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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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f55162f
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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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2615c17
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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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ce9188a
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events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.
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Matt Ridley |
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ea284f3
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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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b1591bd
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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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10105dc
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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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c5f71ca
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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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ab8876b
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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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6ef1424
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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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77a4aa2
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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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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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819d803
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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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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 |
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4c453ea
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A propria palavra "seducao" implica mentira e manipulacao."
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Matt Ridley |
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1c2c41f
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Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raca humana e nao haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparencia, cada ser humano e unico.
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Matt Ridley |
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7bdb6ca
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The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions.
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Matt Ridley |
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Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"20"
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Matt Ridley |
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5fa8712
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La extraordinaria difusion del psicoanalisis entre 1920 y 1970 se debe mas al marketing que a los exitos terapeuticos. Al hablar con los enfermos sobre sus infancia, los analistas ofrecian una humanidad y simpatia hasta entonces inexistentes. Esto les hizo populares cuando las alternativas eran un sueno profundo a base de barbituricos, el coma insulinico, la lobotomia y las convulsiones provocadas por el choque electrico: todas ellas desagr..
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Matt Ridley |
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abcb74a
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Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind. But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind--principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners--are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left A..
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Matt Ridley |
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9731004
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If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word--for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions..
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Matt Ridley |
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cf2b6c5
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The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is "designed" quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, orig..
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Matt Ridley |
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9637fc5
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This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.
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Matt Ridley |