Best 46 quotes of Matt Ridley on MyQuotes

A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.

It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.

It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime.

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [...] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it.

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.

Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.

Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious - that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty - that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

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.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

at this point, the analysis of gene expression in the brain isn't prectical because current (and foreseeable)techniques require that we analyze a piece of brain tissue. Most people find that unpleasant.

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history of human science is not encouraging. Galton's eugenics, Freud's unconscious, Durkheim's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner’s behaviorism, Piaget's early learning, and Wilson’s sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt the Red Queen's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press," said David Hume. But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before. We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.

If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses.

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

Man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

Snaží-li se muž získat ženu, nepošle ji svůj výpis z účtu, ale daruje jí perlový náhrdelník. Nechlubí se svou lékařskou kartou, ale mezi řečí prohodí, že každý týden uběhne patnáct kilometrů a nikdy nebývá nachlazený. Nechlubí se před ní akademickými tituly, ale snaží se ji okouzlit svým vtipem. Nezapřísahá se před ní svou pozorností, ale k narozeninám jí pošle kytici rudých růží. Těmito gesty jí oznamuje: jsem bohatý, jsem zdravý, jsem chytrý, jsem milý. Přitom svá oznámení pronáší co nejsvůdnější a nejúčinnější formou.

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.

The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine. Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, you will in mid-life slowly start to lose your balance, grow steadily more incapable of looking after yourself and die prematurely.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering.

There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.