In this TED talk video, Matt Ridely is telling people that how humans trade their knowledge, ideas and technologies to progress, innovate and advance living standard. One of the examples that he have pointed out is the difference between an Acheulean hand axe and a computer mouse which are both real objects with similar shape and size to fit on human’s hands. The hand axe is made of one substance but a computer mouse is a combination of different substances consisted from sillicon, metal, plastic, etc. More important point is that it is a confection of different ideas having plastic, laser and transistors and so on. Hence, no one in this world, actually know how to make a computer mouse. However, since we as human beings have intelligence to exchange various different ideas and specializations, a computer mouse could be manufactured. Therefore, “when ideas have sex”, we obtain ability to do things that we don’t even understand which means that we can do things that are beyond our capabilities.
You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.” - Matt Ridley
Similarly in Architecture school, when we exchange, discuss and review each others’ ideas and thoughts, more extraordinary outcome may be produced. Thus, Matt Ridley has gaven us the idea that working together, in other words, cultural trade is very important. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.