Matthew Ridley’s discovery and Kuwait’s demographics

For most of human existence, people lived as hunters and gatherers and used largely unchanged tools and materials. Matthew Ridley’s question is why that long period of slow progress eventually gave way to an extraordinary acceleration.

Ridley argues that the explanation does not lie in a sudden rise in human intelligence. Modern humans have had essentially the same brain, neural structure and capacity for thought, planning and communication for most of their history. In his view, the decisive change came when people began trading beyond their own communities.

Trade moved more than commodities. A stone-tool maker could learn from a spear maker, while coastal communities could pass knowledge to inland groups. When ideas from different places met, they could combine into something neither side could have created alone. Ridley calls this the “marriage of ideas.”

His example of Tasmania illustrates the argument. Rising sea levels isolated the island from the rest of Australia around 10,000 years ago, and Tasmanians subsequently fell behind other Australians. Ridley’s point is that the limitation lay not in Tasmanian minds, but in the size of the network through which knowledge could travel. The argument forms the central premise of his 2010 book, The Rational Optimist.

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Marriage of ideas.