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The limits of scepticism The brilliant philosophical writer (and my old friend) Anthony Gottlieb has been ruminating on whether science should be sceptical about itself. There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they […]

Here’s the text of an opinion piece I wrote, which was published in the Western Daily Press (link to home page, not article itself) this morning to publicise a talk I am giving in Wells Cathedral on Tuesday 14th. Come along if you live nearby for the peculiar sight of me speaking in a church. Will […]

How come the richer we get the less we die? Ben Pile at Climate Resistance has a nice essay on the `environmentalist’s paradox’. This is the superficially puzzling — and to many greens, infuriating — fact that people keep on getting healthier and wealthier when really they should, in all decency, be suffering terribly because of […]

Nothing is more vulnerable than self-reliance’ Stephen Budiansky’s two essays on the `locavore’ movement, one in the New York Times and one on his blog, have received quite a bit of attention already. They are remarkably fine rants not least because Steve (an old friend) is not some pontificator. He actually grows a lots of his own […]

The polarisation of environmental science Steve Budiansky has a good piece at his Liberal Curmudgeon blog. He argues — and I agree — that heavy handed legal attacks on climate scientists, like Attorney general Ken Cucinelli’s in Virginia, are reprehensible, but that to some extent environmental scientists are reaping what they have sown, for example in […]

How climate converted the greens to the argument from authority Walter Russell Mead has a powerful essay in the American Interest online about how the environmental movement suddenly turned into the establishment. Have you noticed the irony of being told to shut up and trust the experts by the likes of Greenpeace? Nothing is quite so […]

A damning official report on the IPCC Update: Links added to sources From today’s Times, my op-ed piece. This month, after a three-year investigation, Harvard University suspended a prominent professor of psychology for scandalously overinterpreting videos of monkey behaviour. The incident has sent shock waves through science because it suggests that a body of data […]

When progressives became pessimists Excellent essay in City Journal by Fred Siegel on how liberal progressives became nostalgic reactionaries when they discovered environmental pessimism in the 1970s: Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic […]

pologists for China’s one-child policy make bizarre economic arguments My son, aged 16, is cleverer than me and knows more about economic theory, which interests him. He has his own views on the world. So I invited him to write a blog post on a topic of his choosing. Here it is: by Matthew Ridley […]

A review that misunderstands cultural evolution I have sent the following letter to the New Statesman Dear Sir, John Gray, in his review of my book The Rational Optimist accuses me of being an apologist for social Darwinism. This vile accusation could not be farther from the truth. I have resolutely criticised both eugenics and […]