Matt Ridley Quotes

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

Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.

Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate.

This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum,

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.

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

For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.

It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

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.

Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experiences more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones, and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.

There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium ... It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays same forever.

I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.

No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).

Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order.

As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.

All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

[...] the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It

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.

It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.

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.

Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.

I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.

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.

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.

If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite kinky.

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.

They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once - in response to experience.

Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

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

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.

...nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.

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.

It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear, says the logical friend.

I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'

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.

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

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

A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that 'sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal'. The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use. Well,

Male animals have a finite sum of energy that they can spend on testosterone or immunity to disease, but not both at the same time.

If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word - for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions the presence of greatness.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

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.

Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.

In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: 'At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

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.

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.

each person 'intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'. Yet

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.

Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. (104)

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world's richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV's dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabba

Far from being laws to protect women, antipolygamy statutes may really do more to protect men.

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.

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

Yet Nancy Wexler's obsession with finding the gene was driven by her desire to mend it or cure it when she did find it. And she is undoubtedly closer to that goal now than ten years ago. 'I am an optimist', she writes, 'Even though I feel this hiatus in which we will be able only to predict and not to prevent will be exceedingly difficult .. . I believe the knowledge will be worth the risks.'
What of Nancy Wexler herself? Several times in the late 1980s, she and her elder sister Alice sat down with their father Milton to discuss whether either of the women should take the test. The debates were tense, angry and inconclusive. Milton was against taking the test, stressing its uncertainties and the danger of a false diagnosis. Nancy had been determined that she wanted the test, but her determination gradually evaporated in the face of a real possibility. Alice chronicled the discussions in a diary that later became a soulsearching book called Mapping fate. The result was that neither woman took the test. Nancy is now the same age as her mother was when she was diagnosed.

Evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

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.

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.

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.

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.

It is pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving families or great riches can do nothing about. Your fate is in your genes. Like a pure Augustinian, you go to heaven by God's grace, not by good works. It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

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.

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

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

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.

Life uses information (stored in DNA) to capture energy (which it stores in a chemical called ATP) to create order. Humans burn prodigious amounts of energy - we generate about 10,000 times as much energy per gram as the sun. The sun is hotter only because it is much bigger. We use energy to create and maintain intricate cellular and bodily complexity, the opposite of entropy, just as we do in the economy, where the harnessing of power from burning fuel enables us to build skyscrapers and aeroplanes.

There has probably never been a generation since the paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions. But still an ape.

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.

To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

The genome that we decipher in this generation is but a snapshot of an ever-changing document. There is no definitive edition.

I don't have to," replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.")

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

The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.

People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential - the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.