WHEN WE LOOK at any human, it is natural to wonder what made them the way they are. On meeting Matt Ridley, one finds a tall, well-bred and thoughtful man who cares about the details of the world around him. Even slightly trivial questions are carefully considered. So was it nature or nurture that made Matt Ridley the man he is today? Matt insists that it was a bit of both. Not surprising, really, because this is a fundamental message of his book. In other words, genes and the environment are of equal importance in determining who we are.
Matt began work on the book at the start of 2001, just as the sequence for the human genome was being published. What was exciting about writing this story, he says, was that for the first time light was being shed on some really fundamental aspects of our behaviour as human beings. At this millennium, he asks me, where would you rather be than at a ringside seat at the reading of the genome? ‘It is such a big moment in human history. For the first time in four billion years, a creature has read its own recipe. Wouldn’t you like to be the chronicler of that?’
At one point in our conversation, he describes himself as ‘an old-fashioned empiricist’. He goes on: ‘I feel we have to be humble before the facts if we are to make progress in philosophy.’ Well, then, if we are to be humble before the facts about the author, they are as follows. He was born in England in 1958, and grew up on an idyllic dairy and wheat farm outside Newcastle that has been in his family for three centuries. It doesn’t get much nicer than that, he observes wistfully. Educated at Eton, Matt went on to study zoology at Oxford. He had, he says, an incredibly privileged background with the best nature and the best nurture.
If there is one factor above all others that has steered the course of Matt’s life it seems to be that as a boy his ‘complete and dominating obsession’ was birdwatching. His father was also a keen birdwatcher. Was it in the genes, then? No, says Matt, ‘My grandfather was an engineer. I inherited the personality that led me to be interested in these things, and I learnt the habit that was then reinforced by practice.’
Birdwatching, then, led to an interest in natural history. This led to a degree in zoology, scientific research on pheasants and a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1983. Working on his thesis, though, he discovered that he enjoyed writing more than scientific research. So he left academia, and joined The Economist. He worked there for nine years, first as a science correspondent, then as its science editor and later working in America as its Washington correspondent. In 1996, he became the founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle (a £70m science park and education centre devoted to research in genetics), a role, he says, that he is proud of. He has also been a columnist for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, and has written a number of highly acclaimed books on popular science, including The Red Queen and the international bestseller Genome.
Married with two children, he lives near Newcastle with his wife, Anya Hurlbert. He describes her as a ‘real scientist’; she is a neuroscientist and is trying to understand how the brain interprets what the eye tells it. Matt, though, is clearly still something of a scientist at heart also. Writing this most recent book may, he thinks, have been sparked in part by watching his two young children grow up. ‘It is perhaps no total coincidence that I wrote a book about mating soon after I got married and have written about nature and nurture soon after I’ve had children.’
Of his growing children he observes that he has been ‘mugged by the realities of parenthood’. He had, he says, expected it to involve much more of him, as a parent, deciding how they were going to turn out. ‘It’s amazing how they seem to come into the world not with just with their own personality, but with a fully formed set of ways of behaving that are extremely resistant to you.’ It is said, he adds, that people believe in nurture when they have one child, and nature when they have two. With two children, he continues, you see how incredibly different they are despite being brought up in similar environments.
If he had not learnt about the effect of genes, he says, he might have gone on to feel that the ways his children behave were simply as a result of the things he had done. Parenting certainly matters, he says, but it does not fine-tune the personality. Children seem to be much more aware of peer pressure and relationships, and adjust to these factors more than to the will of their parents. He thinks children calibrate themselves against siblings and peers, in order to judge what sort of person they are and what they are good at. Then there is a feedback effect. If they are good at one thing, such as tennis, then they like playing it and spend more time doing it and get better as a result. But if they detect they are bad at something they will give up.
In a similar vein, twenty years ago Matt identified his talent for science writing and has been honing this skill ever since. The result is Nature via Nurture. Whether it was genes or environment that led him to this point is actually quite irrelevant to the fact that he is now a master of the art.