Matt Ridley

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

1. SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python

   · 2020 · cited 34,522x

2. A global reference for human genetic variation

   · 2015 · cited 17,392x

3. Astropy: A community Python package for astronomy

   · 2013 · cited 13,117x

4. Molecular portraits of human breast tumours

   · 2000 · cited 12,608x

5. First principles methods using CASTEP

   · 2005 · cited 11,967x

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Quotes

• “I know of no other way that human nature can have developed except by evolution, and there is now overwhelming evidence that there is no other way for evolution to work except by competitive reproduction. Those strains that reproduce persist; those that do not reproduce die out.”
• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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 behavior, and if the underlying universals of human behavior are the product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were.”
• “I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa.That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but is is simply not true.”
• “We assume, and rightly that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him. But why, then, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people’s natures are the products of their societies?”

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Official website

mattridley.co.uk

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Official portrait of Viscount Ridley crop 2.jpg

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