Matt Ridley
Tumours are the wages of age, not the wages of sin My Times column on cancer, luck and good deaths: If we could prevent or cure all cancer, what would we die of? The new year has begun with a war of words over whether cancer is mostly bad luck, as suggested by a […]
Matt Ridley
Welcome signs of an end to public sector IT over-runs and failures In December, I omitted to post my Times column on government IT and digital policy: The travel chaos last Friday was a reminder of just how much life depends on Big Software doing its job. The air-traffic control centre at Swanwick was […]
Matt Ridley
800 years after Magna Carta and 200 after Waterloo, the UK’s in good shape My Times column is on the UK’s high standard of living and social freedoms: Years ending in 15 (or 65) have often been good ones to be British. In January, we celebrate 750 years since Simon de Montfort first summoned Parliament […]
Matt Ridley
Imposing monogamous marriage helped pacify the west My column in The Times: When the Kurdish peshmerga forces broke the siege of Mount Sinjar last week, there was no trace of the 5,000 Yazidi women and children abducted from the area in August. It is thought that they have been mostly sold as concubines to jihadist fighters […]
Matt Ridley
Science is being corrupted by political bias My column in the Times, with post-scripts: As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse […]
Pilotless planes and driverless cars
Matt Ridley
Eventually, it will feel reassuring that there’s nobody in the cockpit My column in The Times: The Civil Aviation Authority is concerned that pilots are becoming too reliant on automation and are increasingly out of practice in what to do when the autopilot cannot cope. We now know that a fatal Air France crash in the […]
The EU versus the UN: who makes the rules?
Matt Ridley
Increasingly, trade rules are set above the level of Brussels My column in the Times: In today’s speech on the European Union, previewed in this morning’s Times, Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will make a surprising and telling point. It is that many of the rules handed down to British businesses and consumers […]
Political institutions evolve slower than social ones
Matt Ridley
Britain’s government would be familiar to Daniel Defoe My Times column on the little-changed political institutions of London: Two hundred and ninety years ago a novelist, spy, tradesman and bankrupt named Daniel Defoe began publishing his account of A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. A book out this week by the distinguished sociologist […]
Ants, altruism and self sacrifice
Matt Ridley
It’s the selfishness of genes that makes us unselfish My Times column is on a disagreement between Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins about evolution: I find it magnificent that a difference of opinion about the origin of ants between two retired evolutionary biologists, one in his eighties and one in his seventies, has made […]
Greens take the moral low ground
Matt Ridley
Why environmentalists defend the wealthy against the poor My Times column: A confession: I voted for the Green Party in 1979 – one of less than 40,000 people in the whole country who did so. It was then called the Ecology Party and I knew the local candidate in Oxford, which is some excuse. But […]
