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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.

Back in June, I could not make it to Idea City in Canada,  meeting that chose "ideas having sex as its slogan". But I recorded a talk by Skype and here it is.

I have a piece in today's Times newspaper on extinction of species. Here it is, with added links:

The suitably named Dr Boris Worm, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, led the team that this week estimated the number of species on the planet at 8.7 million, plus or minus 1.3 million. That sounds about right. We human beings have described almost all the mammals, birds, butterflies and other conspicuous creatures, but new beetles, wasps, moths, flies and worms abound in every acre of tropical forest.

Some patterns are clear. Most species are on land; marine life, though just as abundant, is slightly less diverse. Most are in the humid tropics; the rest of the globe is an ecological footnote to the rainforest. Most are animals - though plants, fungi and microbes vastly outweigh us beasts, they tend to come in fewer kinds, perhaps because plants hybridise and bacteria swap genes, blurring the boundaries of species. Most are insects: spiders/mites and molluscs take silver and bronze, but if Planet Earth had a mascot, it would be a ground beetle.

Latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:

Evolutionists long ago abandoned the idea that natural selection can promote only selfish behavior. In the right circumstances, animals-including human beings-evolve the instinct to be nice (or acquire habits of niceness through cultural evolution). This happens within families but also within groups, where social solidarity promotes the success of the group at the expense of other groups.

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

Hardly any subject in science has been so politically fraught as the heritability of intelligence. For more than a century, since Francis Galton first started speculating about the similarities of twins, nature-nurture was a war with a stalemated front and intelligence was its Verdun-the most hotly contested and costly battle.

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

What limits the size of a peacock's tail, the weight of a deer's antlers or the virtuosity of a songbird's song? Driven inexorably by the competition to attract mates, these features of animals ought to get ever more elaborate. There was even once a theory-now discredited-that the famously gigantic antlers of the Irish elk became so unwieldy that they caused its extinction. Yet sexual ornaments do not get ever bigger.

Here is a piece I just published in the Spectator.

Johnny Berliner made this charming little calypso account of genes and what they are made of. It's concise and precise as well as nice. (Calypso rhyming is catching)

h/t Mark Stevenson.

My latest  Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal:

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal

"It's strange that I could become a professional athlete," said the Australian winner of this summer's Tour de France, Cadel Evans. "Physically, I was completely unsuitable for almost all Australian school sports. Nearly all Australian school sports require speed and/or size."

Belatedly, here is last week's Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal.

I once had a soft spot for the yeti, known in my youth as the "abominable snowman." As a teenager I avidly devoured stories of hairy bipeds glimpsed through snowstorms, strange cries echoing across glaciers, or enigmatic footprints in the snow. Slowly it dawned on me that the testimony was unreliable, the ecology implausible, the demography impossible and the lack of specimens conclusive.

I heartily recommend a new book called "And the Band Played On" by Christopher Ward, a friend of mine. It's a best-seller already in the UK. It's about his grandfather, who was the violinist in the band that played as the Titanic sank. But it's not about the sinking, but about what happened afterwards, and in particular the feud that broke about between the violinist's father and his pregnant fiancee's family. It's an astonishing tale of fraud, hoaxes, lawsuits, imprisonment and cruelty that would make a fiction writer blush at having exaggerated.

But, for the purposes of this website, what struck this rational optimist most was the examples of how non-good were the good old days. A world in which a ship's musician has to buy his own uniform on credit, to be deducted from his wages, is not very nice. But a world in which those wages were stopped by his employer at 2.20am on 14 April 1912 is shockingly awful. And a world in which his father then receives a letter pointing out that the wages having been stopped, there is still a sum owing for the uniform buttons, which the father should settle by return -- takes the biscuit. This was also a world in which a seventeen year old girl who devised a cruel hoax to get revenge on her father and stepmother was imprisoned in a brutal jail awaiting trial for deception. Yet I suspect Scotland in 1912 was a lot kinder than it was in 1812 or 1712.

Next time the Archbishop of Canterbury or some pontificating busybody tells me the world is getting worse because people are so much more selfish these days, I will suggest they read this book.

