Friday, December 10, 2010  More Ridley  And here is the always
sharp John Gray, making some of the points I made on Ridley and
more besides: Whatever political goals it is used to promote,
the idea of cultural evolution is not much more than a
misleading metaphor. Laissez-faire was not the result of any
spontaneous process of social evolution; it was imposed on
society through the use of state power. Memes are just a pseudo-
scientific way of talking about ideas, not actually existing
physical entities. There is nothing in society that resembles
the natural selection of random genetic mutations; even if such
a mechanism existed, there is nothing to say its workings would
be benign. Bad ideas do not evolve into better ones. They tend
to recur, as racist memes are doing at present in parts of the
world where economic dis­location is reviving hatred of
minorities and immigrants. Knowledge advances, but in ethics and
politics the same old rubbish keeps on piling up. The idea of
social evolution is rubbish of this