Quotes from Matt Ridley

people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.

if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?

In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.

Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever).

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.

innovation is organic because it must be a response to an authentic and free desire, not what somebody in authority

Like Milton Friedman, I notice that 'business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.

with the elucidation of the genetic code in 1966, Francis Crick confidently declared vitalism dead and buried. Only it still lives on in various pseudosciences. Homeopathy is based on vitalism. Its founder Samuel Hahnemann believed that diseases 'are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body'.

So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else's: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet

By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.

Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts, and especially when predicting the future and when there's lavish funding at stake.

Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order 'to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces', it was necessary to 'stimulate vitalizing and harmonizing processes in the soil', an insight he acquired through clairvoyance.

Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).

The fact that heart disease is a symptom of lack of control explains a good deal about its sporadic appearance. It explains why so many people in senior jobs have heart attacks soon after they retire and 'take it easy'. From running offices they often move to lowly and menial jobs (washing dishes, walking the dog) in domestic environments run by their spouses.

Indeed, even if the permanent secretary was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still less likely to suffer a heart attack at a given age than a thin, non-smoking, low-blood-pressure janitor.

If climate change proves to be mild but cutting carbon causes real pain, we may find we have stopped a nose bleed by putting a tourniquet round our neck.

Paradoxically, depathologising people's fundamental inclinations and giving group members permission to be the way they are seemed to constitute the best insurance that their self-esteem and interpersonal effectiveness would improve.

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

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

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she's pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility.