Matt Ridley Quotes
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.
The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.
Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.
Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
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.
Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race
Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.
Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.