Mostrando resultados por "Matt Ridley" en Todas las categorías

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an arduous and even deadly ritual called a “lek.” To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. When achieved, consummation with a female takes seconds.

The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch - the endless fascination human beings have with design rather than evolution, with direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley's wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high.

Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers - questions that will profoundly impact the way we think about disease, about longevity, and about free will. Questions that will affect the rest of your life. Matt Ridley here probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome.

Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators.

A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in the city of Wuhan.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple transaction. Many treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an exhausting and sometimes deadly ritual called a ‘lek’. To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers.

If, as Darwin suggests, evolution relentlessly encourages the survival of the fittest, why are humans compelled to live in cooperative, complex societies? In this fascinating examination of the roots of human trust and virtue, a zoologist and former American editor of The Economist reveals the results of recent studies that suggest that self-interest and mutual aid are not at all incompatible. In fact, he points out, our cooperative instincts may have evolved as part of mankind's natural selfish behavior - by exchanging favors we can benefit ourselves as well as others.

When a bombing rocks New York City, former Marine Hunter Stevens and his team at Southerly—a new NSA surveillance program listening to Americans through their smart devices—race to track down those responsible. But when Hunter's daughter vanishes without a trace during the investigation, he makes a desperate choice to exploit the system’s vast surveillance network to find her. The decision sets off a chain reaction—exposing corruption, betrayal, and a deeper conspiracy within Southerly itself.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the 21st century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan.

Genetic engineering expert Dr Alina Chan and renowned science writer Matt Ridley examine the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, using their formidable skills to scrutinise arguments and rigorously analyse the sprawling data. Viral is a fascinating account that takes in pangolins, horseshoe bats, internet sleuths and misleading scientific papers. It details the evidence and investigates hypotheses for the virus origin, chief among them a potential laboratory leak or a natural spillover.

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation's founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders' thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero.

Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking, and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

La innovación es la actividad más importante de nuestra época: trae progresos espectaculares a nuestro nivel de vida, pero también, en ocasiones, cambios inquietantes a la sociedad.

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Matt Rife is well aware that he’s both the most loved and the most controversial comic in America today. And honestly, he thinks that’s your problem. Matt reveals (without apology, of course) what led him to becoming comedy’s biggest lightning rod before he reached thirty, in a story full of bold and hysterical takes on everything from Justin Bieber tramp stamps and rap battles with ex-cons to Matt’s struggles with depression and his many brushes with failure before finally hitting it big.

Genome unravels the secrets of human nature without the usual reams of technical jargon. It shows outstanding breakthroughs in gene research, how we've gone from knowing almost nothing to knowing almost everything, and how our genes reveal more about our past, our evolution, and even our minds. Every important event in human history is written into our genes, whether it happened four billion or a few hundred years ago. All you need to know is where to look.

Taught by award-winning Professor Patrick Grim of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, The Philosopher’s Toolkit: How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room arms you against the perils of bad thinking and supplies you with an arsenal of strategies to help you be more creative, logical, inventive, realistic, and rational in all aspects of your daily life.

We are taught that the world is a top-down place. Generals win battles; politicians run countries; scientists discover truths; artists create genres; inventors make breakthroughs; teachers shape minds; philosophers change minds; priests teach morality; businessmen lead businesses; environmentalists save the planet.