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What characteristics would extraterrestrial life have? Here’s a video of a discussion I had with Richard Dawkins about `life’ back in June: extra-terrestrial life, artificial life and synthetic life.  

Is modern growth a materialist or an ideological achievement? Continuing the debate about the industrial revolution with Deirdre McCloskey Here’s her reply to me …We agree at least that innovation is the key. That’s a very, very important agreement. Joel Mokyr, Jack Goldstone, and our own Greg Clark join Matt Ridley, Robert Allen, and me […]

Market innovation helped the miners; counselling was counter-productive Today I read two contrasting articles about the wonderful rescue of the Chilean miners that I strongly recommend, even though both are a few days old. The first, by Brendan O’Neill, in Spiked (hat tip: Frank Stott), reveals the degree to which the miners helped themselves to cope […]

Or rather, why did it not peter out? At Cato Unbound, there is a set of essays on the subject in response to Deirdre McCloskey, one of which is by me, others by Greg Clark and Jonathan Feinstein. I champion the theory that coal was crucial, because it showed increasing rather than diminshing returns (the more people […]

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal On the failed promise of genomics. Is it because common ailments are caused by many different rare genetic variants?

GM crops benefit non-GM crops nearby Do you remember how, back in the days when genetically modified crops were as vilifed as climate sceptics were until recently, one of the arguments deployed against them was that they would `contaminate’ neighbouring farms with their genetically modified pollen? This was one justification for a total ban, as […]

Remember how vilifed were the IVF pioneers Robin Marantz Henig hits the nail on the head in the New York Times today: The history of in vitro fertilization demonstrates not only how easily the public will accept new technology once it’s demonstrated to be safe, but also that the nightmares predicted during its development almost never […]

Pacific fishing technology and the catallaxy My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive. World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world’s income has octupled. The richest places on Earth […]

An advert that advocates blowing up people who disagree with you Yuk. This video was made by an organisation funded partly by the UK taxpayer.

Maurice Wilkins’s letters to Francis Crick turn up Francis Crick’s letters from the 1950s, supposedly thrown away by `an over-zealous secretary’, have come to light in Sydney Brenner’s papers. Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski found them when they went through the Brenner archive. The secretary is exonerated. The Crick Brenner office (they shared a room) […]