Matt Ridley Quotes

No study of the causes of intelligence has failed to find a substantial heritability.

Sexual selection theory suggests that much of the behavior and some of the appearance of an animal is adapted not to help it survive but to help it to acquire the best or the most mates.

The more competitive nature of men is a consequence of sexual selection. Men have evolved to live dangerously because success in competition or battle used to lead to more or better sexual conquests and more surviving children. Women who live dangerously merely put at risk those children they already have. Likewise, the intimate connection between female beauty and female reproductive potential (beautiful women are almost by definition young and healthy; compared with older women, they are therefore both more fertile and have a longer reproductive life ahead of them) is a consequence of sexual selection acting on both men’s psyches and women’s bodies. Each sex shapes the other. Women have hourglass-shaped bodies because men have preferred them that way. Men have an aggressive nature because women have preferred them that way (or have allowed aggressive men to defeat other men in contests over women—it amounts to the same thing).

As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird’s song is inversely correlated with the colorfulness of its plumage.

This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined.

I asked John Maynard Smith, one of the first people to pose the question “Why sex?,” whether he still thought some new explanation was needed. “No. We have the answers. We cannot agree on them, that is all.”

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 you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability.

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.

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).

The pope notwithstanding, the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.

If females have an existing aesthetic preference, it is only logical that males will evolve to exploit that preference.

Few debates in the history of science have been conducted with such stupidity as the one about intelligence.

There are genes that have not changed much since the very first single-celled creatures populated the primeval ooze. There are genes that were developed when our ancestors were worm-like. There are genes that must have first appeared when our ancestors were fish. There are genes that exist in their present form only because of recent epidemics of disease. And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.