Matt Ridley Quotes

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.

As I write this, it is nine o’clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink.

Yet the myth persists that genetic determinism is a more implacable kind of fate than social determinism.

So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?

The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund):

When a neo-Darwinian asks, “Why?” he is really asking “How did this come about?” He is a historian.

At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed.

No matter that the social sciences set about reinventing much more alarming forms of determinism to take the place of the genetic form: the parental determinism of Freud; the socio-economic determinism of Marx; the political determinism of Lenin; the peer-pressure cultural determinism of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead; the stimulus-response determinism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner; the linguistic determinism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. In one of the great diversions of all time, for nearly a century social scientists managed to persuade thinkers of many kinds that biological causality was determinism while environmental causality preserved free will; and that animals had instincts, but human beings did not.

The market is a system of mass cooperation.

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.

The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome.

Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women.

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.

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.