WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

A major academic review reinforces the benefits of biotechnology My Times comment on a new report on genetically modified crops:   The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better […]

Gene editing is the very opposite of coerced selective breeding My Times column on why gene editing is not the slippery slope to eugenics:   This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed — and the centenary […]

Communications infrastructure can bridge the town-country gap My Times column on rural broadband: Compared with most countries, Britain has a fairly healthy rural economy. Barns have been converted into homes or offices rather than left to tumble down, as in parts of France. Remote areas have job vacancies in picturesque villages, rather than drug problems […]

Keeping the balance of power means resisting European power monopolies My Times column on Britain’s history with Europe: [The prime minister argues that “when we turn out back on Europe, sooner or later we come to regret it” and cited 1704, 1805, 1914 and 1940 as examples. This is historical nonsense: in each case it […]

There’s room for disagreement within the “consensus” My Times column on free speech and climate change:   The editor of this newspaper received a private letter last week from Lord Krebs and 12 other members of the House of Lords expressing unhappiness with two articles by its environment correspondent. Conceding that The Times’s reporting of […]

Deirdre McCloskey’s feast of words on the “great enrichment” My review in the Times of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality:   It took me two months to read this 650-page, small-type book, the third volume in a trilogy. In that time I read several other books, absorbing Bourgeois Equality in small doses on trains, ships, Tubes, sofas […]

Most European science funding and collaboration is not EU dependent My column in the Times on British science and the European Union: The House of Lords science and technology committee, on which I sit, has produced a report on British science and the European Union. Most scientists are enthusiastic to remain in the EU but […]

An unfounded attack misses the mark Here is my reply to an article on “Open democracy” criticising me. I am surprised to read this lengthy attack on me and to find that no attempt was made to check the facts. It was Nuccitelli who was wrong. He chose one set of data, from Nasa, ignoring […]

Uncovering the subversion of scientific methods in pursuit of politics My Times column on pseudoscience:   Science, humanity’s greatest intellectual achievement, has always been vulnerable to infection by pseudoscience, which pretends to use the methods of science, but actually subverts them in pursuit of an obsession. Instead of evidence-based policymaking, pseudoscience specialises in policy-based evidence […]

The surprising restoration of Britain’s wildlife My review of Stephen Moss’s book Wild Kingdom from the Times: The wildlife of the River Tyne, near where I live, has been transformed in my lifetime. When I went pike fishing on the Tyne as a bird-watching-obsessed boy, it was empty of salmon, sea trout and otters. It […]