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Economic Topic : Trade – When Ideas have SexMatt Ridley?shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is. Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other."Matt Ridley: When ideas have sexFILMED?JUL 2010 ??POSTED?JUL 2010???TEDGlobal 2010Premise to Essay QuestionIn the 1970’s the future of the world was bleak… population explosion was inevitable, famine would break out because of lack of food production, chemicals in our environment would give us cancer and shorten our lives, acid rain is falling on the forest, deserts are advancing every year, we are running out of oil, and nuclear winter would wipe us out.Essay Question.In reality, in the last lifetime, real income per capita has tripled, lifespans are up 30%, child mortality is down 66%, per capita food production is up 33%. How did we achieve this, you must understand how humans bring together their brains to allow their ideas to combine and recombine to meet and indeed mate, in other words you need to understand how ideas have sex. How did we get from making stone tools, to plastic computer mice? The secret is in the combination and exchange of ideas, or trade. Explain how trade has allowed our lives to get better instead of the apocalypse we thought was certain to have already arrived. How has trade affected your life? How do you think trade will affect the future?When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s,?the future of the world was bleak.?The population explosion was unstoppable.?Global famine was inevitable.?A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment?was going to shorten our lives.?The acid rain was falling on the forests.?The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year.?The oil was running out,?and a nuclear winter would finish us off.?None of those things happened,?(Laughter)?and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime,?the average per-capita income?of the average person on the planet,?in real terms, adjusted for inflation,?has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime.?Child mortality is down by two-thirds.?Per-capita food production?is up by a third.?And all this at a time when the population has doubled.How did we achieve that, whether you think it's a good thing or not??How did we achieve that??How did we become?the only species?that becomes more prosperous?as it becomes more populous??The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population,?and the level of the graph?represents GDP per capita.?I think to answer that question?you need to understand?how human beings bring together their brains?and enable their ideas to combine and recombine,?to meet and, indeed, to mate.?In other words, you need to understand?how ideas have sex.I want you to imagine?how we got from making objects like this?to making objects like this. These are both real objects.?One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago?of the kind made by Homo erectus.?The other is obviously a computer mouse.?They're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree.?I've tried to work out which is bigger,?and it's almost impossible.?And that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand.?They're both technologies. In the end, their similarity is not that interesting.?It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand.?The differences are what interest me,?because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design?for about a million years --?from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago.?Homo erectus made the same tool?for 30,000 generations.?Of course there were a few changes, but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days.?There was no progress, no innovation.?It's an extraordinary phenomenon, but it's true.?Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years.?And there's another difference too,?which is the object on the left is made from one substance.?The object on the right is made from?a confection of different substances,?from silicon and metal and plastic and so on.?And more than that, it's a confection of different ideas,?the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser,?the idea of transistors. They've all been combined together in this technology.And it's this combination,?this cumulative technology, that intrigues me,?because I think it's the secret to understanding?what's happening in the world.?My body's an accumulation of ideas too:?the idea of skin cells, the idea of brain cells, the idea of liver cells.?They've come together.?How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things??Well, it uses sexual reproduction.?In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one,?then one has to be better than the other.?One goes extinct for the other to survive.?But if you have a sexual species,?then it's possible for an individual?to inherit both mutations?from different lineages.?So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon?the genetic innovations of the whole species.?It's not confined to its own lineage.What's the process that's having the same effect?in cultural evolution?as sex is having in biological evolution??And I think the answer is exchange,?the habit of exchanging one thing for another.?It's a unique human feature.?No other animal does it.?You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange --?and indeed there's reciprocity in other animals --But the exchange of one object for another never happens.?As Adam Smith said, "No man ever saw a dog?make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog."