#matt ridley

[entheognosis]

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

Matt Ridley

[omg-hellgirl]

The same would have applied to males who wanted to attract females, which Miller calls the Dionysus effect after the Greek god of dance, music, intoxication, and seduction: He might also have called it the Mick Jagger effect; he admitted to me one day that he could not understand what made strutting, middle-aged rock stars so attractive to women.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.

[oh-dear-so-queer]

Sigmund Freud himself was wary of treating psychotic patients, believing them to be beyond his methods, though he did hazard a wild guess that paranoid schizophrenia was the result of suppressed homosexual impulses.

"Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human" - Matt Ridley

[tenth-sentence]

Ironically, this 'favouritism' led to a higher survival rate among twins than singletons – most of the small children who survived Auschwitz were twins.

"Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human" - Matt Ridley

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The sudden revolution of 50,000 years ago at the start of the Upper Paleolithic is clearly a Eurocentric myth, caused by the fact that far more archaeologists work in Europe than in Africa.

"Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human" - Matt Ridley

[airbrickwall]

[gettothedancing]

Teaching young people to despair over the planet's impending doom is not only cruel. It's wildly inaccurate.

One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.

Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems.

[insidewarp]

A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.

Matt Ridley

http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html