Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

The thing about tightly coordinated flocks of birds is that they can't work by top-down planning and they can't be anarchic free-for-alls either. Now comes news that they are in between: there is no single leader but some birds are more influential than others in which way the flock turns.

Here's what the researchers, led by Dr Dora Biro of Oxford, say:

The authors say that a hierarchical arrangement may foster more flexible and efficient decision-making compared with that of singly led or egalitarian groups. In future studies, the scientists plan to investigate whether leaders are better navigators, and whether hierarchies persist in larger groups and in other types of social animal. "If it's true that there's an evolutionary advantage to making decisions in this way, then there's absolutely a reason to assume that it could have evolved in other species too," Biro says.

Science is not the cataloguing of facts or the accumulation of knowledge. It is the production of ignorance. Scientists are in the business of finding new seams of mystery.

As Jennifer Doudna at U C Berkeley puts it in Erika Check Hayden's Nature article about the tenth anniversary of the first draft of the human genome sequence:

"The more we know, the more we realize there is to know."

Unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition of remarks in an article by the climate scientist James Hansen:

This is not the 17th century, when "beliefs" trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system

and

David Brooks on why America's future is bright:

In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It's always excelled at decentralized community-building. It's always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.

Big news?

The Telegraph: Missing link between man and apes found.

The Sunday Times: Fossil from cave is a 'missing link'

From Maggie Koerth Baker at boingboing.net, a fascinating glimpse of how fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916. Pity she spoils it by an attempt at finding the cloud in the silver lining at the end.

Centralized electricity changed energy production from a difficult, in-home process that kept the messy by-products of progress literally in your face, into something magical that happened when you threw a switch. The choking smoke was still there, but not at your house. There was still heavy labor involved, but it wasn't done by you or your children. For the first time, people were able to pretend that their standard of living was provided, free of downsides, by little elves that lived in the wall. All benefit, no detriment. Action without consequences. In other words, this is the point where everybody went a little bit bonkers.

The beauty is that this is still happening in parts of Africa and Asia. A report on the Philippines estimated that each family derives $108 a month in benefits from connecting to the electricity grid - cheaper lighting ($37), cheaper radio and television ($19), more years in education ($20), time saving ($24) and business productivity ($8). As the miracle of electricity reaches a village, people inhale less smoke, read more school books, cut down fewer trees and find time to do other things that earn them more money.

Breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland's melting ice.

It's higher than it was before:

"The changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," says study co-author Isabella Velicogna of the University of California-Irvine.

A fine analysis by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the way that climate science has been distorted by environmentalism. They write:

"The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.''

Those of us who love science - the habit of licensed curiosity, not the bureaucratic machine - have been increasingly dismayed by the way that its high priests have been behaving over the climate issue: trying to politicize, propagandise and polarize where they should be questioning, debating and being awkward. The most shocking thing to me about 'Climategate' was not the emails, but the any-excuse-will-do reaction to them from the scientific establishment.

Chiffchaffs are the first summer visitors to arrive, around here at least, and their distinctive song is hard to miss, and one day near the vernal equinox suddenly there they are. I have written down the date in my diary most years since 1990. Last night I went back through the diaries and collated the data. It's hardly scientific, but notice there is absolutely no sign of a drift towards earlier arrival: if anything the reverse.

Yet here is whatThe Telegraph says:

Woke to find the newspapers all claiming a new "species" of human being discovered in central Asia. Here's the Guardian:

"The finding suggests an undocumented human species lived alongside Neanderthals and early modern humans in parts of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago."

Leave aside the fact that it's just a bone from a little finger, leave aside the fact that they have only sequenced some mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear DNA. Assume, for the sake of argument, that they have ruled out contamination. Applaud - as we should - the achievement of recovering DNA from the fossil and sequencing it.

So Man flu is not a myth, because testosterone inhibits the immune response.

This has been known to biologists for ages. In The Red Queen, I challenged readers to explain why bodies should be designed that way: why set up an immune system in such a way that it gets hindered by normal hormonal action? I still find it baffling. Over the years readers took up my challenge and wrote to me. They still do. Their answers nearly always boil down to a version of this: to weed out weedy males. That is to say, if males cannot both keep their testosterone levels up and resist disease they don't deserve to contribute to posterity's genes.

Trouble is, like all group selectionist arguments, it's vulnerable to the evolutionary free rider. Along comes a mutant animal that breaks the link between testosterone and illness and hey presto it can breed away to its gonads' content, propagating its subprime genes as if they were triple A.

Very nice piece ofrational optimism

My Times column on skilled versus unskilled migration and Brexit:

Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea of not being able to travel and work freely in Europe is unthinkable to me.” He has been misled — not by Leavers but by Remainers.

It’s not just that the overseas press have consistently portrayed Brexit as a nativist retreat, despite Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Daniel Hannan consistently saying the very opposite. Throughout the referendum campaign — and, shamefully, since — academics have been told by their lobby groups (such as Universities UK) that Brexit probably means losing access to European research funds, European scientific collaborations and European talent.