298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.

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.

Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order ‘to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces’, it was necessary to ‘stimulate vitalizing and harmonizing processes in the soil’, an insight he acquired through clairvoyance.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts.

Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

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.

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.