Quotes from Matt Ridley

knowledge 'never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess'.

a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work'.

Globalgiving.com

A recent survey found that 82 per cent of Americans think that over the next thirty years robots and computers will 'probably or definitely do most of the work done by humans' but that only 37 per cent think they will do 'the type of work I do': a big contradiction there.

So this is what poverty means. You are poor to the extent that you cannot afford to sell your time for sufficient price to buy the services you need

In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

Richard Dawkins that 'money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism' –

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

Marriage teeters on the line between a cooperative venture and a form of mutual exploitation—ask any divorce lawyer. Successful marriages so submerge the costs under mutual benefits that the cooperation can predominate; unsuccessful ones do not.

True barter requires that you give up something you value in exchange for something else you value slightly more.

In most hunter-gatherers, women spend long hours gathering, preparing and cooking staple foods while men are out hunting for delicacies.

The goal for every female animal is to find a mate with sufficient genetic quality to make a good husband, a good father or a good sire. The goal for every male animal is often to find as many wives as possible, and sometimes to find good mothers and dams, only rarely to find good wives.

An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds.

At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer.

in the matter of choosing mates, males are usually after quantity and females after quality.

Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.

In other words, long-lived, late-maturing mammals do more genetic mixing regardless of their size or fecundity than short-lived, early maturing mammals. By Burt's measure, man has thirty crossovers, rabbits ten, and mice three. Tangled-bank theories would predict the opposite.17

Evolution is good for species, and so they strive to make it go faster. Yet it is stasis, not change, that is the hallmark of evolution. Sex and gene repair and the sophisticated screening mechanisms of higher animals to ensure that only defect-free eggs and sperm contribute to the next generation—all these are ways of preventing change.

Trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rest, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.