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Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

Matt Ridley

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Matt Ridley
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: February 7
Banker
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Matthew White Ridley
5th Viscount Ridley
Matthew Ridley
5th Viscount Ridley
Matthew White Ridley
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A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.
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Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
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Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
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The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
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Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
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Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
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You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.
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It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it.
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Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.
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A true scientist is bored by knowledge it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
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We consciously decide whether to consider people we fall in love despite ourselves we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.
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The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene
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The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
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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.
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The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
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