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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and originality,' said H.L. Mencken.
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Matt Ridley |
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Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.
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Matt Ridley |
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Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American people none the less never lose faith in the presidential religion.
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Matt Ridley |
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073bb60
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China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?
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Matt Ridley |
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1fb163d
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We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.
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Matt Ridley |
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1beee7a
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This provided an excuse for sidelining questions of independence - until the subject people were 'ready'. Hailey got the Americans to go along with this, by suggesting a similar line on Southern segregation. Economic betterment would come first; political liberation could wait.
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Matt Ridley |
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events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.
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Matt Ridley |
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These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.
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Matt Ridley |
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bc7b0d4
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And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity.
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Matt Ridley |
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26b91a3
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It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.
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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'.
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Matt Ridley |
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This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical.
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Matt Ridley |
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c0892f1
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if life needs no intelligent designer, then why should the market need a central planner?
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Matt Ridley |
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Besides, we now know that virtually all the evidence purporting to show how parental influences shape our character is deeply flawed. There is indeed a correlation between abusing children and having been abused as a child, but it can be entirely accounted for by inherited personality traits. The children of abusers inherit their persecutor's characteristics. Properly controlled for this effect, studies leave no room for nurture determinism..
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Matt Ridley |
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485b607
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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 sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a huma..
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Matt Ridley |
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3aa35d6
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In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in ..
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Matt Ridley |
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b12f340
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almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.
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Matt Ridley |
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And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.
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Matt Ridley |
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22663ea
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This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make pr..
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Matt Ridley |
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b580f2d
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Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at random any 'paragraph' in the chimp genome and compare it with the comparable 'paragraph' in the human genome, you will find very few 'letters' are different: on average, less than two in every hundred. We are, to a ninety-eight per cent approximat..
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Matt Ridley |
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f90abe8
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Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff's bombast, Iago's cunning, Leontes's jealousy, Rosalind's strength, and Malvolio's embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only
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Matt Ridley |
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977f0da
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When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.
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Matt Ridley |
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e202796
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nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.
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nature
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Matt Ridley |
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9c1c036
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Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.
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Matt Ridley |
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And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.
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Matt Ridley |
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6a98225
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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.
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Matt Ridley |
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The world's cities already contain half the world's people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world's land area.
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Matt Ridley |
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The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.
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Matt Ridley |
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8031f60
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Henry's novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin's idea of female choice as a force in evolution.
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Matt Ridley |
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Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.
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Matt Ridley |
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4c06a80
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We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.
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Matt Ridley |
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4505306
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Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.
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Matt Ridley |
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But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest?
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Matt Ridley |
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if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?
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Matt Ridley |
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It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world back into pre-industrial poverty some time during the coming century. There is even a new reason for such pessimism: the integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, wh..
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Matt Ridley |
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f90b57e
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Snazi-li se muz ziskat zenu, neposle ji svuj vypis z uctu, ale daruje ji perlovy nahrdelnik. Nechlubi se svou lekarskou kartou, ale mezi reci prohodi, ze kazdy tyden ubehne patnact kilometru a nikdy nebyva nachlazeny. Nechlubi se pred ni akademickymi tituly, ale snazi se ji okouzlit svym vtipem. Nezaprisaha se pred ni svou pozornosti, ale k narozeninam ji posle kytici rudych ruzi. Temito gesty ji oznamuje: jsem bohaty, jsem zdravy, jsem chy..
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Matt Ridley |
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a7e8e99
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There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved.
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Matt Ridley |
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d4e42c1
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In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.
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Matt Ridley |
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27bfda7
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It is a common trick to forecast the future on the assumption of no technological change, and find it dire. This is not wrong. The future would indeed be dire if invention and discovery ceased. As Paul Romer puts it: 'Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding ne..
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Matt Ridley |
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d0c7b3b
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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
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Matt Ridley |
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8db8a00
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This is not a book about the Human Genome Project -- about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough first draft of the complete human genome. In just a few short years we will have moved from knowing almost nothing about our genes to knowing everything. I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history..
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Matt Ridley |
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This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not kno..
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Matt Ridley |
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d36b001
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the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.
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Matt Ridley |
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8ff09c7
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The cultural progress of the Species encountered impediments along the way. Overpopulation was a constant problem: as soon as the capacity of the local environment to support the population began to suffer, so individuals began to retreat from specialisation and exchange into defensive self-sufficiency, broadening their production and narrowing their consumption. This reduced the collective intelligence they could draw upon, which reduced t..
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Matt Ridley |