Matt Ridley
The evolution of Covid is not random My article for The Spectator: In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to […]
The contenders – and challenges – in the race to cure Covid
Matt Ridley
There are reasons to be optimistic about the therapies being tested My article for The Spectator: A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, […]
We are about to find out how robust civilisation is
Matt Ridley
The hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known My article for Spectator: On Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It […]
Why have so many of our recent viruses come from bats?
Matt Ridley
Coronavirus is far from the first disease they’ve passed on to us My article from The Spectator: I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a […]
We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously
Matt Ridley
Little of this made the news, because good news is no news My article from The Spectator: Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent […]
