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Evolution ain’t what it used to be
Matt Ridley
Novel rare genes and shrinking brains My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal. If you write about genetics and evolution, one of the commonest questions you are likely to be asked at public events is whether human evolution has stopped. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer. I’m tempted to […]
Red tape hobbles a harvest of life-saving rice
Matt Ridley
Bio-engineered micronutrients may be the most cost-effective way to help the poor Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to […]
How Dickensian childhoods leave genetic scars
Matt Ridley
Epigenetics and childhood maltreatment Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. […]
The economic defeat of tuberculosis
Matt Ridley
TB was not cured so much as prevented by better housing conditions My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Peter Pringle’s new book “Experiment Eleven” documents a shocking scandal in the history of medicine, when Albert Schatz, the discoverer of streptomycin, was deprived of the credit and the Nobel Prize by […]
High tech runs through it: the new science of fly fishing
Matt Ridley
Silicon nano matrix fishing rods My latest Wall Street Journal column is on the technology of fly fishing rods Moore’s Law is the leitmotif of the modern age: Incessant improvements in communication and computing are accompanied by incessant drops in price. Yet some quite low-tech devices are also experiencing Moore’s Laws of their own, especially […]
Matt Ridley
People behave just like the apes they are My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about how predictably “primate” we all are in the workplace: Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and […]
Matt Ridley
Opposition to shale gas is a storm in a teacup The Times has published my op-ed on shale gas: It is now official: drilling for shale gas by fracturing rock with water may rattle the odd teacup, but is highly unlikely to cause damaging earthquakes. That much has been obvious to anybody who has followed […]
Is eventual eradication of malaria possible?
Matt Ridley
A new technique for sterilising certain mosquitoes looks promising After a break of two weeks, here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: April 25 is World Malaria Day, designed to draw attention to the planet’s biggest infectious killer. The news is generally good. Never has malaria, which is carried […]
Matt Ridley
A new study confirms that the threat from CO2 is exaggerated A new study of the Great Barrier Reef will apparently confirm what I argued in The Rational Optimist that local pollution and over-fishing are a much greater threat to coral reefs than either climate change or changing alkalinity (sometimes wrongly called acidification). The actual […]
Matt Ridley
Emma Marris’s fine new book on ecology Belatedly, here is my Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal on 24 March 2012. In her remarkable new book “The Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine […]
