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

Matt Ridley Economics See all quotes by Matt Ridley →

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

“...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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

Resonant Thoughts

"The rational mechanics of Galileo, Descartes and Newton was not, then, directly applied to machines and is not surprising that parallelly it was maintained a "corpus" of experimental knowledge, more o…"

— Lazare Carnot

Military1753–1823

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"If the aim of economics is really to provide the greatest happiness to the most people, than it is rather shocking to discover that economic growth has no net effect on happiness. So what has gone wro…"

— David Orrell

Mathematics1962

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"Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms a…"

— Nancy A. Moran

Science1954

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"While the geneticists were disproving many of Darwin's ideas, the palaeontologists were determining the actual historical facts of evolution. ...they were able to verify the law of succession, first e…"

— J. B. S. Haldane

Mathematics1892–1964

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