Quotes from Matt Ridley

The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.

He asked the question: 'What kind of company do we want this to be?', and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people are 'thinking, energetic, creative and caring'; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves. Defying

The real cause of poverty today – now that it is avoidable – is the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights, says William Easterly.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium. ...........It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays same forever.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

The internet has no centre and no hierarchy. All the computers that use it are equal – 'peers' in a network.

Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by granting you a dollop of free time.

It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.

When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.

nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.

as Isaiah Berlin put it, 'disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery

Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does

It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all.

With the first steam engines, the barrier between heat and work was breached, so that coal's energy could now amplify the work of people.

Imports are Christmas morning; exports are January's MasterCard bill. P.J. O'ROURKE

Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

Trying to replace the common law with a rationally designed law is, he jests, like trying to design a better rhinoceros in a laboratory.

Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich