Matt Ridley

When Ideas have Sex

Middle Stone Age, half a million years old.

This book is about the rapid, continuous and incessant change that human society experiences in a way that no other animal does.

In the past two decades I have written four books about how similar human beings are to other animals.

This book is about how different they are from other animals.

about human beings that enables them to keep changing their lives in this tumultuous way?

You could travel back in time and empathise easily with the motives of Shakespeare, Homer, Confucius and the Buddha.

If I could meet the man who painted exquisite images of rhinos on the wall of the Chauvet Cave in southern France 32,000 years ago, I have no doubt that I would find him fully human in every psychological way.

There is a great deal of human life that does not change.

Yet to say that life is the same as it was 32,000 years ago would be absurd.

In that time my species has multiplied by 100,000 per cent, from perhaps three million to nearly seven billion people.