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Generals win battles, politicians run countries, scientists discover truths, artists create genres, inventors make breakthroughs, teachers shape minds, philosophers change minds, priests teach morality, businessmen lead businesses, environmentalists save the planet. Not just individuals, but institutions too - Goldman Sachs, the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda - these are said to shape the world.This is more often wrong than right. The evolution of everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch, the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Top downer is the source of most of our worst problems in the past - why Hitler won an election, why the sub-prime bubble happened, why Africa lingered in poverty when Asia did not,why the euro is a disaster - and will be the scourge of this century too. And although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends still shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation - driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land could be released for nature, these were largely emergent phenomena. So was the internet, the mobile phone revolution and the rise of Asia.In this wide-ranging, highly opinionated non-fiction narrative, Ridley draws on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy and examples drawn from the scientific literature, from historical narratives and from personal anecdotes. About the Author Matt Ridley received his BA and D. Phil at Oxford researching the evolution of behaviour. He has been science editor,Washington correspondent and American editor of the economist. He is the author of bestselling titles The red queen (1993), The origins of virtue (1996), Genome (1999) and nature via nurture (2003). His books have sold over half a million copies and been shortlisted for six literary prizes He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert.