This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 9, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

Matt Ridley's new book looks at how new ideas emerge, those ripe for development and those

doomed to fail.

The book is The Evolution of Everything.

He spoke at the Cato Institute last month. The most extraordinary improvements in human living standards in the last 50 years or so,

as I like to put it, we've trebled our income,

hit reduced child mortality by two-thirds, increased lifespan by a third

in my lifetime, and it wasn't all my doing.

And it's, it takes a lot of explaining. We should get our minds around why that happened,

why it happened in this generation, why it's possible for it to happen to human beings at all and not to rabbits and rocks.

And of course the answer is innovation.

But then the question becomes where does innovation comes from and that's sort of what this book takes further.

It explores the idea and what I've done is drill down into the idea that innovation comes from combination and

recombination of existing ideas. That's a very similar process to the

combination and recombination of genes which produces the raw material for biological evolution.

But in biological evolution you then have a process of selection where the environment

selects some of the combinations over some of the other combinations and is that happening in

human society well of course it is because some of the combinations that inventors come up with

don't get accepted and others do so So clearly you've got a process of

selection going on. So the closer you look at the way innovation works to

change society, the more it looks like biological evolution.

So I wanted to see how far I could take that idea, whether I could turn everything

...