Quotes from Matt Ridley

Ä°ki prion uzman?n yazd??? gibi, ''kiÅŸisel trajedilerin, etnik felaketlerin ve ekonomik y?k?mlar?n asl?, küçük bir molekülün haylazca yanl?? katlanmas?nda aranabilir.

Men should not care less what women wear so long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy and generally nubile.

To win, then, the parasite must do one of the following: infect somebody else by the time the immune response hits (as flu does), conceal itself inside host cells (as the AIDS virus does), change its own keys frequently (as malaria does), or try to imitate whatever password the host's own cells carry that enable them to escape attention.

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs

The body is the victim, plaything, battleground and vehicle for the ambitions of genes.

Or, as one economist put it: 'The hippies were right all along'.

the true metric of prosperity is time.

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward.

although within a country rich people were generally happier than poor people, richer countries did not have happier citizens than poor countries. Since then the 'Easterlin paradox

If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word—for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions the presence of greatness.

Bizler, miras ald???m?z hücre intihar? mekanizmas?na mahkumuz.

Whether the oil will last long enough is a different subject and one I tackle later in the book: briefly my answer is that substitutes will be adopted if the price rises high enough.)

The first railways were far more expensive than the existing canals and far less reliable. Only gradually and with time does the new invention bring down its own costs or raise its efficacy to the point where it can match the old.

That is possible only because each square metre is encouraged to grow whatever it is good at growing and global trade distributes the result to ensure that everybody gets a bit of everything

But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others' needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,' Henry David Thoreau asked: 'the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father?

Many modern accounts of the history of eugenics present it as an example of the dangers of letting science, genetics especially, out of control. It is much more an example of the danger of letting government out of control.

As James Watson has put it, 'We talk about gene therapy as if it can change someone's fate, but you can also change someone's fate if you pay off their credit card.

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity.

Yet merely to board a passing bandwagon of protest publicity, the leaders of the organic movement locked themselves out of a new technology that has delivered huge reductions in the use of synthetic pesticides.

despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being – even now in a deep recession.

Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution.