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Matt Ridley
Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: Evolutionists long ago abandoned the idea that natural selection can promote only selfish behavior. In the right circumstances, animals-including human beings-evolve the instinct to be nice (or acquire habits of niceness through cultural evolution). This happens within families but also within groups, where social solidarity […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Hardly any subject in science has been so politically fraught as the heritability of intelligence. For more than a century, since Francis Galton first started speculating about the similarities of twins, nature-nurture was a war with a stalemated front and intelligence was its […]
The limits of sexual selection
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: What limits the size of a peacock’s tail, the weight of a deer’s antlers or the virtuosity of a songbird’s song? Driven inexorably by the competition to attract mates, these features of animals ought to get ever more elaborate. There was even once a theory-now […]
Matt Ridley
The New York Times has a fawning profile of the paymaster of eco-doomsters, Jeremy Grantham. It says: In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” [Jeremy Grantham] argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic […]
Matt Ridley
It’s not that they are more desperate. it’s that they are thriving. Here is a piece I just published in the Spectator. The terrible story of the boys mauled by a polar bear in Spitsbergen has sparked a debate about the risks of adventure travel. But what does it tell us about polar bears? Some have claimed […]
Matt Ridley
Johnny Berliner made this charming little calypso account of genes and what they are made of. It’s concise and precise as well as nice. (Calypso rhyming is catching) h/t Mark Stevenson.
Where do carbon dioxide emissions come from?
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal: I spent part of last week in Iceland, where the fragility of civilization’s veneer is all too evident in a violently volcanic landscape. Whereas in most countries geology amazes you with its age, in Iceland it stuns you with its youth. The country […]
The nature and nurture sport: talent versus effort
Matt Ridley
Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal “It’s strange that I could become a professional athlete,” said the Australian winner of this summer’s Tour de France, Cadel Evans. “Physically, I was completely unsuitable for almost all Australian school sports. Nearly all Australian school sports require speed and/or size.” Sounds like a triumph of […]
Matt Ridley
The new Siberian hominids and the family tree Belatedly, here is last week’s Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal. I once had a soft spot for the yeti, known in my youth as the “abominable snowman.” As a teenager I avidly devoured stories of hairy bipeds glimpsed through snowstorms, strange cries echoing […]
Matt Ridley
The not so good old days I heartily recommend a new book called “And the Band Played On” by Christopher Ward, a friend of mine. It’s a best-seller already in the UK. It’s about his grandfather, who was the violinist in the band that played as the Titanic sank. But it’s not about the sinking, […]
