Who invented the Internet? Who is in charge of the English language? Where is the central committee of the world economy? Some of the most important phenomena of the human world are the products "of human action but not of human design," in the words of an 18th-century Scottish army chaplain turned philosopher by the name of
Adam Ferguson. They evolve.
In my new book, The Evolution of Everything, I argue that evolution is a central feature of human culture, as well as of biology, and that we remain in thrall to what are effectively creationist myths about how the world works. We give governments too much credit or blame for running or ruining the economy; inventors too much reward for effectively being in the right place at the right time; generals too much praise for winning unlosable wars; and gods too much obeisance for directing the world.
The word "evolution" means unfolding. It has connotations of incremental, inexorable, and undirected change, driven by random mutation and nonrandom selection, yet the great insight of Charles Darwin was that it is capable of building complexity, order, and function. The body of a bird is exquisitely designed — we have no other suitable word — to fly, yet that purpose has never existed as a plan or thought in any mind. It is, in the philosopher Daniel Dennett's words, a "free-floating rationale."
It took ages to persuade the world of this truth in biology, and in many places we have not yet won the argument. Yet we have hardly begun to tackle the same task with respect to human affairs: to persuade the world that just because the American economy (say) shows an exquisite ...