Matt Ridley Quotes & Sayings

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race — Matt Ridley

A four-letter alphabet called DNA. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

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

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

I think if you put people in front of some huge temptation where it's possible to grab as much as they can for themselves, almost everyone will. The beauty of commerce is that it mutes that. The chap behind the counter in the corner shop has no interest in short-changing you, because he wants you to come back. — Matt Ridley

People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential - the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). — Matt Ridley

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas. — Matt Ridley

Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate. — Matt Ridley

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal. — Matt Ridley

If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite kinky. — Matt Ridley

It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative. — Matt Ridley

The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine.
Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, you will in mid-life slowly start to lose your balance, grow steadily more incapable of looking after yourself and die prematurely. — Matt Ridley

In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created. — Matt Ridley

Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory. — Matt Ridley

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. — Matt Ridley

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose. — Matt Ridley

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience. — Matt Ridley

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure. — Matt Ridley

Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals. — Matt Ridley

I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it. — Matt Ridley

Sex is merely a genetic joint venture. the process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective. — Matt Ridley

Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity. — Matt Ridley

Evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex. — Matt Ridley

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life; — Matt Ridley

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath. — Matt Ridley

Imagine that the genome is a book.
There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.
Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.
Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.
Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.
Each word is written in letters called BASES. — Matt Ridley

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal. — Matt Ridley

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

It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.' No anthropic principle needed. — Matt Ridley

Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time. — Matt Ridley

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene — Matt Ridley

People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up. — Matt Ridley

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future. — Matt Ridley

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive. — Matt Ridley

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence. — Matt Ridley

each person 'intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'. Yet — Matt Ridley

There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium ... It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays same forever. — Matt Ridley

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference? — Matt Ridley

Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over. — Matt Ridley

At this point, the analysis of gene expression in the brain isn't prectical because current (and foreseeable)techniques require that we analyze a piece of brain tissue. Most people find that unpleasant. — Matt Ridley

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before. — Matt Ridley

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event. — Matt Ridley

As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. — Matt Ridley

A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that 'sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal'. The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use. Well, — Matt Ridley

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins — Matt Ridley

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime. — Matt Ridley

Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention. — Matt Ridley

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs. — Matt Ridley

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical. — Matt Ridley

As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers. — Matt Ridley

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth. — Matt Ridley

Uniqueness is the commodity of glut. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will. — Matt Ridley

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him. — Matt Ridley

Male animals have a finite sum of energy that they can spend on testosterone or immunity to disease, but not both at the same time. — Matt Ridley

This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, — Matt Ridley

It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'. — Matt Ridley

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time. — Matt Ridley

Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts. — Matt Ridley

the complexity of society does not imply a planner. — Matt Ridley

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it. — Matt Ridley

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. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, originally African ape as human stomachs were designed for the use of an omnivorous African ape with a taste for meat. — Matt Ridley

If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word - for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions the presence of greatness. — Matt Ridley

Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most — Matt Ridley

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When — Matt Ridley

Because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process ... no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way ... Perhaps we should try. — Matt Ridley

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [ ... ] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it. — Matt Ridley

It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not. — Matt Ridley

Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex. — Matt Ridley

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. — Matt Ridley

In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: 'At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem. — Matt Ridley

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You — Matt Ridley

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. — Matt Ridley

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up. — Matt Ridley

By one estimate, the number of different products that you can buy in New York or London tops ten billion.
This should not need saying, but it does. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. — Matt Ridley

It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear, says the logical friend. — Matt Ridley

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results. — Matt Ridley

The market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.' This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectively rational outcome, so they can turn many individually selfish motives into a collectively kind result. — Matt Ridley

To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom. — Matt Ridley

Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is 'a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator'. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. — Matt Ridley

The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute. If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive. Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger. Keeping climate at 1990 levels, assuming it could be done, would leave more than 90 per cent of human mortality causes untouched. — Matt Ridley

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past. — Matt Ridley

Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out no sewage, because water, gas, and a magic form of invisible power called electricity would come into their home through pipes and wires. They would jump at the chance to have such a home, but they would warily ask ho they could possibly afford it. Suppose that you then told them that to earn such a home, they need only ensure that father and mother both have to go to work for eight hours in an office, travelling roughly forty minutes each way in a horseless carriage, and that the children need not work at all, but should go to school to be sure of getting such jobs when they start to work at twenty. They would be more than dumbfounded; they would be delirious with excitement. — Matt Ridley

The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom. — Matt Ridley

For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves. — Matt Ridley