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Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on metaphors and analogies: Monkeys can reason by using analogy, it seems. In an experiment recently reported in the journal Psychological Science, baboons in a lab proved capable of realizing that a pair of oval shapes is “like” a pair of square shapes and […]
Matt Ridley
Fascinating interview with the founder of Continental Resources Harold Hamm in the Wall Street Journal. Harold Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, the government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties. That’s more than the U.S. national debt. The Bakken […]
The light at the end of the tunnel
Matt Ridley
I have an op-ed article in the Times today, arguing that there is light at the end of the tunnel for the world’s and the British economy: the long-term gains from living within our means are huge: Matthew Parris hit a nerve last Saturday with his argument that we have lived beyond our means and […]
Matt Ridley
Here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal There are many mysteries about Ray, the 17-year-old English-speaking “forest boy” who walked into the city hall in Berlin on Sept. 5, claiming to have lived wild in the woods for five years with his father-until his father recently died in a fall. […]
Matt Ridley
I have the following opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, adapted from my forthcoming Hayek lecture. The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It has been the source of human invention […]
Matt Ridley
I published this article in the Ottawa Citizen today: The world now has almost seven billion people and rising. The population may surpass nine billion by 2050. We, together with our 20 billion chickens and four billion cattle, sheep and pigs, will utterly dominate the planet. Can the planet take it? Can we take it? […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on drug development and network analysis: Here’s a paradox. Every week seems to bring news from a research laboratory of an ingenious candidate cure about to enter clinical trials for a serious disease. Yet the productivity of drugs coming out of clinical trials has […]
Maybe we’re all conspiracy theorists
Matt Ridley
My latest Wall Street Journal Mind and Matter column discusses conspiracy theories. Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the […]
Matt Ridley
A new milestone My TED talk on When Ideas Have Sex has now passed 750,000 views.
Matt Ridley
Latest Wall Street Journal column is on how anti-virals outwit natural selection: Draco, who wrote Athens’s first constitution in about 620 B.C., decreed that just about every crime should be punishable by death, because that was what petty criminals deserved and he could think of no harsher penalty for serious criminals. “Draconian” means indiscriminate as […]
