Matt Ridley Quotes

Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about 99 percent of all animal species, including our closest relatives, the apes.

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

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.

time always erodes advantage.

The lesson of this study is that, on the whole, having to deal with strangers teaches you to be polite to them, and that in order for such generosity to emerge, costly punishment of selfishness may be necessary.

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.

So there is no escape from determinism by appealing to socialization. Either effects have causes or they do not. If I’m timid because of something that happened to me when I was young, that event is no less deterministic than a gene for timidity. The greater mistake is not to equate determinism with genes, but to mistake determinism for inevitability.

These two processes—linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny—are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations.

There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology.

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.

In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes.

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

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-gazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gipsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right. We are dealing here with a prophecy of terrifying, cruel and inflexible truth.

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

Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, for it does not solve survival problems, it makes them worse.