I thought The Evolution of Everything was written by Matt Ridley--the one with a doctorate in zoology, the former science journalist from The Economist, the author of the well-researched Red Queen and Genome. Instead, the Matt Ridley who wrote the Evolution of Everything is a British aristocrat, bank chairman, and Conservative member of the House of Lords. Actually, these two Matt Ridleys are the same person, but the journalist Matt Ridley is a much more compelling writer. The contemporary Matt

Q: ... we may be extraordinarily lucky and vanishingly rare. (c)Overall fascinating. Somewhat simplistic and haphazard, since all kinds of things are demonstrated changing. Still, the author pulls it off with more than a bit of grace. He flutters between different concepts, managing to reveal just enough tantalizing glimpses from varied topics: from morality to universe to population to internet to genome to culture to leadership to personality to tech to money to government to future. A fun rid...

Matt Ridley does not shy away from using the big words: in this book he aspires to offer nothing less than a general theory of evolution, for which Darwin's of course is a source of inspiration but only limited to the field of biology. Ridley wants to go much further, and just as Einstein formulated a general theory of relativity after his special one, also formulate principle(s) that cover the evolution of everything. Yes, everything.His approach is appealing: “if there is one dominant myth abo...

This was a very informative book. It is interesting to find out how new ideas are formed when they are most needed.I recommend this book to all.Enjoy andBe Blessed.

Dawkins fanboy tries to dress up an ideological book as a scientific one. Tries to show that Darwin's theory of evolution is just a byproduct or a specific version of the general theory of evolution proposed by Adam Smith about the emergent order that will prevail bottom-up in any free society of selfish actors. In the process ends up unwittingly using just another"skyhook" - that of benevolent evolution - throughout, by arguing endlessly that all the good things happened bottom-up and all the b...

An important book, if somewhat scattershot. Ridley prefers things to be done from the bottom up, instead of from the top down, and so do I. But. Even though I’m sympathetic to what he’s writing, he does get carried away at times. But he’s likely right, and almost always interesting. And he’s done his homework. From my notes:1779-81. Gen. Cornwallis’s army decimated by malaria in South Carolina and Virginia, in what one US historian called “covert biological warfare.” Cornwallis’s weakened troops...

Matt Ridley has an interesting theory here, and there are a few parts of the book that really shine. For instance, his chapters on the emergence of life, genes, culture, and technology are well-supported by his research, and with those subjects he makes a compelling argument for bottom-up evolution. However, I thought the theory felt forced with the other subjects he chose to focus on, especially education, population, and the economy. When writing about these topics in particular, Ridley seemed...

Pretty much everyone now agrees that top-down central planning of an economy doesn't work. Ridley here is claiming that top-down central planning of anything doesn't work and that the best systems evolve from the bottom up. He gives some good examples and gave me plenty to think about. However, especially in later chapters, it feels like he is cherry-picking examples to only support the idea that bottom-up is always better. Even some of his examples of things that evolved from the bottom don't a...

This satisfied my dilettantish wish to know something about everything. That's all. But it's not as if Ridley has done original scholarship, right? He is an acolyte of Richard Dawkins, and author of two books I never got around to but still feel as if I read (The Red Queen and Genome). He's a fan of Greenblatt's The Swerve and uses an epigraph from Lucretius's "De rerum natura" at the start of each chapter. Fine. He throws around Dennett's "skyhooks" very liberally and literally. Okay. I liked t...

I was on page 10 when I first got the feeling that author Matt Ridley might be completely full of shit. And he never gave me any reason to go back on that impression. I plowed through the book anyway, because I'm into completing things, but can't say I liked it.The part on page 10 that first set off my BS detector: Ridley writes about his discovery of Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius, Ridley fumes at his schoolmasters, "How could they have made me waste all those years at school plodding through...

I was very excited when I read the introduction to this book: finally someone who confirms that history is not so much driven top-down, but rather is the result of thousands of small decisions and behaviors, and thus always 'emergent'. But when I started reading the different chapters, that enthusiasm gradually died down, sometimes even turning into outright annoyance. Ridley seems to have written a political pamphlet in which he systematically downplays everything that has to do with government...

The idea of a bottom up, generalized evolution theory for so many aspects of our life is new to me & well worth exploring, especially since it flies in the face of the current practice of top down legislation which has failed miserably all too often. It's a really interesting premise that's strained a bit occasionally, but overall makes sense.Ridley relies heavily on the views of Epicurus (341-270 BC), Lucretius (99 BC-55 BC), Adam Smith(1723-1790), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Richard Dawkins (b...

Matt Ridley produces another libertarian classic, to match his earlier The Rational Optimist, with The Evolution of Everything. Taking evolution out of the strictly biological and to the cultural, technological, political, and about every other arena of human endeavor. What interests him particularly is exposing the creationism of the Left and government. By creationism is meant top down planning rather than a creator god. Mr. Ridley argues the case against planning and top down control in favor...

I have given a lot of books 5-star ratings, but this book stands out among them. I won't say it solves all the world's problems, but it certainly points to a lot of things that could be done better, which would improve the freedom and well being of the human race. The premise is that just about everything changes (and improves) by evolution in a bottom-up manner, rather than top-down by the action of somebody on high (such as God, the president, or anybody with power), including the universe, li...

Some people love Matt Ridley and some people hate him. Whatever your point of view, there's no mistaking that he gets people thinking and challenging assumptions. In his latest book, he gets us all reconsidering the notion that people and societies progress due to a top-down approach. Whether it's politicians who take (or are given) credit for economic progress or CEOs who are viewed as the only source of a company's success, Ridley provides ample evidence that neither are true.What he presents-...

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley “The Evolution of Everything" is a book on social Darwinism and it’s wide reaching effect from a libertarian perspective. It’s highly readable and provocative but misses the mark on two very important topics: climate change and the 2008 financial crisis. Well known journalist, scientist and educator; Matt Ridley, makes the persuasive case that evolution explains virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, f...

I took my time with this, reading a chapter or two every morning, and not just because I was enthralled by the ideas. It was also because of how the arguments were constructed. This is a learned, scholarly book, drawing on the author's earlier works, and yet immensely accessible.I'm familiar with the subject matter here: The evolution of our material world, as opposed to our physical world, and everything in it. Writers like Tim Harford have written about this, but in its holistic look at histor...

Starts off strong but devolves halfway into an unfocused diatribe. A more generous judgment is that the book is an ideological polemic with some scientific pretensions. Ridley starts from the intriguing premise (to which I am very sympathetic) that bottom-up processes of "self-organisation", from Charles Darwin's natural selection to Adam Smith's invisible hand, explain much of cosmic, biological, human, and socioeconomic evolution. In order to elucidate this claim, Ridley takes on the ambitious...

Charles Darwin stated in his theory of biological evolution that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. This happens through a process of trial and error whereby beneficial variations are favored and injurious ones discarded. Author Ridley calls this the 'Special theory of Evolution' and goes on to extend it to a General theory of Evolution by applying it to...

Evolution has always been a subversive idea. Order from chaos, progress without direction, design without a designer. But are humans the last word in natural evolution, or do their societies represent the evolution of evolution; from the biological to the ideational, cultural, and technological?This is the argument at the heart of The Evolution of Everything by the science writer Matt Ridley. Not only has life and the universe evolved, so do humans over time. These same basic laws of bottom up,