Matt Ridley Quotes

Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.

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.

Such “habituation” is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way.

That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.

Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.

I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge.

Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds.

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

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.

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.

Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge.

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.

I don’t have to,” replies the philosopher. “I only have to outrun you.”)

The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is “designed” quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style.