Matt Ridley > Quotes

“A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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)”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

“Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

“Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she’s pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women, and every person inherits from those ancestors the same preference. Why is that man a slave to his genes? He is not. He has free will. But you just said he’s in love because it is good for his genes. He’s free to ignore the dictates of his genes. Why do his genes want to get together with her genes anyway? Because that’s the only way they can get into the next generation; human beings have two sexes that must breed by mixing their genes. Why do human beings have two sexes? Because in mobile animals hermaphrodites are less good at doing two things at once than males and females are at each doing his or her own thing. Therefore, ancestral hermaphroditic animals were outcompeted by ancestral sexed animals.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“The genome that we decipher in this generation is but a snapshot of an ever-changing document. There is no definitive edition.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“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, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

“There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature. To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience.

The study of human beings remained resolutely unreformed by these ideas until a few years ago. Even now, most anthropologists and social scientists are firmly committed to the view that evolution has nothing to tell them. Human bodies are products of "culture," and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigation only differences between cultures and between individuals--and to exaggerating them. Yet what is most interesting to me about human beings is the things that are the same, not what is different--things like grammatical language, hierarchy, romantic love, sexual jealousy, long-term bongs between the genders ("marriage", in a sense). These are trainable instincts peculiar to out species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“sex is merely a genetic joint venture. the process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective.”
― Matt Ridley

“simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.”
― Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“time always erodes advantage.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.”
― Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

“To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge