The Evolution of Everything

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

THis book is about the growth of the world, and argues that the human society grows evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It is filled with tidbits related to this theory.

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book, full of insights and cool stories. I am generally a fan of Matt Ridelys writing.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Evolution originally meant unfolding.
• If there is one dominant myth about the world, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.
• Soviet-Harvard illusion: N.N. Taleb defines the Soviet-Harvard illusion as lecturing birds on flight and thinking about the lecture caused their skill of flying.
• "Laws in their most general signification, are necessary relations arising from the nature of things." - Montesquieu
• Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa. It is therefore laughable to think of the divinity of the creation of life on earth.
• "The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be." - Lao Tzu, philosopher
• "Participation in Capitalist markets and bourgeois virtues civilized the world." - Diedre McCloskey
• RNA can both store information (like DNA), and catalyze reactions (like proteins)
• "How does one feed Paris?" - Rhetorical question posed by Bastiat in Economic Harmonies. He implies that it is impossible to plan such a thing.
• For the economy to be anti-fragile, the individual firms must be fragile. The restaurant business is the robust because individual restaurants are short-lived and vulnerable. N.N. Taleb's dictum on business and fragility.
• Dictum: Noteworthy statement.
• "Things will happen in a well-organized effort without direction, controls or plans. That's the consensus among economists." - Larry Summers
• Trade can be thought of as sex between ideas. The merging of products/thoughts to better adapt to solve the problem.
• "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
• Kryder's law: The cost per performance of a hard disk computer is rising exponentially, at 40 % per year.
• If the government spends money on the wrong kind of science, it tends to stop people from working on the right kind of science.
• "A puppet is free so long he loves his strings." - Sam Harris
• Cartesian dualism: Two kinds of foundation, mental and physical. Also known as mind-body dualism or substance dualism.
• The modern educational system can be traced back to 1806, after Napoleon defeated Prussia. Prussia then went with intellectual Wilhelm von Hubolt to create a system for educating good soldiers.
• When Britain started with compulsory education in 1880 almost the entire population was literate (90 % of both sexes in 1870)
• In 1877 the British colonial rulers in India, 'created' a famine that killed 10 million people. In response to a draught, the government created camps where the hungry were fed with rations containing fewer calories than in Nazi concentration camps.
• General William Draper, head of the commission on foreign aid reported to Eisenhower in 1959 that aid should be tied explicitly to birth control, in order to decrease the supply of recruits to communism. Neither Eisenhower nor his successor Kennedy brought into this idea. However, Draper and his allies got endorsed in 1966 by Lyndon B. Johnson and population control became an official part of the US aid budget.
• Indira Gandhi had to implement sterilization campaigns to receive aid from the US. 8 million Indians were sterilized as a consequence.
• Childbirth and hunger/diseases are classic cases of backward causality. Higher childbirth rates are a cause of high child death rates.
• *Epiphenomena: Secondary effect or by-product.