A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

— Matt Ridley

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

— Matt Ridley

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralized process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbors. We do not organize societies that way... Perhaps we should try.

— Matt Ridley

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

— Matt Ridley

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

— Matt Ridley

Imagine that the genome is a book. There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES. Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES. Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTOLS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS. Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS. Each word is written in letters called BASES.

— Matt Ridley

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.

— 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 did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

— Matt Ridley

Sex is not about reproduction, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not about persuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affection. Below the surface of every banality and cliché there lies irony, cynicism, and profundity.

— Matt Ridley

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.

— Matt Ridley