The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but the human ones are not. - Matt Ridley
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The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but the human ones are not.
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About
Matt Ridley
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, DL, FRSL, FMedSci (born 7 February 1958), usually known as Matt Ridley, is a British journalist who has written several popular science books. He is also a businessman and a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
Alternative Names:
Matthew Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley
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Hon. Matthew White Ridley
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Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley
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Dr M W Ridley
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Matthew White Ridley
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.
Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women.
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In Bletchley, in Britain, in 1943, in total secrecy, a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, is seeing his most incisive insight turned into physical reality. Turing has argued that numbers can compute numbers. To crack the Lorentz encoding machines of the German forces, a computer called Colossus has been built based on Turing’s principles: it is a universal machine with a modifiable stored program. Nobody realises it at the time, least of all Turing, but he is probably closer to the mystery of life than anybody else. Heredity is a modifiable stored program; metabolism is a universal machine. The recipe that links them is a code, an abstract message that can be embodied in a chemical, physical or even immaterial form. Its secret is that it can cause itself to be replicated. Anything that can use the resources of the world to get copies of itself made is alive; the most likely form for such a thing to take is a digital message — a number, a script or a word.
