298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.

É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós. Todo mundo tem uma única e distina natureza endógena. Um self.

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

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.

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.

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. That is the paradox this book has tried to explain. Human beings have social instincts. They come into the world equipped with predispositions to learn how to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labour.

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.