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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. […]
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, […]
How Darwin would reform Britain’s banks
Matt Ridley
Top down design is flawed even in finance The Times published my op-ed on banking reform: It is not yet clear whether the current rage against the banks will do more harm than good: whether we are about to throw the baby of banking as a vital utility out with the bathwater of banking as […]
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 […]
England’s wettest June — noise, not signal
Matt Ridley
The Met Office keeps getting 3-month forecasts wrong on the warm side I wrote the following op-ed in The Times (behind a paywall) on 2 July. As I cowered in my parked car in a street in Newcastle last Thursday, nearly deafened by hail on the roof of the car, thunder from the black sky […]