?(Laughter)?You can have culture without exchange.?You can have, as it were, asexual culture.?Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture.?They teach each other traditions?which are handed down from parent to offspring.?In this case, chimpanzees teaching each otherhow to crack nuts with rocks.?But the difference is?that these cultures never expand, never grow,?never accumulate, never become combinatorial,?and the reason is because?there is no sex, as it were,?there is no exchange of ideas.?Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops.?There's no exchange of ideas between them.And why does exchange raise living standards??Well, the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817.?And here is a Stone Age version of his story,?although he told it in terms of trade between countries.?Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe.?Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe.?So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam.?He doesn't need Adam.?He can make his own spears and axes.?Well no, because if you think about it,?if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes,?and then they trade,?then they will each have saved an hour of work.?And the more they do this, the more true it's going to be,?because the more they do this, the better Adam is going to get at making axes?and the better Oz is going to get at making spears. So the gains from trade are only going to grow.?And this is one of the beauties of exchange, is it actually creates the momentum?for more specialization,?which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on.?Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time.?That is prosperity, the saving of time?in satisfying your needs.Ask yourself how long you would have to work?to provide for yourself?an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by.?If you had to start from scratch, let's say you go out into the countryside.?You find a sheep. You kill it. You get the fat out of it.?You render it down. You make a candle, etc. etc.?How long is it going to take you? Quite a long time.?How long do you actually have to work?to earn an hour of reading light?if you're on the average wage in Britain today??And the answer is about half a second.?Back in 1950,?you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage?to acquire that much light.?And that's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you've gained?since 1950, as it were,?because that's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else,?or you can acquire another good or service.?And back in 1880,?it would have been 15 minutes?to earn that amount of light on the average wage.?Back in 1800,?you'd have had to work six hours?to earn a candle that could burn for an hour.?In other words, the average person on the average wage?could not afford a candle in 1800.Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse,?and ask yourself: "Who made them and for who?"?The stone axe was made by someone for himself.?It was self-sufficiency.?We call that poverty these days.?But the object on the right?was made for me by other people.?How many other people??Tens? Hundreds? Thousands??You know, I think it's probably millions. Because you've got to include the man who grew the coffee,?which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig,?who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into the plastic, etc.?They were all working for me,?to make a mouse for me.?And that's the way society works.?That's what we've achieved as a species.In the old days, if you were rich,?you literally had people working for you.?That's how you got to be rich; you employed them.?Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him.?They made his silly outfits, like this,?(Laughter)?and they did his silly hairstyles, or whatever.?He had 498 people?to prepare his dinner every night.?But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles?and looking at Louis XIV's pictures,?he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too.?They're in bistros and cafes and restaurants?and shops all over Paris,?and they're all ready to serve you at an hour's notice with an excellent meal?that's probably got higher quality?than Louis XIV even had.?And that's what we've done, because we're all working for each other.?We're able to draw upon specialization and exchange?to raise each other's living standards.Now, you do get other animals working for each other too.?Ants are a classic example; workers work for queens and queens work for workers.?But there's a big difference,?which is that it only happens within the colony.?There's no working for each other across the colonies.?And the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor.?That is to say, they specialize with respect to reproduction.?The queen does it all.?In our species, we don't like doing that.?It's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves, is reproduction.(Laughter)?Even in England, we don't leave reproduction to the Queen.