Matt Ridley is the author of provocative books on evolution, genetics and society. His books have sold over a million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and have won several awards.
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Matt Ridley's latest book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with scientist Alina Chan from Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, is now available in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal:
The astronomer Martin Rees recently coined the neat phrase "Copernican demotion" for science's habit of delivering humiliating disappointment to those who think that our planet is special. Copernicus told us the Earth was not at the center of the solar system; later astronomers found billions of solar systems in each of the billions of galaxies, demoting our home to a cosmic speck.
Mr. Rees says further Copernican demotion may loom ahead. "The entire panorama that astronomers can observe could be a tiny part of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which is itself just one bang among a perhaps-infinite ensemble." Indeed, even our physics could be a parochial custom: Mr. Rees says that different universes could be governed by different rules and our "laws of nature" may be local bylaws.
The Times has published my article on Northumberlandia today.
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on selfish DNA:
The theory of selfish DNA was born as a throwaway remark in the book "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, when he pondered why there is so much surplus DNA in the genomes of some animals and plants.
My latest Mind and Matter column discusses the debate about how non-Africans got their 1-4% Neanderthal DNA:
So did we or didn't we? Last week saw the publication of two new papers with diametrically opposed conclusions about whether non-African people have Neanderthal-human hybrids among their ancestors-a result of at least some interspecies dalliance in the distant past.
That non-Africans share 1% to 4% of their genomes with Neanderthals is not in doubt, thanks to the pioneering work of paleo-geneticists led by the Max Planck Institute's Svante Paabo. At issue is how to interpret that fact. Dr. Paabo originally recognized that there are two possible explanations, hybridization (which got all the press) or "population substructure."
When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following-from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.
Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: "The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth's atmosphere."
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions-we are now, in writer Gary Alexander's word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal:
Identifying unique features of human beings is a cottage industry in psychology. In his book "Stumbling on Happiness," the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert jokes that every member of his profession lives under the obligation at some time in his career to complete a sentence which begins: "The human being is the only animal that..." Those who have completed the sentence with phrases like "makes tools," "is conscious" or "can imitate" have generally now conceded that some other animals also have these traits.
Plenty of human uniqueness remains. After all, uniqueness is everywhere in the biological world: Elephants and worms also have unique features. As fast as one scientist demotes human beings from being unique in one trait, another scientist comes up with a new unique trait: grandparental care, for instance, or extra spines on the pyramidal cells of our prefrontal cortex.
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the third in the series on confirmation bias.
I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias-the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when assessing a theory in science-is to avoid monopoly. So long as there are competing scientific centers, some will prick the bubbles of theory reinforcement in which other scientists live.
If, as I argued last week, scientists are just as prone as everybody else to confirmation bias to looking for evidence to support rather than test their ideas then how is it that science, unlike cults and superstitions, does change its mind and find new things?
The answer was spelled out by the psychologist Raymond Nickerson of Tufts University in a paper written in 1998: "It is not so much the critical attitude that individual scientists have taken with respect to their own ideas that has given science the success it has enjoyed... but more the fact that individual scientists have been highly motivated to demonstrate that hypotheses that are held by some other scientist(s) are false."
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:
There's a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it. Professors tell students that this is the essence of science.
Yet most scientists behave very differently in practice. They not only become strongly attached to their own theories; they perpetually look for evidence that supports rather than challenges their theories. Like defense attorneys building a case, they collect confirming evidence.
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal
If all goes well next month, Curiosity, NASA's latest mission to Mars, will land in the Gale crater, a 3.5-billion-year-old, 96-mile-wide depression near the planet's equator. Out will roll a car-size rover to search for signs of life, among other things. It will drill into rocks and sample the contents, using a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.
In the unlikely event that the project finds evidence of life, then what? In particular, who is in charge of deciding what we should do if we encounter living Martian creatures?
