Matt Ridley Quotes

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Radiation is one of the important factors in evolution. It causes mutation, and some level of mutation is actually good for evolution.

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.

That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved

Evolution is an unproven theory. If what its fundamentalist supporters believe is true, fishes decided to grow lungs and legs and walk up the beach. The idea is so comically daft that only one thing explains its survival-that lonely, frightened people wanted to expel God from the Universe because they found the idea that He exists profoundly uncomfortable.

Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.

Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.