The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to creative thought at a higher level of emergence.

Just as genes for the eye implicitly ‘know’ the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition,

Even in physics, some of the most fundamental explanations, and the predictions that they make, are not reductive.

However, in the aftermath of the Black Death a few true and functional ideas did also spread, and may well have contributed to ending that particular static society in an unusually good way (with the Renaissance).

And then the precautionary principle advises, ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’ There is a closed loop of ideas here: on the assumption that knowledge is not going to grow, the precautionary principle is true; and on the assumption that the precautionary principle is true, we cannot afford to allow knowledge to grow. Unless a so

Hence we certainly do not learn what ‘reasonable’ means by hearing its meaning stated. But we do learn it, and the versions of it that are learned by people in the same culture are sufficiently close for laws based on it to be practicable.

The case of honey, for instance, is very different.

Dawkins named his tour-de-force account of neo-Darwinism The Selfish Gene because he wanted to stress that evolution does not especially promote the ‘welfare’ of species or individual organisms. But, as he also explained, it does not promote the ‘welfare’ of genes either: it adapts them not for survival in larger numbers, nor indeed for survival at