WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

I am now writing a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal called Mind and Matter. Here’s the first one. Recently, the psychologist David Buss’s team at the University of Texas at Austin reported that men, when looking for one-night stands, check out women’s bodies. Or as they put it, “men, but not women, have a […]

A neat insight from Don Boudreaux From Cafe Hayek comes this: When materials are worth recycling, markets for their reuse naturally arise.  For materials with no natural markets for their reuse, the benefits of recycling are less than its costs – and, therefore, government efforts to promote such recycling waste resources. Everyday experience should teach us […]

Chris Anderson’s brilliant talk at TED Global is now on the web. Among the take-home messages: – that innovation is accelerating thanks to the ability to compare and combine. Dance is a great example. – and that video is the future of the net now that bandwidth constraints are fading. The print-dominated era is looking like […]

The perished credibility of George Update: George Monbiot has made it clear that he did not ask for the deletions of comments referred to below, but that the Guardian moderators made the deletions for legal reasons and without his knowledge. But he still fails to take the opportunity to discuss the evidence that Williams and Niggurath […]

The limits of scepticism The brilliant philosophical writer (and my old friend) Anthony Gottlieb has been ruminating on whether science should be sceptical about itself. There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they […]

Here’s the text of an opinion piece I wrote, which was published in the Western Daily Press (link to home page, not article itself) this morning to publicise a talk I am giving in Wells Cathedral on Tuesday 14th. Come along if you live nearby for the peculiar sight of me speaking in a church. Will […]

How come the richer we get the less we die? Ben Pile at Climate Resistance has a nice essay on the `environmentalist’s paradox’. This is the superficially puzzling — and to many greens, infuriating — fact that people keep on getting healthier and wealthier when really they should, in all decency, be suffering terribly because of […]

Nothing is more vulnerable than self-reliance’ Stephen Budiansky’s two essays on the `locavore’ movement, one in the New York Times and one on his blog, have received quite a bit of attention already. They are remarkably fine rants not least because Steve (an old friend) is not some pontificator. He actually grows a lots of his own […]

The polarisation of environmental science Steve Budiansky has a good piece at his Liberal Curmudgeon blog. He argues — and I agree — that heavy handed legal attacks on climate scientists, like Attorney general Ken Cucinelli’s in Virginia, are reprehensible, but that to some extent environmental scientists are reaping what they have sown, for example in […]

How climate converted the greens to the argument from authority Walter Russell Mead has a powerful essay in the American Interest online about how the environmental movement suddenly turned into the establishment. Have you noticed the irony of being told to shut up and trust the experts by the likes of Greenpeace? Nothing is quite so […]