Matt Ridley Quotes

“A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him – the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”

“Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.”

“Few debates in the history of science have been conducted with such stupidity as the one about intelligence.”

“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.”

“Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.”

“Simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.”

“Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.”

“The evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.”

“The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.”

“The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.”

“The genome that we decipher in this generation is but a snapshot of an ever-changing document. There is no definitive edition.”

“Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.”