The Scientific Alliance newsletter has an interesting update on GM food. The public no longer feels the visceral fear of these crops that they did 13 years ago, even in Europe. But finding ways for politicians to climb off their high horses, without upsetting their masters in the Big Green organisations, is not proving easier. Here are three extracts:

Many farmers seem to like GM crops. Only 15 years after they were first commercialised, 148 million hectares were sown with biotech seeds around the world in 2010, a 10% increase over the previous year. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (www.isaaa.org), 15.4 million individual farmers grew GM crops, over 90% of them in developing countries. This is not unexpected: agriculture has evolved over the centuries by farmers trying and adopting new technology if they see a benefit. Crop biotechnology is just one more step on the road, and certainly not the last...

This anti-biotech activity has firm roots in the broader environmentalist and anti-globalisation movements. For most of the public, crop biotechnology is generally now a non-issue, and greater availability of GM crops - without taking away the critical element of choice - would be unlikely to cause a real furore in many countries, except amongst the activist minority. But that relies on governments taking the scientific advice of EFSA and allowing more approvals...

Update: I failed to make clear that negative numbers in the drought severity index implies worse droughts. The two findings below contradict each other. Here is another "greening", of the Sahel:

Here's (belatedly) a piece I published in the Times last week.

British Gas is putting up the cost of heating and lighting the average home by up to 18 per cent, or about £200 a year. Indignation at its profiteering is understandable. But that can only be a part of the story: the combined profits of the big six energy supply companies amount to less than 1.5 per cent of your energy bill, according to the regulator, Ofgem.

My l atest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on 3D printing:

Serendipity works in curious ways. Earlier this month, on the day before I read news of the successful implanting of a synthetic windpipe grown with a patient's own cells, I happened to have lunch with a civil engineer who told me about the first use of a 3-D printer to print structures in concrete. The two technologies are very different, but as I read more about each, I soon found an eerie convergence.

Mark Lynas's new book The God Species contains a few pages that dispute my account of ocean acidification in particular. Mark kindly alerted me to this and asked for my reaction. The result was an exchange, which Mark has put up on his blog here, which I mirror here. I thank Mark for taking my arguments seriously and suggesting an exchange of ideas.

Lynas: In my book The God Species I take science writer Matt Ridley to task for downplaying the dangers of ocean acidification. He responded via email, and I to him. Here is the exchange. Matt's final short responses are also included, indented as 'Ridley2′. Square brackets are mine, for clarification.

Ridley: You say [in The God Species]: "Why not just admit candidly that whilst the human advance has been amazing and hugely beneficial, it has also had serious environmental impacts?" Answer: I do. Human beings have serious environmental impacts. I say so and I do not deny them. For example: "Take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient runoff and fishing - especially the harvesting of herbivorous fishes that otherwise keep reefs clean of algae." From megafaunal extinction to alteration of the composition of the atmosphere, I detail lots of changes wrought by humans. On both climate change and ocean acidification, I accept a human alteration of the environment as real. What I argue with is whether the negative impacts are always as great as claimed or the positive ones always as small as claimed. That's quite different from not admitting that there are impacts, serious and otherwise.

Brian Eno, the musician and writer,  is more positive as a result of reading The Rational Optimist:

"That kind of marks the change I've felt in the past year or two. I wouldn't end an album like that now," he says. Drums Between the Bells has a loose, funky feel; it ends with the words, "Everything will be all right". Eno's new-found positivity - partly sparked by eco-thinker and Eno friend Stewart Brand's book Whole Earth Discipline and popular science writer Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist - boils down to a belief that we've never had it so good.

"Cultures have a tendency to be pessimistic. The whole of the history of humanity is people going, 'It's all going to fall apart, my God it's looking terrible, we're not going to survive for another 20 years.' But, in fact, on average things have actually been getting better for thousands of years. It's like you're playing roulette in the casino and you keep winning and you think I've got to stop, this is not going to carry on. Well, it has been carrying on, by and large. Most of us in this country live a hundred times better lives than we would have done 100 years ago. So things are getting exponentially better for us, and we can't believe our luck, so there's a tendency to say, 'It can't go on'."

