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My latest Wall Street Journal Mind and Matter column: The list of scientific heretics who were persecuted for their radical ideas but eventually proved right keeps getting longer. Last month, Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, having spent much of his career being told he was wrong. “I was thrown […]

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: “You can’t change human nature.” The old cliché draws support from the persistence of human behavior in new circumstances. Shakespeare’s plays reveal that no matter how much language, technology and mores have changed in the past 400 years, human nature is largely undisturbed. Macbeth’s ambition, […]

There’s a fine article at Spiked by Tim Black exposing what Robert* Malthus actually said. Malthus was a reactionary nostalgic pessimist who was not just wrong about population growth outstripping food supply. He was also wrong in his cynicism about helping the poor lest they breed more. (*Everybody calls him Thomas these days, whereas his […]

My lecture on scientific heresy to the RSA this week has been reprinted on bishop-hill.net and wattsupwiththat.com, where it has generated much discussion. Thanks to Andrew Montford and Antony Watts for their interest.

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: This Halloween, the United Nations declared over the summer, a baby will be born somewhere on Earth who will tip the world’s population over seven billion for the first time. Truly do international bureaucrats have the power of prophecy! The precision is bunk, of course, […]

Sad news of the death of John McCarthy, former professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, who coined the very term “artificial intelligence” in 1955 and invented the LISP programming language in 1958. McCarthy was a true “progressive” in that he appreciated the rapid and dramatic improvements in human living standards brought about by innovation. […]

Bronwen Maddox, editor of Prospect, has a long article entitled “Just Too Many?”, arguing that the world needs to end its taboo on discussing population and population control. This is of course pegged on the United Nations’ somewhat gimmicky announcement that the world will pass seven billion people on 31st October. Thugh it is generally a […]

he Australian has published my review of Donna Laframboise’s book here. The review prompted a tweet from Michael Mann that I was wrong to say the IPCC had dropped the hockey stick. Here’s a source: judge for yourself. Here’s the text of the review: A LITTLE-KNOWN Canadian freelancer whowrites a short book dense with data and argument, […]

Chris Huhne, the UK energy secretary, boasts that wind farms and other renewable energy schemes will create 9,000 jobs this year. Since they are all subsidised, each one is in effect sponsored by a newly unemployed person elsewhere in the economy. Shale gas already supports 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone, up from about zero in […]

From The Economist comes news that does not surprise me and reinforces my view, aired in mydebate with Bill Gates, that pessimism about Africa is overdone and trade is transforming Africa for the better: AFRICA has made a phenomenal leap in the last decade. Its economy is growing faster than that of any other continent. Foreign […]