Human nature Quote by 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. Every living thing is “designed” quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, originally African ape as human stomachs were designed for the use of an omnivorous African ape with a taste for meat.””

Matt Ridley

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More by Matt Ridley

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the…

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“If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word—for he is a man of few words.…

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“Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.”

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At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

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We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall…

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It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by…

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“The gene contains a single 'word', repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG ... The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity and your life hang by the thread of this repetition. If the 'word' is repeated thirty-five times or fewer, you will be fine. Most of…

Matt Ridley

“If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended…

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Government can encourage innovation, but mainly by doing less, not doing more.

Matt Ridley

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Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels,…

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The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.

Matt Ridley

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This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as…

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More Human nature quotes

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these…

William Bernbach

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A Light exists in Spring Not present on the Year At any other period - When March is scarcely here A Color stands abroad On Solitary Fields That Science cannot overtake But Human Nature feels. It waits upon the Lawn, It shows the furthest Tree Upon the furthest Slope you know It almost speaks to you. Then as Horizons step…

Emily Dickinson

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

John Dewey

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“The aristocratic interiority is centered on the higher mind, the mens, the ajna chakra, the seat of intellect and intuition that commands the lower soul and the body. To be blunt, that describes the true 'aristocrat if the soul'. The second is the idea of destiny and the spiritual impetus behind it. A people, family, and son, have certain spiritual…

Julius Evola

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone…

Orson Scott Card

It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing…

David Bohm