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Matt Ridley
Ardipithecus is too interesting to fight over I spent an afternoon this week getting a personal tour of a cast of the skeleton of Ardipithecus from Tim White, the leader of the team that decsribed it. Call me a nerd, but I found it spine-tingling to hold in my hands the skull of a 4.4.million […]
Matt Ridley
A journalism prize to celebrate Frederic Bastiat Frederic Bastiat’s writings are full of brilliant rebukes against the restriction of trade, and the curtailment of human happiness such restrictions always bring. But it is in a discussion around the state funding of the arts that Bastiat most clearly articulates the pessimism behind the bureaucratic state and the […]
Matt Ridley
Did war prevent the invention of trade in other species? Nick Wade has a good piece in today’s New York Times about John Mitani’s chronicling of warfare between troops of Chimpanzees in Uganda. Dr. Mitani’s team has now put a full picture together by following chimps on their patrols, witnessing 18 fatal attacks over 10 years […]
More evidence of just how ‘greatly exaggerated’ the ocean acidification scare is
Matt Ridley
Natural variations in ocean pH both in time and space dwarf human-induced trends. Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less alkaline the ocean: […]
The threat from ocean acidification is greatly exaggerated
Matt Ridley
Corals under threat? Yes, but not much from either warming or acidification. As part of an `interview’ with me, New Scientist published a critique by five scientists of two pages of my book The Rational Optimist. Despite its tone, this critique only confirms the accuracy of each of the statements in this section of the book. […]
Matt Ridley
Norman Macrae 1923-2010 When I joined the Economist in 1983, Norman Macrae was the deputy editor. He died last week at the age of 87. Soon after I joined the staff, a thing called a computer terminal appeared on my desk and my electric typewriter disappeared. Around that time, Norman wrote a long article that […]
Matt Ridley
An attack on my book that gets it wrong Update: now that I have seen the five scientists’ comments, I find that remarkably they support and vindicate each one of my factual statements. I have posted a detailed analysis in a separate blog post. Here’s a letter I just sent to New Scientist: In her […]
Matt Ridley
Forbidden fruit is tempting I just read a wonderful book Hybrid: the history and science of plant breeding by Noel Kingsbury. It contains a charming story, of a Moravian priest called Father Schreiber, who was more interested in horticulture than holiness, and whose parish included Gregor Mendel’s birthplace, Hyncice. As Kingsbury tells the tale: Schreiber also […]
The planetary impact of people
Matt Ridley
Why are governments so keen on increasing the human footprint in the name of the environment? I have written a longish piece about the human footprint on the earth, avaliable as a `ChangeThis’ manifesto here Here are a few extracts: I am going to argue that the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking […]
Matt Ridley
George Monbiot’s attack on me in the Guardian is very misleading George Monbiot’s recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot’s selective quotations imply. I argue that the state’s role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that […]
