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4cc68fe
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simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.
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Matt Ridley |
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ade973a
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The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the ..
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specialization
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Matt Ridley |
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a44d7a9
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There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream - that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.
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Matt Ridley |
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5ba246d
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A four-letter alphabet called DNA.
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heredity
genetics
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Matt Ridley |
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5a695fc
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Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.
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free-will
genes
stress
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Matt Ridley |
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fa9be41
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At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
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life
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Matt Ridley |
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b514e90
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people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential--the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.
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Matt Ridley |
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b22c743
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The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine. Most of us have about ten to fifteen repeats. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-nine times or more, ..
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genome
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Matt Ridley |
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ea8c9cf
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To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top-down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.
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Matt Ridley |
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89fd29b
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Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.
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Matt Ridley |
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6f87748
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What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins
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Matt Ridley |
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d8fe182
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I don't have to," replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.")"
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Matt Ridley |
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4182d9d
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time always erodes advantage.
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Matt Ridley |
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a9d2bc3
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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-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.
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Matt Ridley |
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8f5e92a
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Imagine that the genome is a book. There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES. Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES. Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS. Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS. Each word is written in letters called BASES.
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literature
science
literaturegy
science-and-literature
genetics
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Matt Ridley |
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c8a22d6
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It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.
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Matt Ridley |
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fffabe6
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Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
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Matt Ridley |
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46d0649
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Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You
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Matt Ridley |
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11b3f94
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In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiendy ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human..
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Matt Ridley |
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442722a
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Anaxagoras' belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.
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Matt Ridley |
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dc8c5e8
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It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punct..
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Matt Ridley |
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c08b06a
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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. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.
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Matt Ridley |
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aa981b6
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Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.
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Matt Ridley |
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975dba1
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American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.
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Matt Ridley |
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099680b
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The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).
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Matt Ridley |
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253c972
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Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When
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Matt Ridley |
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2fb347a
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Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.
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Matt Ridley |
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c05ba33
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It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It
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Matt Ridley |
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3a46579
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Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.
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Matt Ridley |
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b12959e
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The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
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humanity
life
randomness
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Matt Ridley |
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47c9f8b
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It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,' said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.
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Matt Ridley |
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a7b2990
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I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer's disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas - these seem to me to be immense blessings.
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Matt Ridley |
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347ec18
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There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in tec..
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Matt Ridley |
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5eeb5f9
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Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
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Matt Ridley |
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7d70e20
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If, as a professor, you ask four men and two women each to wear a cotton T-shirt, no deodorant and no perfume, for two nights, then hand these T-shirts to you, you will probably be humored as a mite kinky.
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Matt Ridley |
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768c3cc
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Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.
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Matt Ridley |
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96eee2d
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As I write this, it is nine o'clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, w..
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Matt Ridley |
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5bf7426
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The market is a system of mass cooperation.
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Matt Ridley |
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decc66b
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Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.
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Matt Ridley |
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7c9477f
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Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.
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Matt Ridley |
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1884133
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Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provi..
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Matt Ridley |
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86c79f5
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What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.
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Matt Ridley |
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b49d910
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Few debates in the history of science have been conducted with such stupidity as the one about intelligence.
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Matt Ridley |
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c77ae60
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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.
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Matt Ridley |