The Times published my op-ed on banking reform:
It is not yet clear whether the current rage against the banks will do more harm than good: whether we are about to throw the baby of banking as a vital utility out with the bathwater of banking as a wasteful casino. But what is clear is that the current mood of Bankerdämmerung is an opportunity as well as a danger. The fact that so many people agree that some kind of drastic reform is needed, all the way along a spectrum from Milibands to mega-Tories, might just open the window through which far-reaching reform of the financial system enters.
All the actors involved bear some blame. First, investment bankers and the principals in financial companies that cluster around them have trousered an increasing share of the returns from the financial markets, leaving less for their customers and shareholders, while getting "too big to fail", so passing their risks to taxpayers.
Two rival designs of plant biochemistry compete to dominate the globe. One, called C3 after the number of carbon atoms in the initial sugars it makes, is old, but still dominant. Rice is a C3 plant. The other, called C4, is newer in evolutionary history, and now has about 21% of the photosynthesis "market." Corn is a C4 plant. In hot weather, the C3 mechanism becomes inefficient at grabbing carbon dioxide from the air, but in cool weather C4 stops working altogether. So at first glance it seems as if global warming should benefit C4.
I wrote the following op-ed in The Times (behind a paywall) on 2 July.
As I cowered in my parked car in a street in Newcastle last Thursday, nearly deafened by hail on the roof of the car, thunder from the black sky and shrieking girls from the doorway of a school, a dim recollection swam into my mind. After inching back home slowly, through the flooded streets, I googled to refresh the memory. On 23 March this year, the Meteorological Office issued the following prediction:
"The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier-than-average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period."
One of the delights of science is its capacity for showing us that the world is not as it seems. A good example is the startling statistic that there are at least 10 times as many bacterial cells (belonging to up to 1,000 species) in your gut as there are human cells in your entire body: that "you" are actually an entire microbial zoo as well as a person. You are 90% microbes by cell count, though not by volume-a handy reminder of just how small bacteria are.
This fact also provides a glimpse of the symbiotic nature of our relationship with these bugs. A recent study by Howard Ochman at Yale University and colleagues found that each of five great apes has a distinct set of microbes in its gut, wherever it lives. So chimpanzees can be distinguished from human beings by their gut bacteria, which have been co-evolving with their hosts for millions of years.
These days the heritability of intelligence is not in doubt: Bright adults are more likely to have bright kids. The debate was not always this calm. In the 1970s, suggesting that IQ could be inherited at all was a heresy in academia, punishable by the equivalent of burning at the stake.
More than any other evidence, it was the study of twins that brought about this change. "Born Together-Reared Apart," a new book by Nancy L. Segal about the Minnesota study of Twins Reared Apart (Mistra), narrates the history of the shift. In 1979, Thomas Bouchard of the University of Minnesota came across a newspaper report about a set of Ohio twins, separated at birth, who had been reunited and proved to possess uncannily similar habits. Dr. Bouchard began to collect case histories of twins raised apart and to invite them to Minneapolis for study.
Part of the preamble to Agenda 21, the action plan that came out of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, reads: "We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being."
Update: a couple of small corrections inserted in square brackets below. Thanks to Stephen Coles of UCLA.
Human beings love sharing. We swap, collaborate, care, support, donate, volunteer and generally work for each other. We tend to admire sharing when it's done for free but frown upon it-or consider it a necessary evil-when it's done for profit. Some think that online, we're at the dawn of a golden age of free sharing, the wiki world, in which commerce will be replaced by mass communal sharing-what the futurist John Perry Barlow called "dot communism."
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal.
If you write about genetics and evolution, one of the commonest questions you are likely to be asked at public events is whether human evolution has stopped. It is a surprisingly hard question to answer.
I'm tempted to give a flippant response, borrowed from the biologist Richard Dawkins: Since any human trait that increases the number of babies is likely to gain ground through natural selection, we can say with some confidence that incompetence in the use of contraceptives is probably on the rise (though only if those unintended babies themselves thrive enough to breed in turn).
Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal
This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to vote on the answer to a simple question: Imagine you had $75 billion to donate to worthwhile causes. What would you do, and where should we start?
Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:
Being maltreated as a child can perhaps affect you for life. It now seems the harm might reach into your very DNA. Two recently published studies found evidence of changes to the genetic material in people with experience of maltreatment. These are the tip of an iceberg of discoveries in the still largely mysterious field of "epigenetic" epidemiology-the alteration of gene expression in ways that affect later health.
Peter Pringle's new book "Experiment Eleven" documents a shocking scandal in the history of medicine, when Albert Schatz, the discoverer of streptomycin, was deprived of the credit and the Nobel Prize by his ambitious boss, Selman Waksman. Streptomycin was and is a miraculous cure for tuberculosis.
Yet the near disappearance of tuberculosis from the Western world, where it was once the greatest killer of all, owes little to streptomycin. Mortality from TB had already fallen by 75% in most Western countries by 1950, when streptomycin became available, and the rate of fall was little different before and after. Scarlet fever, pneumonia and diphtheria all declined rapidly long before their cures were introduced.
My latest Wall Street Journal column is on the technology of fly fishing rods
Moore's Law is the leitmotif of the modern age: Incessant improvements in communication and computing are accompanied by incessant drops in price. Yet some quite low-tech devices are also experiencing Moore's Laws of their own, especially those that use new materials. Even something as mundane as fishing rods.
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about how predictably "primate" we all are in the workplace:
Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.
The Times has published my op-ed on shale gas:
It is now official: drilling for shale gas by fracturing rock with water may rattle the odd teacup, but is highly unlikely to cause damaging earthquakes. That much has been obvious to anybody who has followed the development of the shale gas industry in America over the past ten years. More than 25,000 wells drilled have caused a handful of micro-seismic events that can barely be felt.
The two rumbles that resulted from drilling a well near Blackpool last year were tiny. To call a two-magnitude tremor an earthquake is a bit like calling a hazelnut lunch. Such tremors happen naturally more than 15 times a year but go unnoticed and they are a common consequence of many other forms of underground work such as coalmining and geothermal drilling. Earthquakes caused by hydroelectric projects, in which dams load the crust and lubricate faults, can be much greater and more damaging. The Sichuan earthquake that killed 90,000 in 2008 was probably caused by a dam.
After a break of two weeks, here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:
April 25 is World Malaria Day, designed to draw attention to the planet's biggest infectious killer. The news is generally good. Never has malaria, which is carried by the Anopheles mosquito, been in more rapid retreat. Deaths are down by a third in Africa over the past decade alone, and malaria has vanished from much of the world, including the U.S.
As so often happens in the battle against disease, however, evolution aids the enemy. The selection pressure on pathogens to develop resistance to new drugs is huge. In recent weeks, the emergence on the Thai-Myanmar border of malaria strains resistant to artemisin, a plant-derived drug, have led to pessimistic headlines and reminders of the setback caused by resistance to the drug chloroquine, which began in the 1950s.
A new study of the Great Barrier Reef will apparently confirm what I argued in The Rational Optimist that local pollution and over-fishing are a much greater threat to coral reefs than either climate change or changing alkalinity (sometimes wrongly called acidification).
The actual paper will appear in Current Biology, but this is from the press release from James Cook University (I hate it when scientists announce their results by press release before the journal article is available).
Update: here's the article in press, but behind a paywall.
Belatedly, here is my Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal on 24 March 2012.
In her remarkable new book "The Rambunctious Garden," Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine wilderness is to manage it intensively. Left unmanaged, a natural habitat will become dominated by certain species, often invasive aliens introduced by human beings. "A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem," she writes. "The ecosystems that look the most pristine are perhaps the least likely to be truly wild."
Scientists, it's said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit-a failing known as confirmation bias. They then accuse their opponents of doing the same thing. This is what makes debates over nature and nurture, dietary fat and climate change so polarized.
But just because the prosecutor is biased in favor of his case does not mean the defendant is innocent. Sometimes biased advocates are right. An example of this phenomenon is now being played out in geology over the controversial idea that a meteorite or comet hit the earth 12,900 years ago and cooled the climate.
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