WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Or rather, why did it not peter out? At Cato Unbound, there is a set of essays on the subject in response to Deirdre McCloskey, one of which is by me, others by Greg Clark and Jonathan Feinstein. I champion the theory that coal was crucial, because it showed increasing rather than diminshing returns (the more people […]

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal On the failed promise of genomics. Is it because common ailments are caused by many different rare genetic variants?

GM crops benefit non-GM crops nearby Do you remember how, back in the days when genetically modified crops were as vilifed as climate sceptics were until recently, one of the arguments deployed against them was that they would `contaminate’ neighbouring farms with their genetically modified pollen? This was one justification for a total ban, as […]

Remember how vilifed were the IVF pioneers Robin Marantz Henig hits the nail on the head in the New York Times today: The history of in vitro fertilization demonstrates not only how easily the public will accept new technology once it’s demonstrated to be safe, but also that the nightmares predicted during its development almost never […]

Pacific fishing technology and the catallaxy My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive. World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world’s income has octupled. The richest places on Earth […]

An advert that advocates blowing up people who disagree with you Yuk. This video was made by an organisation funded partly by the UK taxpayer.

Maurice Wilkins’s letters to Francis Crick turn up Francis Crick’s letters from the 1950s, supposedly thrown away by `an over-zealous secretary’, have come to light in Sydney Brenner’s papers. Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski found them when they went through the Brenner archive. The secretary is exonerated. The Crick Brenner office (they shared a room) […]

Lists of threatened species include things you can buy cheaply online for the garden. There is a big push on to draw attention to species extinction in the run up to a Biodiversity Jamboree in Japan. But something struck me as odd as I listened to the radio this morning. There was a lot of […]

I am now writing a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal called Mind and Matter. Here’s the first one. Recently, the psychologist David Buss’s team at the University of Texas at Austin reported that men, when looking for one-night stands, check out women’s bodies. Or as they put it, “men, but not women, have a […]

A neat insight from Don Boudreaux From Cafe Hayek comes this: When materials are worth recycling, markets for their reuse naturally arise.  For materials with no natural markets for their reuse, the benefits of recycling are less than its costs – and, therefore, government efforts to promote such recycling waste resources. Everyday experience should teach us […]