WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Oil prices look set to fall as America exploits a shale cornucopia My Times column: Exciting as Britain’s latest shale gas estimate is — 47 years’ supply or more — it pales beside what is happening in the United States. There shale gas is old hat; the shale oil revolution is proving a world changer, […]

Fashionable attacks on choice are not supported by good evidence I have an article in Spiked! on the the tyranny of consumer choice: This summer at TED Global in Edinburgh, a lively networking conference, there was a talk on one of the true and terrible scourges of the modern world. This is a bit of […]

Genomics helps head off cancer, but cures remain elusive My column in The Times: Preventing cancer is proving a lot easier than curing it. The announcement that the NHS will fund five-year courses of the drugs tamoxifen or raloxifene for healthy women who are genetically predisposed to get breast and ovarian cancer is overdue. The […]

Striking a balance between intellectual property and freedom to innovate The economist Arthur Laffer is reputed to have drawn his famous curve—showing that beyond a certain point higher taxes generate lower revenue—on a paper napkin at a dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the Washington Hotel in 1974. Another economist, Alex Tabarrok of George […]

Making electricity from burning wood is bad for the economy and the environment My column in the Times on 20 June 2013:   In the Energy Bill going through Parliament there is allowance for generous subsidy for a huge push towards burning wood to produce electricity. It’s already happening. Drax power station in Yorkshire has […]

In the absence of predators to control lesser predators, people have a role My article in the Times on 13 June 2013   ‘We are as gods and have to get good at it,” the Californian ecologist and writer Stewart Brand said recently. Worldwide there has been a sea change in the ecological profession. These […]

Abiogenic methane made in the mantle from carbonate? My Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on abiogenic methane Coal, oil and gas are “fossil” fuels, right? They are derived from ancient life-forms and are nonrenewable, stored energy, extracted from prehistoric sunlight. In the case of coal and most oil, this is […]

It’s what politicians will do unbribed that’s the bigger scandal My Times column here. I have a confession to make. Last week I held a meeting with representatives of three organisations and offered to raise an issue for them in the House of Lords. They claimed they were charities seeking a smidgin of funding to […]

By Simon Fisher and Matt Ridley Simon Fisher and I have published a Perspectives article in Science magazine.   From Science magazine: by Simon E. Fisher and Matt Ridley (Simon E. Fisher, Department of Language and Genetics, Max Planck Insti- tute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6525 XD, Netherlands. 2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud […]

Unexpectedly, antibodies work inside cells to defeat pathogens My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on a surprising discovery about antibodies and the immune system: It isn’t often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a […]