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 More Quotes by Matt Ridley More Quotes From 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 agency clever running 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 brain sex ideas Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. Matt Ridley selfish evolution mind 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 race sex years 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 events body brain 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. Matt Ridley ancient products evolution Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future. Matt Ridley ends The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom. Matt Ridley gaps behaviour lying 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 zero heart lying Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up. Matt Ridley collaboration innovation order The message from history is so blatantly obvious - that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty - that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer. Matt Ridley example country thinking The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene Matt Ridley genes vehicle body 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 heart jobs blood Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race Matt Ridley lines race running Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever. Matt Ridley genetics states forever 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 pressure-groups ocean real A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed. Matt Ridley bored ignorance discovery The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view. Matt Ridley ignorance views running Trade is 10 times as old as farming. Matt Ridley farming motivation inspiration Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him. Matt Ridley evolution men way
