“ The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depr… Matt Ridley
“ Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim 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
“ There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious p… Matt Ridley
“ From 2000, Fannie and Freddie’s appetite for sub-prime loans increased markedly every year, encouraging a rich harvest of increasingly crazy loans by mortgage originators to supply this appetite. Hous… 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, w… Matt Ridley
“ The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every oppor… Matt Ridley
“ Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure‘. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most… Matt Ridley
“ But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest? Matt Ridley
“ Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation. 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
“ From the perspective of today, or from that of a Cobden-Mill-Smith liberal, there is not a great deal of difference between the various -isms of the twentieth century. Communism, fascism, nationalism,… Matt Ridley
“ The idea that parents shape their children’s personalities is so ingrained, and still supplies so many psychoanalysts with their livelihoods, that any challenge to it is bound to meet a lot of resista… Matt Ridley
“ That the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have gene… Matt Ridley
“ For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a vi… 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; e… Matt Ridley
“ In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011. Matt Ridley
