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I spent an afternoon this week getting a personal tour of a cast of the skeleton of Ardipithecus from Tim White, the leader of the team that decsribed it. Call me a nerd, but I found it spine-tingling to hold in my hands the skull of a 4.4.million year old creature that might be very close to my own ancestor.

But it was the details that stole the show. The lack of sharpening on the rear of the canines (unlike a chimpanzee), the flared pelvis of a regular biped, the curved but relative short metatarsals of the foot, the hints of very little sexual dimorphism.

The ecology, too, is intriguing. The Afar depression was not such a depression then, and the weather was sufficiently damp for a fairly rich forest to be growing there, albeit with patches of grassland. By far the commonest antelopes were woodland-dwelling, browsing kudu. Ardi herself ate fruits and nuts from trees, not grasses -- this can be decided by isotopic analysis -- and she was a good climber as well as a walker. Her molar teeth had not grown robust like those of Lucy, for grinding grass seeds and roots, but nor had they shrunk for processing soft fruit as those of modern chimpanzees have.

Frederic Bastiat's writings are full of brilliant rebukes against the restriction of trade, and the curtailment of human happiness such restrictions always bring. But it is in a discussion around the state funding of the arts that Bastiat most clearly articulates the pessimism behind the bureaucratic state and the life-enhancing optimism of those who believe in human freedom.

Our adversaries consider that an activity which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by government, is an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith is in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not in the legislator.

The latest evidence for the rationality of such optimism can, of course, be found in my book.

Nick Wade has a good piece in today's New York Times about John Mitani's chronicling of warfare between troops of Chimpanzees in Uganda.

Dr. Mitani's team has now put a full picture together by following chimps on their patrols, witnessing 18 fatal attacks over 10 years and establishing that the warfare led to annexation of a neighbor's territory.

The fact that male chimpanzees systematically and stealthily patrol their boundaries in groups to kill neighbouring males has been known for a long time in Gombe in Tanzania, but critics have charged that it was unnaturally caused by human feeding of the chimps. That now seems unlikely.

Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less alkaline the ocean:

As one goes from Hawaii to Alaska the pH slowly decreases along the transect, dropping from 8.05 all the way down to 7.65. This is a change in pH of almost half a unit.

The study also measured the change caused by carbon dioxide from industry:

As part of an `interview' with me, New Scientist published a critique by five scientists of two pages of my book The Rational Optimist. Despite its tone, this critique only confirms the accuracy of each of the statements in this section of the book. After reading their critiques, I stand even more firmly behind my conclusion that the threats to coral reefs from both man-made warming and ocean acidification are unlikely to be severe, rapid or urgent. In the case of acidification, this is underlined by a recent paper, published since my book was written, summarising the results of 372 papers and concluding that ocean acidification `may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century'. The burden of proof is on those who see an urgent threat to corals from warming and acidification. Here is what I wrote (in bold), interspersed with summaries of the scientists' comments and my replies.

Take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient run-off and fishing - especially the harvesting of herbivorous fishes that otherwise keep reefs clean of algae. Yet environmentalists commonly talk as if climate change is a far greater threat than these, and they are cranking up the apocalyptic statements just as they did wrongly about forests and acid rain

Andy Ridgwell says `I agree that at least for some reef systems, other, and more local human factors such as fishing and pollution may be the greater danger' and Jelle Bijma says `I do agree that, for example, pollution and overfishing are also important problems, some even more important than the current impact of ocean acidification'. It was not therefore accurate of Liz Else to say that the critics accuse me of failing `to recognize that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea' They do not - she has misrepresented their views and mine.

When I joined the Economist in 1983, Norman Macrae was the deputy editor. He died last week at the age of 87. Soon after I joined the staff, a thing called a computer terminal appeared on my desk and my electric typewriter disappeared. Around that time, Norman wrote a long article that became a book about the future. It was one of the strangest things I had ever read.

It had boundless optimism --

Over the last decade, I have written many articles in The Economist and delivered lectures in nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be much more rosy. This book explores the lovely future people could have if only all democrats made the right decisions.

Update: now that I have seen the five scientists' comments, I find that remarkably they support and vindicate each one of my factual statements. I have posted a detailed analysis in a separate blog post.

