Matt Ridley
Matt Ridley
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley DL FRSL FMedSci, known commonly as Matt Ridley, is a British journalist who has written several popular science books. He is also a businessman and a Conservative member of the House of Lords...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 February 1958
falling-in-love people complicated
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.
sex writing differences
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.
commodity uniqueness
Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
ice growing ends
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.
dna four recipes
Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.
average years mexican
The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.
prosperity nostalgic stressful
Prosperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
dream lying book
It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.
forever genetics states
Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.
imitation memes term
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
selfish mind evolution
Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
order innovation collaboration
Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.
motivation inspiration farming
Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
break feeling figure kids lost lowest million moment people point reality start trying watching wife
The reality sunk in that we had no place to live, and we had to find it, ... We had no place for our kids to go to school, and we had to find that. We didn't know about my job, and we had to figure that out. And you're one of a million people trying to do that. It was the moment of feeling like we lost everything and we had to start over. For me, the lowest point was watching my wife come to that realization and break down in tears.