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  Fenbeagle has done a cartoon featuring a rational optimist…    

From My latest Mind and Matter Column at he Wall Street Journal: The science of evolutionary psychology has flourished in recent years by asking “why” as well as “how” questions about animal and human behavior, and answering them with historical explanations. John S. Dykes For example, why are most male mammals keen on promiscuity, while most […]

I have a book review in the Wall Street Journal of Robert Laughlin’s book Powering the Future. These are the first two paragraphs: Many environmentalists believe that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels will cause a climate crisis toward the end of this century. Environmentalists also raise the alarm that we have reached “peak oil” […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on metaphors and analogies: Monkeys can reason by using analogy, it seems. In an experiment recently reported in the journal Psychological Science, baboons in a lab proved capable of realizing that a pair of oval shapes is “like” a pair of square shapes and […]

Fascinating interview with the founder of Continental Resources Harold Hamm in the Wall Street Journal. Harold Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, the government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties. That’s more than the U.S. national debt. The Bakken […]

I have an op-ed article in the Times today, arguing that there is light at the end of the tunnel for the world’s and the British economy: the long-term gains from living within our means are huge:   Matthew Parris hit a nerve last Saturday with his argument that we have lived beyond our means and […]

Here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal There are many mysteries about Ray, the 17-year-old English-speaking “forest boy” who walked into the city hall in Berlin on Sept. 5, claiming to have lived wild in the woods for five years with his father-until his father recently died in a fall. […]

I have the following  opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, adapted from my forthcoming Hayek lecture. The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It has been the source of human invention […]

I published this article in the Ottawa Citizen today: The world now has almost seven billion people and rising. The population may surpass nine billion by 2050. We, together with our 20 billion chickens and four billion cattle, sheep and pigs, will utterly dominate the planet. Can the planet take it? Can we take it?   […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on drug development and network analysis: Here’s a paradox. Every week seems to bring news from a research laboratory of an ingenious candidate cure about to enter clinical trials for a serious disease. Yet the productivity of drugs coming out of clinical trials has […]