Matt Ridley

Everything can be inherited except sterility.

— Matt Ridley

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

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

...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

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

— Matt Ridley

People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential -the healthy, the fit and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme.

— Matt Ridley

When a neo-Darwinian asks 'Why?' he is really asking 'How did this come about?' He is a historian.

— Matt Ridley

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

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages.

— Matt Ridley

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

...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

Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem.

— Matt Ridley

As one of Kondrashov's critics put it, sex is a 'cumbersome strange tool to have evolved fro a housekeeping role'

— Matt Ridley

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

Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life.

— Matt Ridley

He (Thomas Ray) had discovered that the notion of a host-parasite arms race is one of the most basic and unavoidable consequences of evolution.

— Matt Ridley

The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasite.

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

Advertising works. Brand names are better known if advertised with sexy or alluring pictures, and better-known brands sell better. Why does it work? Because the price the consumer would have to pay in ignoring the subliminal message is just to high. Better to be fooled into buying the second best ice-cream than go to all the bother of educating yourself into the ability to resist salesmen.

— Matt Ridley

As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird's song is inversely correlated with the colourfulness of its plumage.

— Matt Ridley

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

Evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competitions for members of the other gender.

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

...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

...conditioning usually reinforces instinct rather than overrides it.

— Matt Ridley

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

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

— Matt Ridley