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Matt Ridley
I have a piece in today’s Times newspaper on extinction of species. Here it is, with added links: The suitably named Dr Boris Worm, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, led the team that this week estimated the number of species on the planet at 8.7 million, plus or minus 1.3 million. That sounds about right. We human beings […]
Matt Ridley
Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: Evolutionists long ago abandoned the idea that natural selection can promote only selfish behavior. In the right circumstances, animals-including human beings-evolve the instinct to be nice (or acquire habits of niceness through cultural evolution). This happens within families but also within groups, where social solidarity […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Hardly any subject in science has been so politically fraught as the heritability of intelligence. For more than a century, since Francis Galton first started speculating about the similarities of twins, nature-nurture was a war with a stalemated front and intelligence was its […]
The limits of sexual selection
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: What limits the size of a peacock’s tail, the weight of a deer’s antlers or the virtuosity of a songbird’s song? Driven inexorably by the competition to attract mates, these features of animals ought to get ever more elaborate. There was even once a theory-now […]
Matt Ridley
The New York Times has a fawning profile of the paymaster of eco-doomsters, Jeremy Grantham. It says: In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” [Jeremy Grantham] argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic […]
Matt Ridley
It’s not that they are more desperate. it’s that they are thriving. Here is a piece I just published in the Spectator. The terrible story of the boys mauled by a polar bear in Spitsbergen has sparked a debate about the risks of adventure travel. But what does it tell us about polar bears? Some have claimed […]
Matt Ridley
Johnny Berliner made this charming little calypso account of genes and what they are made of. It’s concise and precise as well as nice. (Calypso rhyming is catching) h/t Mark Stevenson.
Where do carbon dioxide emissions come from?
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: I spent part of last week in Iceland, where the fragility of civilization’s veneer is all too evident in a violently volcanic landscape. Whereas in most countries geology amazes you with its age, in Iceland it stuns you with its youth. The country […]
The nature and nurture sport: talent versus effort
Matt Ridley
Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal “It’s strange that I could become a professional athlete,” said the Australian winner of this summer’s Tour de France, Cadel Evans. “Physically, I was completely unsuitable for almost all Australian school sports. Nearly all Australian school sports require speed and/or size.” Sounds like a triumph of […]
Matt Ridley
The new Siberian hominids and the family tree Belatedly, here is last week’s Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal. I once had a soft spot for the yeti, known in my youth as the “abominable snowman.” As a teenager I avidly devoured stories of hairy bipeds glimpsed through snowstorms, strange cries echoing […]
