Matt Ridley Quotes
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In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique.
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Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.
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People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential -the healthy, the fit and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme.
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As one of Kondrashov's critics put it, sex is a 'cumbersome strange tool to have evolved fro a housekeeping role'
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Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.
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...compare mankind with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery.
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The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasite.
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...the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well.
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Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life.
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I'm perfectly happy to eat organic food, but if I choose to pay more for it, I don't pat myself on the back ethically. Quite the reverse. I think I'm actually being quite greedy, because what I'm doing is essentially saying, 'I want more land to be devoted to growing my food.'
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Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males.
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Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.
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Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
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Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be worst for a man.
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I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.
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...conditioning usually reinforces instinct rather than overrides it.
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If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?
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In chess or in football, the tactic that proves most effective is soon the one that people learn easily to block. Every innovation in attack is soon countered by another in defence.
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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.
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Evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competitions for members of the other gender.
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As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird's song is inversely correlated with the colourfulness of its plumage.
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I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.
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I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.
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I asked John Maynard Smith, one of the first people to pose the question 'Why sex?', whether he still thought some new explanation was needed. 'No. We have the answers. We cannot agree on them, that is all.'