role of great individuals and exceptional happenings. With The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley intends to show us how almost everything around us is a result of a bottom-up, gradual evolutionary process.


A copy of Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything with a bright yellow cover lies propped face-down on a wooden table with an iced coffee, a bowl of French fries and pair of sunglasses. Photo by Ninay Desai.

This book's strength lies in the ideas it throws up, causing us to re-examine and rethink the way the world works, grows and changes. Ridley makes the point that much of recorded history,

“places far too much emphasis on design, direction and planning, and far too little on evolution.”

In separate chapters devoted to the evolution of varied fields such as government, morality, education, population, money, etc, Ridley lays out his primary thesis, that changes in all these spheres are incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous. And quite often, this slow evolution is not visible to the casual observer who may have trained his or her eyes on larger-than-life personalities or organizations expecting them to be the founts of change. Ridley writes,

“Much of the human world is the result of human action, but not of human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few."

Ridley states that things which survive and thrive are a result of bottom-up evolution, created without any active decision towards making a change, be it the evolution of all living things, industrialisation, religion or language. No one person or entity created or caused them and yet, here they are… all in working order.


Furthermore, Matt Ridley makes the point that top-down policy-making is a recipe for disaster since it is prescriptive without fully understanding any issue in addition to not allowing for the rough-tumble of the real world to separate the wheat from the chaff in the dustbowl of ideas. Ridley leans heavily on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to support his view.


For me, the most compelling chapters were about the evolution of morality, culture and technology. Ridley illustrates the concept of nothing being able to stop an idea whose time has come with an example of the light bulb and Edison:

“Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the electric bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. Somebody else would have come up with the idea. Others did. Where I live, we tend to call the Newcastle hero Joseph Swan the inventor of the incandescent bulb, and we are not wrong… In Russia, they credit Alexander Lodygin. In fact, there are no fewer than twenty-three people who deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison.”

The Evolution of Everything sets off to cast aside confirmation bias, the Great Man theory and mostly, the dusty idea of top-down policy-making. Unfortunately, Ridley isn’t very convincing in all chapters.


The chapters about leadership and economy are especially crippled by the very thing The Evolution of Everything is so determined to expose – confirmation bias and the desire to fit cherry-picked events into pre-determined theories about the world and how it works. Ridley states that one of the chief characteristics of an untrustworthy theory is that it is not refutable. Some of his own ideas and versions of events share that characteristic.


More specifically, in the chapter about the evolution of the money, Ridley writes that the 2008 Recession was caused more by the top-down policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations rather than bottom-up deregulation (such as the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial and investment banking activities). He also mentions, in passing, his own exposure to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

“My own experience as chairman of a bank was of endless reassurance from intrusive and detailed regulation right up till the point when it all went wrong. Far from warning of the crisis to come, regulators did the very opposite, and gave false reassurance or emphasised the wrong risks.”

It's a pity that he doesn’t mention that in September 2007, Northern Rock (the bank he was chairman of) became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances. And it’s not like he followed the libertarian, ‘survival of the fittest’ credo when his bank was sinking. Instead, Northern Rock applied to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding at the beginning of the crisis, but failed. Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007. In February 2008, Northern Rock was nationalised following a bailout by the UK government.  A parliamentary committee criticised Ridley for not recognising the risks of the bank's financial strategy and "harming the reputation of the British banking industry". But the 'bottom-up' £27 billion failure of Northern Rock and its 'top-down' rescue don’t find a mention in The Evolution of Everything. That's confirmation bias and ideological blindness at its peak.


I suppose, that is to be expected when an author is cherry-picking examples and anecdotes to prop up a theory that springs interesting questions and explains some things but not everything. I found it surprising that there is no mention of China's economic revolution in the chapter about economy just as Singapore's visionary leader, Lee Kuan Yew, viewed as 'authoritarian' by the West, is ignored in the chapter about leadership. Ridley wishes to make the point that top-down policies are always failures and these two examples amongst many others don't suit his narrative. 


The American author, F Scott Fitzgerald is reported to have said,

“The truest sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas simultaneously.”

I dare say, it is also a sign of a genuine spirit of inquiry and grace which, sadly, is lacking in The Evolution of Everything. As a result, it becomes a rather tedious read by the end.


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