Matt Ridley
The fruit of a narrow-leaved campion, buried in permafrost by a ground squirrel 32,000 years ago on the banks of the Kolyma river in Siberia, has been coaxed into growing into a new plant, which then successfully set seed itself in a Moscow laboratory. Although this plant species was not extinct, inch by inch scientists […]
Why derive morality from superstition
Matt Ridley
For people who profess to be kind and tolerant, the defenders of Christianity can be remarkably unpleasant and intolerant. For all his frank and sometimes brusque bluster, I cannot think of anything that Richard Dawkins has said that is nearly as personally offensive as the insults that have been deluged upon his head in the […]
Flaming and soul baring — online honesty
Matt Ridley
In defense of Richard Dawkins My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the good and the bad consequences of our surprising internet honesty: It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social-networking sites. Patients are willing […]
When the crowd solves problems
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on citizen science: The more specialized and sophisticated scientific research becomes, the farther it recedes from everyday experience. The clergymen-amateurs who made 19th-century scientific breakthroughs are a distant memory. Or are they? Paradoxically, in an increasing variety of fields, computers are coming to […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on gene-culture co-evolution: Human beings, we tend to think, are at the mercy of their genes. You either have blue eyes or you do not (barring contact lenses); no amount of therapy can change it. But genes are at the mercy of us, […]
Matt Ridley
One of my favourite writers these days is Willis Eschenbach, whose essays at wattsupwiththat often combine ingenious scientific rationality with lyrical prose. Here he is on the subject of the sea ice off Alaska: My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors […]
The distorting of the human sex ratio
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Even a rational optimist is pessimistic about some things. Here’s one: the gradual distortion of the human sex ratio by sex-selective abortion. A new essay by the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt concludes that “the practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that […]
The slow cooling of our interglacial
Matt Ridley
Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal, with added links and charts. On interglacials. The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth’s recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The effect of acidification, according […]
Catching the species in the act of being born
Matt Ridley
My Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal on 1 January 2012 is here: Here’s a New Year’s thought. With some nine million species on the planet, and with each species lasting a million years on average, about nine species will go extinct naturally this coming year (with more, almost certainly, going extinct […]
