Matt Ridley

"I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right."

"Nature is not inflexible but malleable. Moreover, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others. Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for a man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man."

"And even where I am wrong about human nature, I am not wrong that there is such a nature to be sought."

"The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but the human ones are not."

"Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals."

"If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and rewarding of violence."

"Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men."

"One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence."

"By describing adultery as a force that shaped our mating system, I am not “justifying” it. Nothing is more “natural” than people evolving the tendency to object to being cuckolded or cheated on, so if my analysis were to be interpreted as justifying adultery, it would be even more obviously interpreted as justifying the social and legal mechanisms for discouraging adultery. What I am claiming is that adultery and its disapproval are both “natural.”"

"Jealousy is a “human universal,” and no culture lacks it, Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being."

"Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity….Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes. Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history."

"Men and women have different bodies. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. Men and women have different minds. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family. The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual. Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable….Second, the evidence is overwhelming."

"These concerns (that is, about differences being used to justify unequal treatment) are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality."

"We give boys tractors and girls dolls. We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them. This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turns every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll."

"These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls."

"There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently."

"Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not."

"Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women."

"Anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity."

"The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface. Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field. The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant. It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."

"Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex."

"Beauty is not arbitrary."

"Morality is never based upon nature."

"In the 1970s a few brave “sociobiologists” began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching. Yet the question they had asked has not gone away. The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seem to justify prejudice. This was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars."

"Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, for it does not solve survival problems, it makes them worse."

"And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different."

"The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious."

"I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge."

"There are genes that have not changed much since the very first single-celled creatures populated the primeval ooze. There are genes that were developed when our ancestors were worm-like. There are genes that must have first appeared when our ancestors were fish. There are genes that exist in their present form only because of recent epidemics of disease. And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred."

"If I read the genome out to you at the rate of one word per second for eight hours a day, it would take me a century. If I wrote out the human genome, one letter per millimetre, my text would be as long as the River Danube. This is a gigantic document, an immense book, a recipe of extravagant length, and it all fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a tiny cell that fits easily upon the head of a pin."

"Almost everything in the body, from hair to hormones, is either made of proteins or made by them."

"Human beings accumulate about one hundred mutations per generation."

"All rules have exceptions (including this one)."

"Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate, and the ability to create order."

"That life is chemistry is true but boring, like saying that football is physics."

"Life consists of the interplay of two kinds of chemicals: proteins and DNA."

"This means—and religious people might find this a useful argument—that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: ‘One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.’"

"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."

"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."

"There is no bone in the chimpanzee body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part of the immune system, the digestive system, the vascular system, the lymph system or the nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa."

"It was this division of labour among specialists, unique to our species, that was the key to our ecological success, because it allowed the growth of technology."

"In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes."

"Genes are recipes for both anatomy and behaviour."

"A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium."

"No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-gazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gipsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right. We are dealing here with a prophecy of terrifying, cruel and inflexible truth."

"No study of the causes of intelligence has failed to find a substantial heritability."

"But the astonishing result (of IQ testing) is the correlation between the scores of adopted children reared together: zero. Being in the same family has no discernible effect on IQ at all."

"As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability."

"In egalitarian societies, genes matter more."

"Nobody doubts that genes can shape anatomy. The idea that they also shape behaviour takes a lot more swallowing."