Here's a letter I just sent to New Scientist:

In her misleading article about my book, among other errors Liz Else wrongly states that I `failed to recognize that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea'. Yet I clearly state in my book: `take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient runoff and fishing'. After doing the interview, Else asked me for proof of a statement in my book that `Even with tripled bicarbonate concentrations, corals show a continuing increase in both photosynthesis and calcification.' Presumably this was because her unnamed `experts' had challenged this statement. I was happy to supply her with the following extract from Craig Idso's book (`CO2, global warming and coral reefs'), which I cited in my book, and with the reference it cites (Herfort et al 2008. Journal of Phycology 44: 91-98): `This work reveals that additions of HCO3- to synthetic seawater continue to increase the calcification rate of Porites porites until the bicarbonate concentration exceeded three times that of seawater…Similar experiments on Acropora species showed that calcification and photosynthetic rates in these corals were enhanced to an even greater extent, with calcification continuing to increase above a quadrupling of the HCO3- concentration and photosynthesis saturating at triple the concentration of seawater'. I am sorry that instead of quoting this exchange between us, Else chose to fall back on unsubstantiated accusations of `misconceptions, selective reporting and failure to see the significance of historical changes in ocean acidity'. I took the trouble to back up my claims; she should have done so for her accusations.

I just read a wonderful book Hybrid: the history and science of plant breeding by Noel Kingsbury.

It contains a charming story, of a Moravian priest called Father Schreiber, who was more interested in horticulture than holiness, and whose parish included Gregor Mendel's birthplace, Hyncice. As Kingsbury tells the tale:

Schreiber also had to face opposition, or at least suspicion, from a conservative peasantry. So in order to distribute new fruit varieties, he and the countess [Maria Walpurga Truchsess-Zeil, no less] developed a technique that has been used more than once down the ages in order to bring new genes to the countryside: subterfuge. A nursery for trees was established and word put out that these valuable seedlings were under guard, the guards being instructed to make a lot of noise if they heard anybody but not to actually arrest anyone. In a matter of days, all the seedlings had been stolen.

I have written a longish piece about the human footprint on the earth, avaliable as a `ChangeThis' manifesto here

Here are a few extracts:

George Monbiot's recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply. I argue that the state's role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that generates prosperity needs to be recognised, as people from enslaved ancient Egyptians to modern North Koreans could testify. But as I mention in my book, I don't think that free markets, especially those in assets, should be completely unregulated. I do argue that free and fair commerce has the power to raise living standards.

Unlike Monbiot's article, my book isn't about me. It's about the billions of other people in the world who, through ingenuity, exchange and specialisation, have generated remarkable prosperity.

Monbiot, remember is the man who once wrote: ``every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.'' (see, George, two can play at selective quotation).

In my book I quote the English environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as follows: 'It's blindingly obvious [that] completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly, stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.'

At first I had assumed that the quote, which I had found in another book, must be out of context. Surely nobody would say anything so foolish or so heartless. Surely he was caricaturing some blimpish view from a reactionary? So I looked up the original article, in The Ecologist in 2007, to be sure I was not being unfair to quote him thus. You can read the whole article here. Here's the longer context of the quote.

Yet the facts speak for themselves: the fewer there are of us, the greater our personal carbon budgets - and just remember we're starting from a baseline here in the UK of around 12½ tonnes of CO2 per person!I can't tell you how politically incorrect it is to spell things out in those terms. Even those who are getting more and more enthusiastic about the idea of personal carbon budgets (including Environment Secretary David Miliband) wouldn't dream of giving voice to such a crass calculation. Leaders of our ever-so-right-on environment movement can barely bring themselves to utter the dreaded "p" word. The Millennium Development Goals don't mention population. Tony Blair's Commission for Africa ignored it entirely, even though it's blindingly obvious that completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly stuck in deepest, darkest poverty. Our very own Department for International Development grits its teeth and reluctantly doles out little bits of money for family planning projects, but the idea that it should be the Department's No 1 priority - if it was remotely realistic about its poverty alleviation aspirations - remains anathema to most officials and ministers.

