Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

Here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal

There are many mysteries about Ray, the 17-year-old English-speaking "forest boy" who walked into the city hall in Berlin on Sept. 5, claiming to have lived wild in the woods for five years with his father-until his father recently died in a fall. Judging by his rucksack and his speech, he was not a fully feral child, reared by wild animals and unacquainted with language.

I have the following  opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, adapted from my forthcoming Hayek lecture.

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It has been the source of human invention all along. Human technological advancement depends not on individual intelligence but on collective idea sharing, and it has done so for tens of thousands of years. Human progress waxes and wanes according to how much people connect and exchange.

I published this article in the Ottawa Citizen today:

The world now has almost seven billion people and rising. The population may surpass nine billion by 2050. We, together with our 20 billion chickens and four billion cattle, sheep and pigs, will utterly dominate the planet. Can the planet take it? Can we take it?

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on drug development and network analysis:

Here's a paradox. Every week seems to bring news from a research laboratory of an ingenious candidate cure about to enter clinical trials for a serious disease. Yet the productivity of drugs coming out of clinical trials has been plummeting, and the cost per drug has been rocketing skyward. The more knowledge swells, the more pharmaceutical innovation fails. What's going on?

My latest Wall Street Journal Mind and Matter column discusses conspiracy theories.

Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the sinister Zionist cabal that deliberately destroyed the twin towers and blew a hole in the Pentagon while secretly killing off the passengers of the flights that disappeared, just to make the thing look more plausible.

He tells this story in his fascinating new book, "The Believing Brain." In Mr. Shermer's view, the brain is a belief engine, predisposed to see patterns where none exist and to attribute them to knowing agents rather than to chance-the better to make sense of the world. Then, having formed a belief, each of us tends to seek out evidence that confirms it, thus reinforcing the belief.

My TED talk onWhen Ideas Have Sexhas now passed 750,000 views.

Latest Wall Street Journal  column is on how anti-virals outwit natural selection:

Draco, who wrote Athens's first constitution in about 620 B.C., decreed that just about every crime should be punishable by death, because that was what petty criminals deserved and he could think of no harsher penalty for serious criminals. "Draconian" means indiscriminate as well as harsh.