# The Evolution of Everything
## Metadata
- Author: [[Matt Ridley]]
- Full Title: The Evolution of Everything
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- It implies the emergence of something from something else. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=284))
- carry a connotation of incremental and gradual change, the opposite of sudden revolution. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=284))
- This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=288))
- Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. ([Location 289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=289))
- what biologists call adaptation. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=301))
- The way that human history is taught can therefore mislead, because it places far too much emphasis on design, direction and planning, and far too little on evolution. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=305))
- one huge mistake ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=311))
- assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=311))
- again and again we mistake cause for effect; ([Location 312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=312))
- a child learns, so a teacher must have taught her ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=314))
- Nassim Taleb ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=317))
- Antifragile, ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=318))
- ‘another reason to ignore newspapers with their constant supply of causes for things’. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=318))
- see past the illusion of design, ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=325))
- How does the world economy work? Economists pretend to explain, but they cannot really do so in any detail. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=330))
- human action, ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=332))
- not of human design. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=332))
- Note: See von Mises
- We latch on to any excuse to blame an extreme weather event on human agency – whether witchdoctoring or man-made global warming. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=341))
- Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=343))
- brains take shape without brain-makers, ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=345))
- simpler forms of evolutionary, unplanned change. ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=350))
- general theory of evolution ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=351))
- human beings none the less take credit for this process of endogenous change ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=354))
- Marx ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=378))
- said that the state was the means of delivering economic and social progress. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=378))
- Epicurus, ([Location 381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=381))
- the physical world, the living world, human society and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, ([Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=382))
- (Of the Nature of Things), ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=388))
- Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=389))
- died in mid-stanza around 49 BC, ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=389))
- ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. ([Location 397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=397))
- In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=402))
- Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did. ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=410))
- Lucretius’s special contempt for all forms of superstition, ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=417))
- He talks about people ‘crushed beneath the weight of superstition’, ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=426))
- Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, stumbled upon a copy of the whole poem. ([Location 433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=433))
- The Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and the American Revolution were all inspired by people who had to some degree imbibed Lucretius. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=438))
- emergence is more plausible, ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=461))
- the swerve. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=462))
- the Lucretian swerve, ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=464))
- Watch out, in the pages that follow, for many Lucretian swerves. ([Location 466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=466))
- Gottfried Leibniz, ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=467))
- treatise on theodicy, ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=467))
- Voltaire, ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=478))
- character Dr Pangloss ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=479))
- Candide ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=480))
- Thomas Jefferson, ([Location 490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=490))
- declared himself an Epicurean, ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=491))
- The influence of this great Roman materialist culminates rather neatly in the moment when Mary Shelley had the idea for Frankenstein. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=495))
- James Hutton, ([Location 511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=511))
- in 1785 laid out a theory that the rocks beneath our feet were made by processes of erosion and uplift that are still at work today, ([Location 511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=511))
- Pierre-Simon Laplace ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=519))
- Laplace’s determinism eventually crumbled ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=525))
- quantum mechanics and chaos theory. ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=525))
- uncertainty built into the very fabric of matter. ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00U1T9OSO&location=526))