In my book I point out that an unemployed British father of three on welfare today receives more in state support than a man on the average wage received in income in 1957. It's an eye-catching reminder of how wrong J K Galbraith was to argue that affluence in the late 1950s had already gone too far.

Now the Institute of Fiscal Studies has compiled data on average incomes in Britain since 1961, coming to the remarkable conclusion that

in real terms the bottom 25% are now considerable richer than were the top 25% in 1961.

Tim Black has an excellent article in Spiked about the hypercautious European reaction to the Icelandic volcano in April:

We have sincediscoveredthat the maximum density of ash (100 micrograms of ash per cubic metre) over the UK during the ban was one fortieth of that nowdeemeda safe threshold (4,000 micrograms of ash per cubic metre). In other words, the ban was nowhere near justified by what is now the official threshold.

He goes on to give some remarkable numbers from the similar over-reaction to avian flu:

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has made a nice new version of my "handaxe and mouse" image to illustrate their review of The Rational Optimist

There's a lot of debate about the `Medieval Warm Period'. But I've always been intrigued by the warm period of 7,000 years ago, known as the Holocene Optimum, and I have been doing some digging to find out just how warm it was. I've come away rather amazed.

Have a look at this image, which uses stalagmites in caves to estimate ancient temperatures (as graphed by Wilis Eschenbach)

Listen to my interview on NPR's Leonard Lopate Show

and an MP3 of my interview on PM with Marc Colvin, in Australia

My good friend Dave Sands is not only a brilliant biologist -- I cite him in The Rational Optimist arguing for genetic modification to improve the quality rather than the quantity of food -- but a very fine poet. He's profiled in yesterday's New York Times discussing his latest theory that ice-forming pseudomonas bactera in the air play a central role in precipitation:

In the last few years, Dr. Sands and other researchers have accumulated evidence that the well-known group of bacteria, long known to live on agricultural crops, are far more widespread and may be part of a little-studied weather ecosystem. The principle is well accepted, but how widespread the phenomenon is remains a matter of debate.

If true, this could have all sorts of implications.

One small fact in my book has caught several readers' attention:

Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.

My source for this remarkable statistic was Johan Norberg's 2006 book När människan skapade världen. In a translation he sent me it reads:

nterview in the Guardian today:

"If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference? Clearly our genes haven't changed; this process has happened far too fast for genetic change. My answer, bringing together my evolutionary knowledge and a lot of economic reading, is this: sex is to biology as exchange is to culture."

Here is why Craig Venter's new organism carries absolutely no fears for me: the Red Queen. Evolution is a treadmill.

People speak about artificial life forms getting loose and running amok. But that's not how life works. It's a jungle out there.

Nature is continually trying new life forms on a truly gigantic scale and testing them against each other. Very few get to take over the world even briefly and even they soon succumb to evolving predators, parasites and competitors.

John Tierney reviews The Rational Optimist in today's New York Times:

Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list.

The Sunday Times printed an edited extract of the book on 16 May.

People love to talk about the energy industry in voices of gloom and doom. The oil's running out, the lights are going out, the pollution's getting worse. But pause to consider the good news. Like shale gas.

Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there's 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone-enough to supply the nation's natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.

Imagine a source of energy...

As own goals go, this was a stunning shot.

The quantity of cereals harvested in the world has trebled in 40 years [correction: nearly trebled in 50 years!], but the acreage planted to cereals has hardly changed at all.

(graph from my book)

My good friend the evolutionary biologist and expert on old age, Tom Kirkwood, has made a splash in my local newspaper, The Newcastle Journal, by writing to all three British party leaders to ask them to emphasise the positive rather than the negative aspects of people living longer.

Our studies are revealing high levels of capability and good quality life among people who are well into their 80s. They are not all in poor health needing high levels of care. Indeed, many view their health as 'excellent' and still live highly independent lives.

I point out in The Rational Optimist that the average lifespan has increased by a third during my lifetime; life expectancy is increasing globally by 5 hours a day. Kirkwood's Changing Age Charter, like my book, says:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a horror, for people and for wildlife. It will surely cause huge damage. It is a reminder that for all the talk of global impacts, the worst environmental crises are still local ones.

But it is worth pausing to reflect how rare such terrible oil spills have now become. Here is the data on world tanker spills over the past 40 years: