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Why derive morality from superstition
Matt Ridley
For people who profess to be kind and tolerant, the defenders of Christianity can be remarkably unpleasant and intolerant. For all his frank and sometimes brusque bluster, I cannot think of anything that Richard Dawkins has said that is nearly as personally offensive as the insults that have been deluged upon his head in the […]
Flaming and soul baring — online honesty
Matt Ridley
In defense of Richard Dawkins My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the good and the bad consequences of our surprising internet honesty: It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social-networking sites. Patients are willing […]
When the crowd solves problems
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on citizen science: The more specialized and sophisticated scientific research becomes, the farther it recedes from everyday experience. The clergymen-amateurs who made 19th-century scientific breakthroughs are a distant memory. Or are they? Paradoxically, in an increasing variety of fields, computers are coming to […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the exodus from Africa, either 125,000 years ago or 65,000 years ago. Everybody is African in origin. Barring a smattering of genes from Neanderthals and other archaic Asian forms, all our ancestors lived in the continent of Africa until 150,000 years ago. […]
Why do diseases cause species decline?
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about the role of disease in species conservation: Some beekeepers, worried by the collapse of their bee colonies in recent years, are pointing a finger this month at a class of insecticide (neo-nicotinoids) that they think is responsible for lowering the insects’ resistance to […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on gene-culture co-evolution: Human beings, we tend to think, are at the mercy of their genes. You either have blue eyes or you do not (barring contact lenses); no amount of therapy can change it. But genes are at the mercy of us, […]
Matt Ridley
One of my favourite writers these days is Willis Eschenbach, whose essays at wattsupwiththat often combine ingenious scientific rationality with lyrical prose. Here he is on the subject of the sea ice off Alaska: My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors […]
The distorting of the human sex ratio
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Even a rational optimist is pessimistic about some things. Here’s one: the gradual distortion of the human sex ratio by sex-selective abortion. A new essay by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt concludes that “the practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that […]
The best explanation in the world
Matt Ridley
Each year, John Brockman’s website, The Edge, asks a question and gets many answers to it. This year, the question is: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? Some of the answers are fascinating. Here’s mine: It’s hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February 1953 […]
The slow cooling of our interglacial
Matt Ridley
Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal, with added links and charts. On interglacials. The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth’s recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% […]
