WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Desecrated a century ago a subantarctic island is now restored My recent essay in the Wall Street Journal on South Georgia: When you tell people that you’re going to South Georgia, some will ask if you’re changing planes in Atlanta. In fact, the name belongs to an island near Antarctica. It’s about the size of […]

40 years, on Richard Dawkins’s bold book has stood the test of time My Retrospective article on Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, published in Nature magazine:   Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try […]

The renegotiation of Britain’s membership has achieved little My column in The Times on Britain’s EU membership referendum: Public opinion about the European Union is divided, like Gaul, into three parts: one third are already firmly in the “leave” camp, one third would remain in whatever happens, and the tussle is over who gets the […]

The success of a bold bid to rid a subantarctic island of rats and deer My column in The Times on how South Georgia’s environment has been repaired: In claiming the Falklands, the Argentinian government also claims South Georgia, even though it is 700 miles further away from its coast, was unambiguously claimed by Captain Cook when […]

It’s about slowing water in the uplands and speeding it in the lowlands My Times column on the winter floods in Britain:   My invitation to serve on the government’s flood defence review seems to have got stuck in the Christmas post. So here’s a memo, based on Northumberland gossip as well as published papers, for how […]

Our favourite landscapes echo our past habitat My Times column on the Capability Brown tercentenary: Next year marks the 300th birthday of Lancelot Brown at Kirkharle, in Northumberland, the man who saw “capability” in every landscape and indefatigably transformed England. In his 280 commissions, Capability Brown stamped his mark on some 120,000 acres, tearing out […]

A classic case of meso-predator release hurting another species My Times column on the hedgehog decline, and the effect of badgers: Hedgehogs, subjects of the Times Christmas Appeal, are to get their own summit, the Environment Secretary Liz Truss said last week. Hedgehogs really are in trouble. Their numbers have plunged, their range has shrunk […]

Treating evolution as a prescription not a description has been cruel My article on the misuse of Malthus appeared in Standpoint magazine. It is an edited extract from my book, The Evolution of Everything. It is worth asking how John Gray could have reviewed that book and accused me of social Darwinism after reading this! […]

Why multilateral negotiation is so difficult My Times column on the underwhelming results of the climate conference and Britain’s renegotiation with the European Union:   There’s an uncanny similarity between the climate negotiations that climaxed in Paris at the weekend and David Cameron’s European Union reform negotiations, which continue in Brussels this week. The original […]

Mark Zuckerberg’s generosity is welcome My Times column on the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative: Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan marked the birth of their daughter Max by promising to donate 99 per cent of their Facebook shares during their lifetimes to support good causes. For this they were pilloried by some. The economist Thomas Piketty […]