Quotes from Matt Ridley

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

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.

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.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

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.

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'.

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

I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'

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

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.

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

Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government's job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.

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 can be order and complexity without any management.

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 evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.

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.

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

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo's magic trick.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

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.

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.

In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.

I don't have to," replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.")

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

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