Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson, in his book "Where Good Ideas Come From", argues that good ideas occur most abundantly in an environment that encourages free, open intellectual exchange.  From the renaissance to the Scottish Enlightenment, from the 25 separate applications for a patent for the light bulb within a couple years of each other, to the explosion of amazing Android phones within a couple of business quarters, innovation occurs and discoveries are made when ideas can compete in the open.

This reminds me of a remarkable passage in one of my favourite books, "A Critical History of Greek Philosophy", which describes Anaximander's description of evolution by adaptation to the environment in the 6th century BC...

"The next philosopher of the Ionic school is Anaximander.  He was an exceedingly original and audacious thinker.  He was probably born about 611 B.C. and died about 547...
"Anaximander also developed a striking theory about the origin and evolution of living beings.  In the beginning the earth was fluid and in the gradual drying up by evaporation of this fluid, living beings were produced from the head and moisture.  In the first instance these beings were of a low order.  They gradually evolved into successively higher and higher organisms by means of adaptation to their environment.  Man was in the first instance a fish living in the water.  The gradual drying up left parts of the earth high and dry, and marine animals migrated to the land, and their fins by adaptation became members fitted for movement on land.  The resemblance of this primitive theory to modern theories is remarkable.  It is easy to exaggerate its importance, but it is at any rate clear that Anaximander had, by a happy guess, hit upon the central idea of adaptation of species to their environment..."

That is, Anaximander, one of the very earliest Greek philosophers, hit upon an idea 2500 years ago that took modern Europe many centuries to arrive at.

From the same period of a few hundred years in Ancient Greece -- mostly Athens -- we have inherited the foundation of our modern philosophy, our legal system, democracy, mathematics, science, literature, and the list goes on.

A more modern example of such a beehive of ideas is the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave us: Francis Hutcheson, Alexander Campbell, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Robert Burns, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair, Joseph Black and James Hutton.

Wherever you see rapid, intense development of ideas, you will notice conditions that are conducive to the development of such ideas.  Wherever there is a dearth of innovation, you will find an environment that rewards conformity and punishes intellectual honesty.