The perils of confirmation bias – part 1
Matt Ridley
How scientists collect positive evidence rather than test theories My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: There’s a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it. […]
Who’s in charge if we find life on Mars?
Matt Ridley
Apart from the Martians, that is My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal If all goes well next month, Curiosity, NASA’s latest mission to Mars, will land in the Gale crater, a 3.5-billion-year-old, 96-mile-wide depression near the planet’s equator. Out will roll a car-size rover to search for signs of life, […]
Two rival kinds of plants and their future
Matt Ridley
Can rice match maize’s yield? My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Two rival designs of plant biochemistry compete to dominate the globe. One, called C3 after the number of carbon atoms in the initial sugars it makes, is old, but still dominant. Rice is a C3 plant. The other, called […]
Matt Ridley
Microbes and worms that are necessary for the immune system to work My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: One of the delights of science is its capacity for showing us that the world is not as it seems. A good example is the startling statistic that there are at least […]
High IQ heritability would testify to environmental equality
Matt Ridley
How twin studies silenced their critics My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: These days the heritability of intelligence is not in doubt: Bright adults are more likely to have bright kids. The debate was not always this calm. In the 1970s, suggesting that IQ could be inherited at all was […]
Planetary boundaries are in practice arbitrary
Matt Ridley
Technology leads people to live more lightly on the land My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Part of the preamble to Agenda 21, the action plan that came out of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, reads: “We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a […]
Do Human Beings Carry Expiration Dates?
Matt Ridley
Few people get past 115, though many live to 100 Update: a couple of small corrections inserted in square brackets below. Thanks to Stephen Coles of UCLA. My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal After celebrating her 60th year on the throne in style this past week, Britain’s Queen […]
How Facebook captured capitalist “Kumbaya”
Matt Ridley
Free sharing on the net is not incompatible with markets My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Human beings love sharing. We swap, collaborate, care, support, donate, volunteer and generally work for each other. We tend to admire sharing when it’s done for free but frown upon it-or consider it […]
Evolution ain’t what it used to be
Matt Ridley
Novel rare genes and shrinking brains My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal. If you write about genetics and evolution, one of the commonest questions you are likely to be asked at public events is whether human evolution has stopped. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer. I’m tempted to […]
Red tape hobbles a harvest of life-saving rice
Matt Ridley
Bio-engineered micronutrients may be the most cost-effective way to help the poor Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to […]
