Matt Ridley
Tumours evolve — so must cancer cures My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on cancer and evolution by natural selection: Last week the American Cancer Society reported that death rates from cancer are falling steadily, at an annual rate of about 1.9% in men and 1.5% in women. A study […]
Matt Ridley
Were E coli deaths preventable with food irradiation? My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal is about the precautionary principle as exemplified by the German e coli outbreak, which has now killed 29. Less precaution about new technology might have meant fewer deaths: A technology that might have prevented contaminated produce […]
Matt Ridley
Owning up to a hoax does not always work My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about what happens when hoaxers own up and nobody believes them. In the interest of space, I had to leave on the cutting room floor my favourite, though fictional, example. In The Life of Brian, […]
The surprising resilience of continental species
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: A recent paper in the journal Nature concluded that species extinction caused by habitat loss is happening less than half as fast as usually estimated. The normal method for calculating rates of extinction assumes that doomed species merely cling temporarily to a shrunken patch of habitat, […]
Evil, empathy and the evolution of morality
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, with added links: It’s presumably neither ethical nor practical, but supposing that somebody could sequence Osama bin Laden’s genome, which genes would you want to examine to try to understand his violent desires? I put this question to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the author […]
Matt Ridley
New technologies raise living standards, not when they are invented but when their cost falls within most people’s range My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the innovation that leads to the cheapening of technologies, as opposed to the invention that leads to new technologies. Cheapeners deserve as much credit […]
Matt Ridley
Food that can be stored can be traded and trade leads to democracy My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on grain, fruit and the economic underpinnings of democracy. When I was young, I had a mug on a shelf in my bedroom, and on it was a poem about a […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about trying to evolve, rather than ordain, solution to obesity Sometimes we find it easy to identify a problem and impossible to think of a solution. Obesity is a good example. Almost everybody agrees that it is a growing burden on health systems and […]
