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Matt Ridley
Modern disease is often caused by a lack of parasites My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is a review of a remarkable new science book: Your great-grandparents faced infectious diseases that hardly threaten you today: tuberculosis, polio, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, tapeworm, hookworm…. […]
Matt Ridley
Science keeps reminding us that we are not special My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal: The astronomer Martin Rees recently coined the neat phrase “Copernican demotion” for science’s habit of delivering humiliating disappointment to those who think that our planet is special. Copernicus told us the Earth was not at […]
Matt Ridley
A new work of art that is also public open space The Times has published my article on Northumberlandia today. On Monday the Princess Royal will officially declare open a new feature of the British countryside: a sculpture made of rock, and clad in clay, soil and grass, in the shape of an […]
When genes look out for themselves
Matt Ridley
The antics of selfish DNA in worms and plants My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on selfish DNA: The theory of selfish DNA was born as a throwaway remark in the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, when he pondered why there is so much surplus DNA […]
Did your ancestor date a Neanderthal?
Matt Ridley
And if so where and when? My latest Mind and Matter column discusses the debate about how non-Africans got their 1-4% Neanderthal DNA: So did we or didn’t we? Last week saw the publication of two new papers with diametrically opposed conclusions about whether non-African people have Neanderthal-human hybrids among their ancestors-a result of at […]
Matt Ridley
A history of failed predictions of doom I have a long article on apocalyptic predictions in Wired Magazine. Here’s a version with about 70 links to sources. I have also added in a few paragraphs on falling sperm counts and on species extinction: these were edited from the published version of the article for space […]
Human uniqueness versus anthropomorphism
Matt Ridley
Rats rescuing rats looks like empathy, but what about ants? My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: Identifying unique features of human beings is a cottage industry in psychology. In his book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert jokes that every member of his profession lives under the obligation […]
The perils of confirmation bias – part 3
Matt Ridley
Climate science needs gadflies My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the third in the series on confirmation bias. I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias-the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when assessing a theory in science-is to avoid monopoly. […]
The perils of confirmation bias – part 2
Matt Ridley
What keeps scientists accurate is rivals’ scepticism, not their own My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: If, as I argued last week, scientists are just as prone as everybody else to confirmation bias to looking for evidence to support rather than test their ideas then how is it […]
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. […]
