Matt Ridley quotes

As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird's song is inversely correlated with the colourfulness of its plumage. (Matt Ridley)
...the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well.
Matt Ridley
In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique.
Matt Ridley
Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life.
Matt Ridley
Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem.
Matt Ridley
That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics.
Matt Ridley
A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
Matt Ridley
Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.
Matt Ridley
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.
Matt Ridley
Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.
Matt Ridley
It is sometimes hard even for biologists to remember that sex is merely a genetic joint venture. (Matt Ridley)
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.
Matt Ridley
The pope notwithstanding, the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.
Matt Ridley
As one of Kondrashov's critics put it, sex is a 'cumbersome strange tool to have evolved fro a housekeeping role.
Matt Ridley
...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.
Matt Ridley
Nicholas Humphrey, a Cambridge psychologist, was the first to see clearly the solution to this puzzle. We use our intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people's motives, manipulating people -these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are, but how much cleverer and craftier than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species.
Matt Ridley
When a neo-Darwinian asks 'Why?' he is really asking 'How did this come about?
Matt Ridley
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.
Matt Ridley
Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
Matt Ridley
He (Thomas Ray) had discovered that the notion of a host-parasite arms race is one of the most basic and unavoidable consequences of evolution.
Matt Ridley
The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasite. (Matt Ridley)
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.
Matt Ridley
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.
Matt Ridley
Advertising works. Brand names are better known if advertised with sexy or alluring pictures, and better-known brands sell better. Why does it work? Because the price the consumer would have to pay in ignoring the subliminal message is just to high. Better to be fooled into buying the second best ice-cream than go to all the bother of educating yourself into the ability to resist salesmen.
Matt Ridley
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.
Matt Ridley