We’re wasting our big Brexit gene-editing opportunity
Matt Ridley
The Government’s half-hearted support for the process is denying us a huge chance to progress My article, for The Telegraph: The Government wants to unleash innovation. If it were to be presented with a magic wand that could by 2040 feed millions more people, avoid tens of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and […]
Matt Ridley
“Rewilding” is fashionable but there is more to it than letting Nature run free My article for The Critic: Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife […]
Put the animal sentience bill out of its misery
Matt Ridley
Lobsters and the like are given no more protection from cruelty under this legislation but bureaucrats will thrive on it My article for the Times: Like a lobster in boiling water, a parliamentary bill on animal sentience is being tortured in the House of Lords. The problem is political rather than ethical. Nobody objects to […]
Environmentalists have got it wrong – we’re not facing an insect apocalypse
Matt Ridley
The doomsday claims are not backed up by scientific research My article for the Telegraph: On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch. It would be silly […]
Life science is taking off in the age of the gene
Matt Ridley
The ‘great stagnation’ is a myth; wonders are being accomplished. But silly rules still block progress. My article for the Telegraph: Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was […]
Interview: How Science Lost the Public’s Trust
Matt Ridley
From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them. My interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal: “Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.” But what […]
Matt Ridley
Last week saw only my fourth visit to the Lords from the north-east since the pandemic began. From the “Lords Diary” feature at PoliticsHome: I wandered the ghostly corridors of Westminster hoping to spot a few colleagues and got lost in a one-way system. This hybrid Parliament seems to have made the government’s job more […]
The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible
Matt Ridley
My article for Spectator: In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will […]
The World Health Organisation’s appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely
Matt Ridley
The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19 My article for The Telegraph: It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 […]
Matt Ridley
Hart explains why we’re adapted to the environment we evolved in, rather than the one we inhabit My review of Unfit for Purpose: When human evolution collides with the modern world by Adam Hart, for The Critic: Our ancestors have spent a few hundred years in cities at most. Before that, they spent a million […]
