WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Science is packed with committees deciding on ethics… but there are few that decide whether it is safe “I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly and strangely worded tweets sent in recent days from the Twitter […]

Like (I suspect) many birdwatchers, I sometimes wish I actually was a bird. Birds are just better at life. They are more colourful, more tuneful, more beautiful, than mammals. Their feathers are more versatile, their lungs more efficient, their digestion faster, their genomes more streamlined, the visual acuity superior, their eyes attuned to more colours, […]

The case for the Wuhan lab leak theory – and against Anthony Fauci – is too important to be sensationalised The White House has changed a page on its website, replacing a mundane compendium of advice about Covid vaccines, treatment and testing with a Hollywood-style poster of Donald Trump striding through the giant words “LAB […]

Ten years ago, I invited a bunch of clever biologists to my home to discuss the possibility of one day reversing the extinction of a bird called the Great Auk. We did not claim it could yet be done but we knew that the two technologies for doing de-extinction – ancient genome sequencing and Crispr […]

I now expect to see the existence of extraterrestrial life confirmed in the next few years. When it happens, put down your phone, look up from your work, walk away from your routine and let the moment sink in. Then we can go back to arguing about pronouns and tariffs.   We are not there […]

Sir Keir Starmer has woken up to the fact that his policies are killing one of Britain’s last successful manufacturing industries, the £90-billion-a-year car industry, on which 800,000 jobs depend. ‘This is the beginning of a new era,’ said Starmer yesterday, as he announced plans to aid the motor industry by relaxing environmental rules following Trump’s 25 […]

Five years ago this week, based on a highly misleading “model” forecast from one academic, Neil Ferguson, the British government ditched its pandemic plan and locked the entire country down with disastrous and – as Sweden proves – unnecessary consequences. It was the first of many dreadful mistakes made by the government during the Covid […]

The theory of evolution is dominated by the utilitarian logic of natural selection: adapt or die, survival of the fittest. But consider that the word “fit” has two meanings among the young these days: “healthy” but also “hot”. There is another evolutionary mechanism that scientists have taken a longer time to appreciate – seduction by […]

Work and money for glaziers doesn’t mean wealth for the rest of us A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails – but […]

The Covid pandemic almost certainly began with a leak from a laboratory, probably in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some time in the autumn of 2019. The evidence is voluminous, detailed, precise and devastating, as I and others have catalogued. The CIA, FBI, German intelligence and the former head of MI6 all say they think […]