Quotes from Matt Ridley

Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is 'a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator'. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.

The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.

Economists are quick to speak of 'market failure', and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from 'government failure'.

In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

This book argues that evolution is happening all around us. It is the best way of understanding how the human world changes, as well as the natural world. Change in human institutions, artefacts and habits is incremental, inexorable and inevitable. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise.

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.

In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.

This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.

Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.

Europe was, in Joel Mokyr's words, 'the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies'.

Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.

Henry's novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin's idea of female choice as a force in evolution.

Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.

É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós. Todo mundo tem uma única e distina natureza endógena. Um self.

Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting parent – and even that vanished when controlled for peer-group effects, whereby the adopting parents were found to live in more, or less, criminal neighbourhoods according to whether they themselves were criminals.

You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature

The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.

There has probably never been a generation since the paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past.

An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences and even intelligence. More important, though, he addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability." —The New Yorker