Quotes from Matt Ridley

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

Evolutionary tortoises nonetheless do more genetic mixing than evolutionary hares. Austin Burt's discovery of a correlation between generation length and amount of recombination is evidence of the Red Queen at work. The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites.

The point is that nothing could be more "instinctive" than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learned. It is—horrid thought—genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.

The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation.

We use our intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people's motives, manipulating people – these are what the intellect is used for.

The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated.

It is a remarkable fact that people who have been preparing for an important exam, and have shown the symptoms of stress, are more likely to catch colds and other infections, because one of the effects of Cortisol is to reduce the I50 GENOME activity, number and lifetime of lymphocytes – white blood cells.

What is it about human beings that enables them to keep changing their lives in this tumultuous way?

the genome contains secret messages from both the distant and the recent past – from when we were single-celled creatures and from when we took up cultural habits such as dairy farming. It also contains clues to ancient philosophical conundrums, not least the question of whether and how our actions are determined and what is this curious sensation called free will.

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

The phenomena we refer to as intelligence may be a byproduct of intergenomic conflict between genes mediating offense and defense in the context of language', write Rice and Holland.

The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be.

Different versions of genes rise and fall in popularity driven often by the rise and fall of diseases. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium.

Had I only known it, experiments in laboratories by the economist Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all.

genetically different population, so that she can have offspring with varied genes and little risk of inbred diseases. But perhaps she – and T-shirt-sniffing people – are actually doing something that makes sense in terms of the blood-group story. Remember that, when making love in a time of cholera, an AA person is best off looking for a BB mate, so that all their children will be cholera-resistant ABs.

So growth will resume – unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier in the future.

fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.

the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people's problems. It is 'best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are "fitter" than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.

George Washington said that 'Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.

The common analogy for what Williams was describing is a lottery. Breeding asexually is like having lots of lottery tickets all with the same number. To stand a chance of winning the lottery, you need lots of different tickets. Therefore, sex is useful to the individual rather than the species when the offspring are likely to face changed or unusual conditions.

Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings through the order of their groupings.