He is the author of several works of popular science:
- 1993 Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
In Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets the Red Queen who runs everywhere but stays in the same place. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it was invented to keep changing the genetic locks so as to remain one step ahead of constantly mutating parasites. The Red Queen also addresses dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture — including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and why the human brain may be like the peacock’s tail — a seduction device.
- 1996 Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation
In
The Origins of Virtue, Ridley argues that the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange that enables us to reap the benefits of co-operation, ostracise those who break the social contract and avoid the trap of being 'rational fools'. It traces the evolution of society first among genes, then among cells, then in ants, vampire bats, apes and dolphins, and finally among human beings. Along the way, it plays games with computers, traces the psychological roots of football riots, finds trade to be ten times as old as economists believe, compares dead mammoths to lighthouses, explains the evolution of human emotions and shows how to save the rain forest. In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, former US President Bill Clinton named this book as one which had influenced his thinking.
- 1999 The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
The human genome, the complete set of genes in 23 pairs of chromosomes, is an 'autobiography' of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been edited, abridged, altered and added to as it has been handed down, generation to generation, over more than three billion years. This generation is the first to read this book, and to gain hitherto unimaginable insights into what it means to be alive, to be human, to be conscious or to be ill. By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes, and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, described the book as "lucid and exhilarating".
- 2003 Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, also later released under the title The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture in 2004
This book chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes, recounting the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. The emerging truth is far more interesting than a stale antithesis between heredity and environment. Nurture depends on genes, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; through the pattern of their turning on and off they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.
- 2006 Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
A biography of Francis Crick that won the Davis Prize for the history of science from the US History of Science Society.
Ridley also edited
The Best American Science Writing 2002, one of a series of annual science writing anthologies edited by Jesse Cohen, and contributed a chapter to
How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, a collection of essays in honour of his friend Richard Dawkins (edited by his near-namesake Mark Ridley).
- 2010 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, HarperCollins. Reviewed in Nature 465, 294—295 (20 May 2010)
Ridley creates a wide-ranging history of human society from early hunter-gatherer groups into the early 21st century. He argues that human beings have an often underestimated capacity for change and social progress. From early on in human evolution, Ridley writes, trade and other kinds of exchanges between groups "gave the Species an external, collective intelligence". He continues with histories of socio-economic progress under free market capitalism and democratic civil institutions. He then dismisses what he sees as overly pessimistic views of global climate change and Western birthrate decline. The book contains numerous graphs depicting social changes, such as how world GDP per person grew from about $1,000 in 1900 to $6,000 in 2000.