An incredibly profound and lucid book from a wonderful author. Read it!

This book should definitely be on your short list of books to read if you are at all interested in what makes us humans behave as we do. It is one among many recently published books on evolutionary psychology -- and it's one of the very best. What distinguishes Ridley's book from the pack is his explicit grappling with the question: What does the fact that human moral sentiments are crafted by natural selection imply about the appropriate political order? I definitely want and need to read it a...

Matt Ridley was educated at Oxford and is a journalistic scientist, which means he is able to translate the more complicated scientific breakthroughs and understandings to the wider public in a clear and succinct manner.Almost anything he has written, including his Guardian articles, are worthy of a reader's time. This particuar publication is a brave attempt to explain why we are nice to each other. Is it from some altruistic human capacity or is it more a genetic survival technique? We are tau...

The Origins of Virtue is a non-technical discussion of the evolutionary aspects of cooperation and altruism. That being an extremely complex subject (and still very much an active area of research), a short book like this can only skim the surface. Although I've read other books, magazine articles, and blog posts, there were some things here that were new to me. For example, the pair of chapters introducing game theory are better than other introductory articles I've seen, which (surprisingly) g...

This book sets out to demonstrate that "there was morality before the church, trade before the state, exchange before money, social contracts before Hobbes, welfare before the Rights of Man, culture before Babylon, society before Greece, self-interest before Adam Smith, and greed before capitalism." By the title, you would think this is a book about the origins of virtue, but really the primary focus is on only two virtues he focuses on are altruism and cooperation. When he is doing so, Matt Rid...

Read it awhile ago. I remember it being really good. Pretty simple to grasp. Fun. Interesting. All that.Attempts to answer the question "Why are people nice?"Quotes:"Animals are designed to do things not for their species, or for themselves, but for their genes.""There had come the realization that the genome wasn't the monolithic data bank plus executive team devoted to one project - keeping oneself alive, having babies - that I had hitherto imagined it to be. Instead, it was beginning to seem

Hmmm, The Origins of Virtue is an interesting examination of the possible evolutionary causes of virtue, mostly defined here as altruism. It works quite well as a supplement that falls somewhere in between three of my current classes on Coursera: one with an anthropological bent, one largely genetic, and one about morality. It draws some of those themes together quite well, for me, and explains some of the studies -- and some of the pitfalls of the studies, and wishful thinking.It's also pretty

Ridley explores the concepts laid out by Charles Darwin regarding the spirit of cooperation amongst the human race with clarity and purpose. He is a compelling author with well-defined views.Great read!

The book opens with a daring jail break. The story notes that the person escaping the grim Russian prison is, in fact, a member of the nobility, one of the Czar's favorites when the escapee was much younger. The person breaking out, of course, is Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist prince. However, it is not his philosophy so much as his work in natural history that drew Matt Ridley's attention. Kropotkin, on an exploration of Siberia, observed what he saw was cooperation among multitudinous animal s...

Bit tempted to put this one in science fiction.

This book poses a puzzle: Is virtue an instinctual property built into our selfish genes? And if so, how do we reconcile our tribal tendencies with the trust we extend to others? You might think such thorny questions best explained by anthropologists, but Matt Ridley the biologist/economist wouldn't agree. His thesis is based on several lines of research which weigh traditional and emerging beliefs about human nature. Traditionally he asks if we are noble savages constrained by society or distr...

This book extends the arguments about the genetic basis of behavior from the rest of the animal kingdom (familiar to readers of Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene") into human behavior, the appearance of cooperation and altruistic actions, and the unique nature of human society. The author, Matt Ridley, is good at engaging the reader, with many examples drawn not only from biology, but from diverse fields, including opera (the "Prisoner's Dilemma" chapter begins with the plot story for Puccini's "Tosca"...

This book convinced me to be an ethical being. Also is true. Great work

Interesting, well written.

Nature or nurture? It’s a question as old as philosophy, and it is an ongoing discussion in our current world. Matt Ridley tackles this question from the perspective of evolutionary biology (a subject on which he has authored several books) in The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. In answering the question, he doesn’t vary far from the “selfish gene” concept, but he uses illustrations from anthropology, biology, economics, history, and horticulture (among other...

Solid in parts, sadly Ridley once again Allows his scientific reasoning and conclusions to be the servants of his a priori political beliefs

A fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of human nature, and how it has evolved biologically and culturally. It’s mostly a happy story – as a species we are cooperative, social, sharing, trading and we divide the labor so that we all have more. There’s a darker side too: we are fiercely and often irrationally (and violently) tribal. And underlying it all is the unpleasant (to many) truth that self-interest drives the whole thing – probably at the level of our genes, but certainly at the level...

My overall impression of the book: This book is by far the most comprehensive account on the evolution of human morality I have yet to read. Ridley consummately brings together knowledge and narratives from biology, zoology, history (e.g. ancient Rome), and contemporary society (e.g. extant hunter-gatherer societies) to bring depth and volume to the subject matter. His book is informative from a socio-historical perspective, evolutionary perspective, zoological perspective, and even genetic pers...

Lively, biased, and a whole lot of funMatt Ridley nicely demonstrates here that there is no such thing as virtue and that altruism is an oxymoron. Instead it is all reciprocity and enlightened self-interest. This reminds me of when I was a sophomore in college. We used to argue passionately about three things: the nature of women, whether the Pope believed in God, and whether it was possible to act otherwise than in one's own self-interest. We concluded that women were an enigma wrapped in a mys...

Matt Ridley, a former journalist, continues to provide evolutionary-psychology and zoology grounded insights into human behavior. An old book, but good groundwork for more recently published material.