Why won’t western scientists condemn Wuhan?

Matt Ridley

Science is packed with committees deciding on ethics… but there are few that decide whether it is safe “I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly and strangely worded tweets sent in recent days from the Twitter […]

Survival of the hottest: evolution’s fun side has been long overlooked

Matt Ridley

The theory of evolution is dominated by the utilitarian logic of natural selection: adapt or die, survival of the fittest. But consider that the word “fit” has two meanings among the young these days: “healthy” but also “hot”. There is another evolutionary mechanism that scientists have taken a longer time to appreciate – seduction by […]

Will ‘The Seeker’ find the truth about the Covid lab leaks?

Matt Ridley

At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British Nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors […]

Wuhan wager: the $400 ‘bio bet’ that predicted the pandemic

Matt Ridley

This appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-wager-the-400-bio-bet-that-predicted-the-pandemic/ At the end of the year, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to settle a wager with another of the world’s most renowned scientists. We don’t yet know which will win, but it is likely to be the wrong one, in my […]

Tagged: 
covid 

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

Matt Ridley

Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-experts-who-enabled-rfk-jrs-rise/ The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator […]

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covid 
US 

Private landowners make better conservationists

Matt Ridley

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshall, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs […]

Blue tits vs willow tits: a lesson in subsidies

Matt Ridley

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the […]

Tagged: 
Birds 

Latvia is alive with song again

Matt Ridley

Every five years Latvia stages a week-long song and dance festival and this year my wife’s Latvian cousins got us tickets to two of the biggest events. I had no idea what to expect. The first evening, in a vast open-air arena in the Mezaparks forest outside Riga, while the light faded behind the tall […]

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Latvia 

My unexpected lunch with Nigel Lawson – and Prince Philip

Matt Ridley

When I joined the House of Lords in 2013 I soon realised that, despite its poor reputation, the place contained plenty of wise, quick-witted and courageous minds. None more so than Nigel Lawson who died this week. An intellectual titan who had once almost become a philosophy professor, he was not content to rest on […]

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