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Matt Ridley
A rare glimpse into how pressure groups try to keep the good news off the front page One of the themes in my forthcoming book is that there are huge vested interests trying to prevent good news reaching the public. That is to say, in the ruthless free-market struggle that goes on between pressure groups for […]
Matt Ridley
Iceland’s volcanic cloud keeps the sky clear of planes: will that cause more nocturnal cooling? The sky’s bright blue right now, which is weird because I am looking up through a 5,000-metre thick plume of volcanic ash from Iceland. This has stopped all flights in the UK air space and much of northern Europe. (As […]
Matt Ridley
Bottom up thinking from a political party at last Tim Worstall’s commentary on the new Tory faith in volunteers is funny and perceptive. The main criticism people make of voluntarism is that people might not volunteer. Says Worstall: We currently have several armies’ worth of people whose paid job is to shepherd the proles into certain forms of organisation […]
Matt Ridley
Whatever your research, always try to mention climate change. That way lies attention A scientist does a study of how Arctic seabirds die. It’s not a bad idea: die they do, but not from the usual diseases and predators that kill birds in more temperate zones. So what does kill them? He pores over thousands of records […]
Matt Ridley
Spiritual DNA energy, the creation of the universe and flattened wheat Please look at these four objects below Are they: a) natural? b) evidence of supernatural forces? c) man-made? As some of you know, crop circles — those neat patterns that appear in British wheat fields in summer — did more than any other phenomena to convince methat […]
There never was a golden age of freedom
Matt Ridley
Life was more free in the past only for the elite — if at all I will have a lot to say in The Rational Optimist about golden-age nostalgia. It’s an easy trap, to think that the past was better or more free than the present. It’s not hard to show that the past was poorer […]
Matt Ridley
The new 1.9m year old hominin fossils from South Africa Carl Zimmer puts the new mother-and-son fossils in their place In other words, the fossils Berger discovered cannot be our direct ancestors. Instead, they may be very informative cousins. If Berger’s right, then the evolution of Homo happened in a surprisingly piecemeal way. Our legs […]
Matt Ridley
You can have order in a flock of birds or a society without having a dictator The thing about tightly coordinated flocks of birds is that they can’t work by top-down planning and they can’t be anarchic free-for-alls either. Now comes news that they are in between: there is no single leader but some birds […]
The more we know, the more we don’t know
Matt Ridley
Science is the exploration of ignorance Science is not the cataloguing of facts or the accumulation of knowledge. It is the production of ignorance. Scientists are in the business of finding new seams of mystery. As Jennifer Doudna at U C Berkeley puts it in Erika Check Hayden’s Nature article about the tenth anniversary of the first draft of the human […]
Matt Ridley
Who’s Galileo and who’s the pope today? Unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition of remarks in an article by the climate scientist James Hansen: This is not the 17th century, when “beliefs” trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system and Religions across the spectrum — Catholics, Jews, Mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals — […]