(Applause)So when did this habit start??And how long has it been going on? And what does it mean? Well, I think, probably, the oldest version of this?is probably the sexual division of labor.?But I've got no evidence for that.?It just looks like the first thing we did?was work male for female and female for male.?In all hunter-gatherer societies today,?there's a foraging division of labor between, on the whole, hunting males and gathering females.?It isn't always quite that simple,?but there's a distinction between?specialized roles for males and females.?And the beauty of this system?is that it benefits both sides.?The woman knows?that, in the Hadzas' case here --?digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat --?she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein?is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat.?And she doesn't have to go on an exhausting hunt?and try and kill a warthog.?And the man knows that he doesn't have to do any digging?to get roots.?All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog?it's big enough to share some.?And so both sides raise each other's standards of living?through the sexual division of labor.When did this happen? We don't know, but it's possible?that Neanderthals didn't do this. They were a highly cooperative species.?They were a highly intelligent species.?Their brains on average, by the end, were bigger than yours and mine?in this room today.?They were imaginative. They buried their dead.?They had language, probably,?because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us,?which was discovered here in Oxford.?And so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills.?They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the Neanderthals.?But there's no evidence?of a sexual division of labor.?There's no evidence of gathering behavior by females.?It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men.?And the other thing there's no evidence for?is exchange between groups,?because the objects that you find in Neanderthal remains,?the tools they made,?are always made from local materials.?For example, in the Caucasus?there's a site where you find local Neanderthal tools.?They're always made from local chert.?In the same valley there are modern human remains?from about the same date, 30,000 years ago,?and some of those are from local chert,?but more -- but many of them are made?from obsidian from a long way away.?And when human beings began?moving objects around like this,?it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups.Trade is 10 times as old as farming.?People forget that. People think of trade as a modern thing.?Exchange between groups has been going on?for a hundred thousand years.?And the earliest evidence for it crops up?somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa, when you see obsidian and jasper and other things?moving long distances in Ethiopia.?You also see seashells --?as discovered by a team here in Oxford --?moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria.?And that's evidence that people?have started exchanging between groups.?And that will have led to specialization.How do you know that long-distance movement?means trade rather than migration??Well, you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals,?who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mount Isa,?which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe.?They traded them with their neighbors?for things like stingray barbs,?and the consequence was that stone axe sended up over a large part of Australia.?So long-distance movement of tools?is a sign of trade, not migration.What happens when you cut people off from exchange,?from the ability to exchange and specialize??And the answer is that?not only do you slow down technological progress,?you can actually throw it into reverse.?An example is Tasmania.?When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago,?the people on it not only experienced?slower progress than people on the mainland,?they actually experienced regress.?They gave up the ability to make stone tools?and fishing equipment and clothing?because the population of about 4,000 people?was simply not large enough?to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had.?It's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island.?How many of the things in our pockets?could we continue to make after 10,000 years??It didn't happen in Tierra del Fuego --?similar island, similar people.?The reason: because Tierra del Fuego?is separated from South America by a much narrower straight,?and there was trading contact across that straight?throughout 10,000 years.?The Tasmanians were isolated.Go back to this image again?and ask yourself, not only who made it and for who,?but who knew how to make it.?In the case of the stone axe, the man who made it knew how to make it.?But who knows how to make a computer mouse??Nobody, literally nobody.?There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse.?I mean this quite seriously.?The president of the computer mouse company doesn't know.?He just knows how to run a company.?The person on the assembly line doesn't know?because he doesn't know how to drill an oil well?to get oil out to make plastic, and so on.?We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole.I am of course quoting from a famous essay?by Leonard Read, the economist in the 1950s,called "I, Pencil"?in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made,?and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil,?because the people who assemble it don't know how to mine graphite,?and they don't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing.?And what we've done in human society,?through exchange and specialization,?is we've created?the ability to do things that we don't even understand.?It's not the same with language.?With language we have to transfer ideas?that we understand with each other.?But with technology,?we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities.We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind?to an extraordinary degree.?And by the way,?that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested?in the debate about I.Q.,?about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups.?It's completely irrelevant.?What's relevant to a society?is how well people are communicating their ideas,?and how well they're cooperating,?not how clever the individuals are.?So we've created something called the collective brain.?We're just the nodes in the network.?We're the neurons in this brain.?It's the interchange of ideas,?the meeting and mating of ideas between them,?that is causing technological progress,?incrementally, bit by bit.?However, bad things happen.?And in the future, as we go forward,?we will, of course, experience terrible things.?There will be wars; there will be depressions;?there will be natural disasters.?Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure.?But I'm also sure that, because of the connections people are making,?and the ability of ideas?to meet and to mate?as never before,?I'm also sure?that technology will advance,?and therefore living standards will advance.?Because through the cloud,?through crowd sourcing,?through the bottom-up world that we've created,?where not just the elites but everybody?is able to have their ideas?and make them meet and mate,?we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.Thank MENT ON THIS TALK441?total commentsSign in to add comments or?Join (It's free and fast!)Sort By:??????Ignacio G.R. Gavilán0ReplyApr 20 2013:?Sex as a metaphor for collaboration and exchange. Interesting and giving some hope on prosperityKunal Bavishi0ReplyApr 20 2013:?This is the age of super specialization, we all are workers of Adam Smith's pin factory .Niv Banay0ReplyApr 18 2013:?Thats the best ted talk imho.i really liked the stone and mouse example. and the spears and axes example.i'm not sure tho why "it's not the same with language" or if there are more examples where this method doesn't workBogdan Bocse+1ReplyFeb 25 2013:?Great speech!Upon some research I found that monkeys have been taught to use money under laboratory conditions:[ How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money. Not long after, the first prostitute monkey appeared ] Hiatt0ReplyJan 15 2013:?It is an interesting point about Neanderthal man and his lack of diversification in terms of labor. It has long been believed that this man had a high degree of intelligence , however an in ability to communicate via conversation.There is evidence that contradicts the theory that they had advanced linguistic skills. It is thought their linguistic skills were mor akin to simians than Homsapiens. Communication was more pack ,instinctive, body language,facial expressions and some think kinetic thought.When encounters with other clans occurred there is forensic evidence that they were shunned and perhaps even thought of as "less" than human. Verbal communication is critical in terms of not just socialization and sharing ideas, but neurologically the spoken word has direct causation with our individual health, in contest as to that word being affirming or negative? is what some anthropologist feel was the downfall of their clan.Theodore A. Hoppe?200+0ReplyMar 4 2013:?While at UCLA last fall I had the opportunity to hear a lecture by Scott Reed of UC- Santa Barbara. His research in parts examines this distrust we have on outsiders. Have a look at this TEDx talk regarding the notion of "less than human." I sent it along to Prof. Reed after his lecture and he was surprised by Wheatley's findings. Its toward the end of the talk. Andrés Ferrero0ReplyNov 24 2012:?The only thing is the environmental/cost in resources for this "growth".?Coltan is now destroying rainforests, (coltan is used in touch phones and other stuff), so.. who?s going to care about anything with such "high earnings".YET, this might be blind acting like the Easter Island men, who cut down all their trees. (See Jared Diamond)-Hope not.Krisztián Pintér?200+0ReplyTED TRANSLATORMar 3 2013:?the good old jared diamond. here, have some reading Sennouni0ReplyNov 4 2012:?great theory !chenghow ng0ReplySep 30 2012:?So we first combine and use hybrid technology to create something new, and then we use separate those works to all individuals, why not we all learn on those ideas, and combine those ideas and leave manufacture job to technology and design?Julian Colucci0ReplyAug 29 2012:?The acceleration of innovation through increased communication and collaboration. NIoceScott Armstrong?50+0ReplyAug 25 2012:?...they probably should use a condom..Shrilakshmi Subramanian0ReplyAug 15 2012:?If it is indeed a deduction complete in itself, then populous nations should have displayed innovation as a common phenomenon compared to scarcely populated nations. I am not sure that is the case though.Antranig Mardiros0ReplyOct 15 2012:?Have you heard of the USA? In the US, children are encouraged to learn and be creative while simultaneously having access to computers, the Internet and television. The access to information inside a culture of freedom to question authority has given kids here the ability to create/modify ideas. That's the root cause of originality which leads to innovation. Multiply that times the population and you get an incredible result. You don't get that even in countries with huge population like china or India because of information access, freedom to question authority and the support of creativity.Mracus Rugger+1ReplyOct 15 2012:?That might be true if individual nations were island universes. But, they are not. They trade goods, services, and ideas with other nations. The extent of that trade might be one measure