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Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on gene-culture co-evolution: Human beings, we tend to think, are at the mercy of their genes. You either have blue eyes or you do not (barring contact lenses); no amount of therapy can change it. But genes are at the mercy of us, […]
Matt Ridley
One of my favourite writers these days is Willis Eschenbach, whose essays at wattsupwiththat often combine ingenious scientific rationality with lyrical prose. Here he is on the subject of the sea ice off Alaska: My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors […]
The distorting of the human sex ratio
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Even a rational optimist is pessimistic about some things. Here’s one: the gradual distortion of the human sex ratio by sex-selective abortion. A new essay by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt concludes that “the practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that […]
The best explanation in the world
Matt Ridley
Each year, John Brockman’s website, The Edge, asks a question and gets many answers to it. This year, the question is: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? Some of the answers are fascinating. Here’s mine: It’s hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February 1953 […]
The slow cooling of our interglacial
Matt Ridley
Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal, with added links and charts. On interglacials. The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth’s recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The effect of acidification, according […]
Catching the species in the act of being born
Matt Ridley
My Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal on 1 January 2012 is here: Here’s a New Year’s thought. With some nine million species on the planet, and with each species lasting a million years on average, about nine species will go extinct naturally this coming year (with more, almost certainly, going extinct […]
Matt Ridley
Here is the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal, published on 24th December. Which American city has more inhabitants: San Antonio or San Diego? More Germans than Americans get the answer right (San Diego). What about Hanover or Bielefeld? More Americans than Germans get the answer right (Hanover). In each case, the […]
Don’t be such a silly Higgs Boson
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on metaphors for the Higgs Boson. In 1993 a British science minister, William Waldegrave, was sitting on a train reading the speech that his staff had prepared for him for a physics conference. Finding the draft “unspeakably dull,” he decided instead to challenge […]
Matt Ridley
Prospect has published my essay on bioenergy, in which my research left me astonished at the environmental and economic harm that is being perpetrated. Biomass and biofuels are not carbon neutral, can’t displace much fossil fuel, require huge subsidies, increase hunger and directly or indirectly cause rain forest destruction. Apart from that, they’re fine… Here’s […]
