Science Writer, Author
Matt Ridley is a British science writer and journalist with a doctorate in zoology from Oxford. His bestselling books include 'The Red Queen,' 'Genome,' 'The Rational Optimist,' 'The Evolution of Everything,' and 'How Innovation Works,' exploring evolution, genetics, and human progress.
by Matt Ridley
Ridley tells the story of humanity through 23 chromosomes, one per chapter. Each gene illuminates a different facet of human nature, from disease and intelligence to personality and free will.
by Matt Ridley
Ridley argues sexual selection drives the evolution of human intelligence and culture. The arms race between parasites and hosts explains why sex exists, and mate competition shaped our minds.
by Matt Ridley
Ridley argues that prosperity emerges from the exchange and recombination of ideas, which he calls 'ideas having sex,' and that specialization and trade have driven cumulative human improvement since the Stone Age. He uses this framework to mount an empirical case for optimism about future living standards, innovation, and resource use.
The books Matt Ridley references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins reframes evolution from the organism's perspective to the gene's. Bodies are survival machines built by genes competing to replicate - a view that transformed modern biology.
by Charles Darwin
Darwin lays out the evidence that species evolve through natural selection, where small heritable variations accumulate over generations. The theory unified biology and changed how we understand life.
by Jared Diamond
Diamond argues that geography, not racial superiority, explains why some civilizations dominated others. Differences in domesticable plants, animals, and continental axes gave certain societies an insurmountable head start.
Who Matt draws from, and who draws from Matt — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.