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What we do changes the wiring of our genes I have an article in The Conversation, an Australian idea forum:   The  human genome provides penetrating and unexpected insights into human individual and collective history. Among them is the counterintuitive idea that genes are at the mercy of experience – that what we do in our […]

Rinderpest joins smallpox in oblivion   I missed this news last month. For the second time in history, human beings have eradicated a disease altogether. This time it is rinderpest, which people cannot get, only cattle so it’s not such big news as smallpox or (soon?) polio. It’s still good news.   Dr Peter Roeder, who […]

Owning up to a hoax does not always work My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about what happens when hoaxers own up and nobody believes them. In the interest of space, I had to leave on the cutting room floor my favourite, though fictional, example. In The Life of Brian, […]

Tim Harford’s new book understands bottom-up design I have written the following review of Tim Harford’s book  Adapt, for Nature magazine: Charles Darwin’s big idea – that blind trial and error can progressively build a powerful simulacrum of purposeful design – got pigeonholed under biology. Yet it always had wider implications in economics, technology and culture. […]

Farmers can feed the world, if they are allowed to I have the following op-ed in today’s Times: Oxfam’s chief executive, Dame Barbara Stocking, claimed this week in a BBC interview that there will “absolutely not be enough food” to feed the world’s population in a few decades’ time. Such certainty about the future is remarkable, […]

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: A recent paper in the journal Nature concluded that species extinction caused by habitat loss is happening less than half as fast as usually estimated. The normal method for calculating rates of extinction assumes that doomed species merely cling temporarily to a shrunken patch of habitat, […]

I sent this letter to the Financial Times: Sir, Gideon Rachman (“In defence of gloomy columnists“, May 24) is right to point out that terrible blips will still happen in an improving world. Another way of making the same point is that good news tends to be gradual, incremental and barely visible, while bad news almost […]

Forests are self-replenishing but easily exhausted; fossil fuels are the opposite My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:     What does the word “renewable” mean? Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, […]

Warmiong potential of methane emissions from gas do not nearly match carbon dioxide emissions from coal It turns out I was right to be sceptical about the Howarth study claiming that shale gas production produces more greenhouse gases than coal. Ther’s now a definitive study here thoroughly debunking Howarth and showing that shale gas results in […]

Britain’s neo-medieval green policy robs the poor to pay the rich I have this article in the current issue of the Spectator (not yet online): `Greener food and greener fuel’ is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe’s largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside last year – and has now […]