WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the 21st century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need […]

Understanding how Covid-19 started is more important than we know for the future of humankind.  Determining whether the virus came from nature or from a lab will help us to safeguard against the next pandemic. This disease will forever punctuate modern history. It has led to the deaths of millions, sickened hundreds of millions and affected […]

The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world. The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch–the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather […]

Despite Chinese obstruction and denial, the world is coming round to the idea that the origin of the pandemic might be traced to a Wuhan laboratory. Little wonder — the clues have been there all along   By Matt Ridley   It is not clear why the US government chose this week to drop not […]

Tuesday 28th February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the entire history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: […]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/27/the-case-for-the-lab-leak-theory-grows-stronger-by-the-day/   The case for the lab leak theory grows stronger by the day. Matt Ridley     The news that the US Department of Energy has changed its mind about the probability of a lab leak as the source of covid-19 on the basis of new evidence has sent shock waves through the scientific […]

The Department of Energy in the United States, which has responsibility for a network of national scientific research laboratories, has changed its mind. It now thinks it likely the pandemic began in a Chinese laboratory, not in a seafood market, on the basis of new evidence it has seen.   It has not divulged what […]

The failure to speedily investigate Covid’s real origins leave us vulnerable to another pandemic   The World Health Organisation, the body charged with finding how a virus from central China killed more than ten million people and upended the world economy, has dropped the ball. An article appeared in Nature magazine this week, headlined “WHO […]

The emerging truth is far more interesting than a stale antithesis between heredity and environment. Nurture depends on genes, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; through the pattern of their turning on and off they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. […]

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll brought the dodo back to life. The extinct, fat, flightless pigeon arranged a famous running race in which “all shall have prizes”.   Now an American tech entrepreneur, Ben Lamm, plans to bring the dodo back to life for real, along with some other extinct species like woolly mammoths, […]