by which to judge this theory. North Korea vs. the U.S. comes to mind.Su Zhu0ReplyMay 12 2012:?GreatIlan Shaki0ReplyMar 8 2012:?some of you may counter this and say well actually dogs do need to be fed and looked after in exchange, well that certainly was not the case didn't before they were domesticated.Ilan Shaki+3ReplyMar 8 2012:?I agree with a lot of the points raised in this talk however for me Ridley misses one crucial "point" on one crucial topic. Correct, "Dogs do not exchange bones", but what they do instead is exchange love, companionship and loyalty which is everlasting. All this in exchange for...........nothing. Thats right it is free. They expect nothing in return. Surely this is the more advnaced model that we should be striving towards? Maybe I am wrong but this everlasting energy and warmth that animals give us while they are alive is like the energy and all the resources on this planet which are actually abundant and available to us if we just opened our minds and started being more aware of the nature around us ,and not being constantly dictated to by giant multinational organisations and governments. Anyway, I understand this viewpoint may be controversial but it is just how I see it.JW R0ReplyMay 14 2012:?Great response! Thank YouJie Wu0ReplySep 25 2012:?Love n companion exchange can be referred to soft power, which encourage each side to gain the bone for better survival.?What if one day no bone worries, or every sides enjoy psychological comfort of soft power exchange? Does it mean a complete peaceful world?Mitch Blau0ReplyMar 4 2012:?This is an interesting silver-lining argument to population-growth fears...more people may = greater stress on planetary resources, but perhaps more people also = more products and better products, and more prosperity....thanks to the expanding "collective brain"Enrico Petrucco?20+0ReplyJul 3 2012:?There is an optimum population size that depends on many functions, yet collectively we may never know if we have grown our population too big until it is too late.That is a fundamental paradox: how does a population test and strategise for the future once it reaches the size we have?Tony Bialorucki+2ReplyFeb 7 2012:?"...Through exchange and specialization, we've created the ability to do things that we don't understand."A compelling point, and exciting when we think of certain technological innovation. But this idea is much more scary when you apply the concept to innovation in finance, genetics, and pharmaceutical sciences.Krisztián Pintér?200+0ReplyTED TRANSLATORFeb 21 2012:?not the slightest. they are even more exciting.check:? Scaffeo?500+0ReplyTEDX ORGANIZERFeb 1 2012:?This TEDTalk corresponds well with the acceleration rate of technological growth - the Singularity that Ray Kurweil describes. The exchange of ideas is growing faster and faster - that is evident when you look at the stone axe from millions of years ago to the modern computer mouse, each the same size while each being so different - fused with the acceleration of ideas and technological growth.Jose Maria Borbolla0ReplyOct 30 2011:?Interesting talk! The central point for me is the fragmented knowledge, and human abilities. We need of each other for even personal growth. That’s so true. "No human is an island" and that’s why every human being is in his dead a loss for everyone.Josh Popescu0ReplyOct 30 2011:?Wow humanity and I might say life in general is like a very macroscopic form of bacteria, very complex with lots of small parts working together.Anand Ghurye+3ReplySep 12 2011:?Mindblowing stuff . The two concepts which I received from this talk were - If you have one idea , and I have another idea , and we exchange idea , we both have potential to beget number of further ideas based on the combination . This is the why professional , transprofessional and nonprofessional exchanges are all of utmost important. The second concept I received was that of collective IQ . The progress of a society will not depend on how many brilliant minds are there within , but how well they communicate and coordinate . The superior collective IQ will reign supreme . A lot to learn and inculcate in day to day life .Load more comments…Sign in to add comments or?Join (It's free and fast!)2,187,878?ViewsAt TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other."?Full bio ?RELATED PLAYLISTS?NEWView more ?5Where do ideas come from?Curated by TEDHow does the metaphorical lightbulb go off? Is it a flash of genius? The power of crowds? These heady talks explore the nature of ideas...10The artist is in.Curated by TEDWhy create? Artists and designers share their work, their process and their vision in these deeply personal -- and often hilarious -- talks.8Architectural inspirationCurated by TEDMaster architects share their vision for buildings that inflate, float, twist and glitter, while artfully addressing the challenges faced by their...WHAT TO WATCH NEXTCharles Leadbeater: The era of open innovation19:01?Posted: Jan 2007Views?619,543?| Comments?84Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics17:52?Posted: Apr 2008Views?426,165?| Comments?83Robert Wright: The logic of non-zero-sum progress19:11?Posted: Jan 2007Views?512,782?| Comments?106STAY UPDATEDTop of FormBe the first to know about new TEDTalks.Enter email address for TED updates?Daily??WeeklyBottom of FormFollow TEDWHAT YOUR FRIENDS ARE WATCHINGRELATED TAGSBusinessCollaborationDesignTechnologyWe want you to share our Talks!Just follow the?guidelines?outlined under our Creative Commons?license.TED? 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