Books

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other.

Published: May 2010 (All day)

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Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code

Traces the colourful life of the man who discovered the structure of DNA, the building blocks of life.

Published: February 2008 (All day)
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

This book chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes, recounting the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture.

Published: May 2004 (All day)
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes, and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine.

Published: March 2000 (All day)
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

Why are people nice to each other? What are the reasons for altrusim? Matt Ridley explains how the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange, offering a lucid and persuasive argument about the paradox of human benevolence.

Published: October 1997 (All day)
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass", Alice meets the Red Queen who runs everywhere but stays in the same place. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it was invented to keep changing the genetic locks so as to remain one step ahead of constantly mutating parasites.

Published: October 1994 (All day)