A four-letter alphabet called DNA. - Matt Ridley

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.

When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.

Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”