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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 […]

Antibiotics, flu and evolution Let nobody accuse professional healthcare officials of being unproductive. They diligently produce what they are good at producing — dire warnings of disaster. There have been Ebola virus, Lassa fever, swine flu, bird flu, swine flu again, SARS, the human form of mad cow disease, and many more such scares. Every […]

Rich Idaho looks after biodiversity better than poor North Korea I am on holiday in the Idaho Rockies, in a house on the edge of what is in winter a fancy ski resort, the streets of which are clogged with sports cars, massive SUVs and even the odd Hummer. The shops offer all the extravagances […]

Rational optimism for the universe In The Rational Optimist, I argue that the human technological and economic take-off derives from the invention of exchange and specialisation some time before 100,000 years ago. When people began to trade things, ideas could meet and mate, with the result that a sort of collective brain could form, far […]

`Optimisten brauchen diesen Text nicht zu lesen. Pessimisten sollten ihn auswendig lernen.’ German language interview just published in Das Magazin, based in Zurich. It calls me `notorisch zuversichtlichen’. Includes this picture of the author looking pessmistic because about to be eaten by sabre-toothed cat, and because he has his head by the rear end of a […]

Who thinks they are in conflict? Through the letterbox drops a begging letter from the head of a university. Fair enough. The needy beg. The first sentence reads as follows. Today, the defining struggle in the world is between relentless growth and the potential for collaboration. This is very odd in all sorts of ways. […]

That damned elusive slick I noticed a curious thing recently. The BBC’s coverage of the Gulf oil spill for the last two nights was missing one thing: oil. A reporter went down in a minisubmarine and looked at a pristine coral reef. Newsnight interviewed lawyers, fishermen and politicians. But there was no sign of a […]