The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

In Science Salon # 117, Michael Shermer speaks with Matt Ridley about his book How Innovation Works: and Why It Flourishes in Freedom.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Matt Ridley argues that we need to think about innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan.

This lecture is an account of scientific discovery from the invention of stone tools to theories of quantum physics. In this fascinating and illuminating work, Leonard Mlodinow guides us through the critical eras and events in the development of science, all of which were propelled forward by humankind’s collective struggle to know.

Blake Smith examines the history of pasteurization as a case study in the accretive process of invention—and reflects on the extraordinary interconnectedness necessary to push the boundaries of human accomplishment forward.