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Matt Ridley
133 quotes
“Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and rewarding of violence.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By describing adultery as a force that shaped our mating system, I am not “justifying” it. Nothing is more “natural” than people evolving the tendency to object to being cuckolded or cheated on, so if my analysis were to be interpreted as justifying adultery, it would be even more obviously interpreted as justifying the social and legal mechanisms for discouraging adultery. What I am claiming is that adultery and its disapproval are both “natural.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jealousy is a “human universal,” and no culture lacks it, Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity….Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes. Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These concerns (that is, about differences being used to justify unequal treatment) are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We give boys tractors and girls dolls. We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them. This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turns every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface. Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field. The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant. It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is not arbitrary.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Morality is never based upon nature.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, for it does not solve survival problems, it makes them worse.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I read the genome out to you at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take me a century. If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimetre, my text would be as long as the River Danube. This is a gigantic document, an immense book, a recipe of extravagant length, and it all fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a tiny cell that fits easily upon the head of a pin.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Almost everything in the body, from hair to hormones, is either made of proteins or made by them.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings accumulate about one hundred mutations per generation.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All rules have exceptions (including this one).”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life consists of the interplay of two kinds of chemicals: proteins and DNA.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pope notwithstanding, the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no bone in the chimpanzee body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part of the immune system, the digestive system, the vascular system, the lymph system or the nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was this division of labour among specialists, unique to our species, that was the key to our ecological success, because it allowed the growth of technology.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genes are recipes for both anatomy and behaviour.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-gazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gipsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right. We are dealing here with a prophecy of terrifying, cruel and inflexible truth.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No study of the causes of intelligence has failed to find a substantial heritability.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the astonishing result (of IQ testing) is the correlation between the scores of adopted children reared together: zero. Being in the same family has no discernible effect on IQ at all.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In egalitarian societies, genes matter more.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody doubts that genes can shape anatomy. The idea that they also shape behaviour takes a lot more swallowing.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you still thought evolution was about the good of the species, stop thinking so right now.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. We are full of digital chain letters and warnings about marmalade.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genes do indeed behave as if they have selfish goals, not consciously, but retrospectively: genes that behave in this way thrive and genes that don’t don’t.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Judges were never very good at science.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It underscores yet again the fact that what we call personality is to a considerable degree a question of brain chemistry.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evolutionary implication is that we are descended from a common ancestor with flies which used the same way of defining the pattern of the embryo more than 530 million years ago, and that the mechanism was so good that all this dead creature’s descendants have hung on to it.”
Matt Ridley (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source