A Quote by Matt Ridley

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years. — © Matt Ridley
The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old, we wouldn't be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.
Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.
Man's inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. Some people just do evil things. Most do not. A billion people have seen 'Batman' movies over the past 20 years, and they have been entertained and inspired. One man saw it as a sick entry point for mass murder. The one is tragic. The billion are not. I choose to write for the billion.
The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.
My parents were only one part of my lineage. I also met a number of mentors, one of whom I nicknamed "Socrates" after the ancient Greek, and wrote about in my first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior. That book emerged in 1980, as a result of travels around the world and decades of preparation, eventually leading to 15 other books written over the years, culminating in my newest offering, The Four Purposes of Life.
When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it's four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.
Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead: for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.
A billion dollars every week for Iraq, $87 billion for Iraq. We can't get $5 billion for childcare over five years in welfare reform.
The Sun, each second, transforms four million tons of itself into light, giving itself over to become energy that we, with every meal, partake of. For four million years, humans have been feasting on the Sun’s energy stored in the form of wheat or reindeer. Brian Swimme
I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.
If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.
There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed four billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die?
Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass.
My lucky number is four billion. That doesn't come in real handy when you're gambling. "Come on, four billion! Darn! Seven. Not even close. I need more dice."
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