Matt Ridley Quotes

The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.

The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.

The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coinciden...

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there ca...

This is not a book about the Human Genome Project — about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough f...

This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different pl...

To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evol...

When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.

[...] the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.

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 l...

The complexity of society does not imply a planner.

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

A large, interconnected population meant faster cumulative invention – a surprising truth even to this day, as Hong Kong and Manhattan islands demonstrate.

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.

Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at rand...

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

Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice ve...

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.