Emergent order via cultural evolution

From How Culture Makes Us Smarter by Steve Stewart-Williams.  Successful cultures of self-generated prosperity are few and far between and the result of decades and centuries of culling of bad ideas and norms and the cultivation and refinement and mixing and matching of successful ideas and norms.  

Idealists seeking complete transformations are always naive and ignorant.  The magnitude of their ignorance apparent only after the destruction caused by their unsophisticated simplistic designs.  Emergent order, i.e. culture, is far more powerful than school house designs.

A growing contingent of scholars argue that our “superpower” as a species is not so much our intelligence as our collective intelligence and our capacity for what’s called cumulative culture: that is, our ability to stockpile knowledge and pass it down from generation to generation, tinkering with it and improving it over time.

To illustrate, consider Plato and Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle were almost certainly more intelligent than most people living today. And yet most people living today have a vastly more accurate view of the universe than these Ancient Greek philosophers. In fact, most preschool children have a more accurate view, because most preschool children know that we live on a spinning rock orbiting a great big ball of fire. In a certain sense, then, today’s preschoolers are smarter than the greatest thinkers of the ancient world.

This has nothing to do with biological evolution, and everything to do with our ability to stockpile knowledge and add to the common pool of knowledge over time. Biological evolution can give rise to the eye. But cumulative cultural evolution can give rise to entities every bit as complex as the eye: airplanes and smartphones, legal systems and the Internet.