WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the regulation of genetic testing I just took a detailed genetic test by sending some spit to a firm in California and looking up the results on the Net. It seems I’m probably descended from a peculiarly fecund fourth-century Irish king called Niall […]

Economics for scientists   In my experience, scientists often have a reflexive contempt for economics. Speaking as a scientist who came to understand economics after leaving academia, I find this attitude frustrating, because I see how they miss the fundamentally bottom-up, emergent, evolving nature of human society that the field of economics strives to understand […]

A nineteenth century blast of rational optimism   Peter Risdon writes to draw to my attention what Mark Twain wrote to Walt Whitman on this 70th birthday: What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the […]

Getting cause and consequence confused is a surprisingly common error in science Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Scientists like to remind us not to confuse cause and effect. But they’re not immune from making that mistake themselves. Last week, for example, a flurry of sociological headlines emanating from a conference […]

The BBC has plumbed new depths with its recent reporting on shale gas. Its reporter Richard Black wrote a story about the old Cornell University claim that shale gas production emits more greenhouse-warming gases than coal. I happen to know quite a bit about this study and I know that it is based on very extreme […]

Alan Carlin has a peer reviewed paper in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which concludes that climate policy is, in my terminology, a tourniquet for a nosebleed: The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity […]

The Times has been serialising seven chapters of The Rational Optimist for a week each. The last one is available now.

The discovery, announced this week, of several genetic mutations that predispose people toward Alzheimer’s disease is intriguing, because the genes are associated with cholesterol metabolism and inflammation. The Alzheimer’s jigsaw is a long way from being complete, but the pieces are emerging, and this new evidence fits quite nicely with the other pieces in suggesting […]

As I keep saying, shale gas is indeed revolutionising world energy supply. The US Energy Information Administration officially uses the word `vast’ for shale gas resources outside the US: Although the shale gas resource estimates will likely change over time as additional information becomes available, the report shows that the international shale gas resource base is […]

Here is how the first mobile computer, the Osborne 1, compares with an iPad 2 (hat tip Cafe Hayek):