When Ideas Mate

An inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on progress and com­mu­ni­ca­tion by the British author Matt Rid­ley who argues that, through his­tory, the engine of human progress and pros­per­ity has been, and is, “ideas hav­ing sex with each other.”

He starts off with com­par­ing a stone age tool to a com­puter mouse. One human could make the tool but the mak­ing of the com­puter mouse requires the coop­er­a­tion of sev­eral thou­sands of peo­ple from oil drilling to make the plas­tic to chip mak­ing and assem­bly of sev­eral parts made of dif­fer­ent materials.

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