Matt Ridley: Trending quotes

“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

Source: Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Motivation , Knowledge

“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.”

Matt Ridley book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5
Source: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Life

“Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be worst for a man.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 6

“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

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 3

People , Learning , Football

“One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counter-invention.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

History , Time

“Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 7

Women , Wealth

“Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

“…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

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Bird , Animals

“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

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 2. The Enigma

People , Motivation , Understanding , Problem

“…the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

“Reproducing sexually must improve an individual´s reproductive success or else sex would not persist… It is increasingly hard to understand how human beings came to be so clever without considering sexual competition.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

Sex , Understanding , Success

“…nobody has told the coelancath, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not evolving.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 2. The Enigma

Law , Fish

“When a neo-Darwinian asks 'Why?' he is really asking 'How did this come about?”

Matt Ridley

He is a historian.
Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

“The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

Idea , Past

“It is sometimes hard even for biologists to remember that sex is merely a genetic joint venture.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 3

Sex

“Such 'habituation´is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Way , Sense , Change

“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

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 2. The Enigma

People , Sex , Question

“It is no harder to explain than a game of cards. There are aces and kings and twos and threes in any deck of cards. A lucky player is dealt a high-scoring hand, but none of his cards is unique. Elsewhere in the room are others with the same kinds of cards in their hands. But even with just thirteen kinds of cards, every hand is different and some are spectacularly better than others. Sex is merely the dealer, generating unique hands from the same monotonous deck of genetic cards shared by the whole species.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

Sex , Game

“Everything can be inherited except sterility.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

“Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.”

Matt Ridley

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 3