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Cargando... The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (edición 2016)por Matt Ridley (Autor)
Información de la obraThe Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge por Matt Ridley
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Stay away from an audio book version at any cost. Everything around us has evolved from a bottom-up manner. But we tell stories that it came in a top-down, one-man-redefined-the-field way. We fail to appreciate randomness, environment and various other factors that led to a change. Matt Ridley call this as an argument of creationists, whereas the world has really evolved. The entire book is a convincing argument on various facets of our life and how it has evolved. I now really appreciate the concepts of emergence and complexity much better thru this fantastic, well researched and lucidly written book. It’s an excellent book that deserves five stars. But it is deliciously repetitive. To get the best out of it, I recommend you to read one chapter with enough breaks. You will love it. I was very excited when I read the introduction to this book: finally someone who sheds light on that history is not only 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, design or planning. Of course, he is right that many government decisions, or “steering decisions” in general, have negative or adverse effects. But to then vehemently throw the baby out with the bathwater, that is clearly a bridge too far. His previous book, The Rational Optimist, did contain some hints in that direction, but I still liked that book quite well. Here the libertarian-conservative that Ridley is (until recently he sat in the British House of Lords) clearly goes over the moon. Beware, he regularly offers interesting arguments, but his evidence usually rests on a very narrow basis; in most cases he seems to have only consulted 1 study about a certain problem, cherry picking his way through. And in some cases his argument is downright wrong or he contradicts himself. Take his analysis of what went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis: according to him, this was not the result of too far-reaching liberalization of the financial markets, but, on the contrary, of just too much government control and influence. At times Ridley's views are tantalizing, but regularly he misses the mark completely, out of ideological blindness. No, this is a turn off. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4422761323
If The Evolution of Everything has any value, it’s as a demonstration that, outside of science, there isn’t much progress – even of the vaguer sort – in the history of thought. Bad ideas aren’t defeated by falsification, and they don’t fade away. As Ridley’s book shows, they simply recur, quite often in increasingly primitive and incoherent forms.
"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley's wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for nature--these were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.As compelling as it is controversial, authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridley's stunning perspective will revolutionize the way we think about our world and how it works"--
"A book that makes the case for evolution over design and skewers a widespread but dangerous myth: that we have ultimate control over our world"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)303.48Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Social change Causes of changeClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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