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Sisyphean
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Matt Ridley |
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Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out no sewage, because water, gas, and a magic form of invisible power called electricity would come into their home through pipes and wires. They would jump at the chance to have such a home, but they would warily ask ho they could possibly afford i..
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Matt Ridley |
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the market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.' This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectively rational outcome, so they can turn many individually selfish motives into a collectively kind result.
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Matt Ridley |
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These days, the cancer cells often need another mutation to thrive: one that will outwit the chemotherapy or radiotherapy to which the cancer is subjected. Somewhere in the body, one of the cancer cells happens to acquire a mutation that defeats the drug. As the rest of the cancer dies away, the descendants of this rogue cell gradually begin to multiply, and the cancer returns. Heartbreakingly, this is what happens all too often in the trea..
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Matt Ridley |
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Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even - perhaps especially - in the hands of elite experts, and especially when predicting the future and when there's lavish funding at stake.
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Matt Ridley |
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0a11735
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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" --
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Matt Ridley |
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39ab5ea
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This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots.
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Matt Ridley |
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Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.
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Matt Ridley |
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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.
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Matt Ridley |
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First, I need to convince you that human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for the average human being - even now in a deep recession.
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Matt Ridley |
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It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.
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Matt Ridley |
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In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one.
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Matt Ridley |
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An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds. Just
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Matt Ridley |
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02d0603
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today people farm (i.e., plough, crop or graze) just 38 per cent of the land area of the earth, whereas with 1961 yields they would have to farm 82 per cent to feed today's population.
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Matt Ridley |
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5115981
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The lesson of this study is that, on the whole, having to deal with strangers teaches you to be polite to them, and that in order for such generosity to emerge, costly punishment of selfishness may be necessary.
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Matt Ridley |
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So - as animal experiments have suggested - oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.
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Matt Ridley |
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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
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Matt Ridley |
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the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.
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Matt Ridley |
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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.
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Matt Ridley |
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Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.
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Matt Ridley |
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As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus
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Matt Ridley |
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The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.
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Matt Ridley |
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Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever).
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Matt Ridley |
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3815340
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The top four priorities would be food, fuel, clothing and shelter. Dig the garden, feed the pig, fetch water from the brook, gather wood from the forest, wash some potatoes, light a fire (no matches), cook lunch, repair the roof, fetch fresh bracken for clean bedding, whittle a needle, spin some thread, sew leather for shoes, wash in the stream, fashion a pot out of clay, catch and cook a chicken for dinner.
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Matt Ridley |
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So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else's: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet,
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Matt Ridley |
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In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.
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Matt Ridley |
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So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.
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Matt Ridley |
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In Germany too the preservation of nature went hand in hand with the destruction of human life. 'Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists!' read one Nazi slogan.
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Matt Ridley |
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The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would 'perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents'. The organisation's international arm was headquartered in the offices of the British Eugenics Society as late as 1952.
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Matt Ridley |
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Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa.
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Matt Ridley |
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People increased their birth rate in response to high child death rates. Make them richer and healthier and they would have fewer babies, as had already happened in Europe, where prosperity had led birth rates down, not up.
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Matt Ridley |
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It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.' No anthropic principle needed.
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Matt Ridley |
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The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.
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Matt Ridley |
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The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,' wrote William Easterly.
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Matt Ridley |
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As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.
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Matt Ridley |
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The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.
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Matt Ridley |
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Jeff Bezos's favourite saying is 'Start with the customer and work backwards,' but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work forwards.
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Matt Ridley |
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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. The habitat in which these ideas reside consists of human brains.
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Matt Ridley |
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8a741fb
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Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over. The Social Security Administration ordered 174,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets. The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Bureau ..
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Matt Ridley |
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It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom-up.
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Matt Ridley |
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Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.
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Matt Ridley |
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Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.
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Matt Ridley |
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Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.
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Matt Ridley |
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Top-down language teaching just does not work well - it's like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.
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Matt Ridley |