Matt Ridley: Humanity

Matt Ridley is economist. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Matt Ridley: 130 quotes0 likes

“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

“…then the study of human nature must have profound implications for the study of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and politics. Each of those disciplines is an attempt to understand human behaviour, and if the underlying universals of human behaviour are product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were.”

Matt Ridley

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

“In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique.”

Matt Ridley

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

“The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 10 “Stress” (p. 150)

“Just as we underestimate the degree to which human brains rely upon instincts, so we have generally underestimated the degree to which other animals are capable of learning.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 16 “Memory” (p. 222)

“These two processes—linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny—are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 13 “Pre-History” (p. 185)

“Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 25)

“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 book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 24)

“Human beings accumulate about one hundred mutations per generation.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Introduction (p. 10)
Genome (1999)