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the strange phenomenon of contagious cancer in dogs and Tasmanian devils, and whether it could happen to us. Elizabeth Murchison is speaking about this at the TED Global meeting in Edinburgh next week.

Frank Dikotter's fine -- and vital -- book on Mao's Great famine won the Samuel Johnson prize. But you can see a short film and a discussion about my book on the BBC Culture showhere(from minute 17.17 onwards). It's an honour to have made it to the shortlist.

Nic Lewis's discovery of a statistical alteration applied by the IPCC lends strong support to lukwarming

As most people know, I am a lukewarmer -- somebody who accepts carbon dioxide's full greenhouse potential, but does not accept the much more dubious evidence for net positive feedbacks on top, and who therefore thinks that a temperatuire rise of more than 2C in this century is unlikely.

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

Driving home the other day it occurred to me that almost none of the greenery I could see-trees, garden shrubs, grass shoulders on the highway-was going to be used by humans for food, fuel, clothing or shelter.

New  evidence has been published that the Great Barrier Reef is not in trouble from climate change. The effects of bleaching are short-lived and reversible. When I said this in my book, I was patronised from a great height by a bunch of marine biologists in New Scientist. Will they, and New Scientist, now apologise? As I keep saying, coral reefs are indeed under threat from man-made problems -- pollution, overfishing, run-off, but climate change is the least of their worries. Here's the abstract of Osborne et al's paper in PLOS One:

Coral reef ecosystems worldwide are under pressure from chronic and acute stressors that threaten their continued existence. Most obvious among changes to reefs is loss of hard coral cover, but a precise multi-scale estimate of coral cover dynamics for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is currently lacking. Monitoring data collected annually from fixed sites at 47 reefs across 1300 km of the GBR indicate that overall regional coral cover was stable (averaging 29% and ranging from 23% to 33% cover across years) with no net decline between 1995 and 2009. Subregional trends (10-100 km) in hard coral were diverse with some being very dynamic and others changing little. Coral cover increased in six subregions and decreased in seven subregions. Persistent decline of corals occurred in one subregion for hard coral and Acroporidae and in four subregions in non-Acroporidae families. Change in Acroporidae accounted for 68% of change in hard coral. Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) outbreaks and storm damage were responsible for more coral loss during this period than either bleaching or disease despite two mass bleaching events and an increase in the incidence of coral disease. While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980's suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995. Instead, fluctuations in coral cover at subregional scales (10-100 km), driven mostly by changes in fast-growing Acroporidae, occurred as a result of localized disturbance events and subsequent recovery.

Here's what i wrote in my book.

Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading. Now he has written a two-part essay on Al Gore and the climate debate (part one; part two) that is, I think, very perceptive. It is angry, hard-hitting, and I don't agree with everything in it, but it somehow gets to to the core of the issue in a way that so much other commentary has not. This is the sort of old-fashioned polemic from somebody with historical perspective that has been lacking on this subject. Here's his conclusion:

The green movement's core tactic is not to "hide the decline" or otherwise to cook the books of science.  Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science.  Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.

The Rational Optimist is one of 13 books long-listed for the Royal Society Book prize for science books. If I make it to the shortlist, this will be my fifth time on this shortlist. (I have yet to win, though!)

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on cancer and evolution by natural selection:

Last week the American Cancer Society reported that death rates from cancer are falling steadily, at an annual rate of about 1.9% in men and 1.5% in women. A study published this week by the University of Colorado found that most seniors who died after being diagnosed with breast cancer actually lived long enough to have died of something else.

Prevention explains much of the decline in cancer fatalities, especially the drop in smoking. As for treatment, the most promising new options harness the very force that makes cancer so stubbornly virulent in the first place: evolution.

Here is an op-ed I wrote for today's Australian newspaper:

POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a self-proclaimed "rational optimist" who argues that the world has been getting better for most people and that the future is likely to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice towards pessimism that dominates the intelligentsia. As John Stuart Mill put it, "not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage".

What is more, pessimism has become a hallmark of the Left, chiefly because it justifies activism. Once upon a time conservatives lamented the way the world had gone to the dogs since the golden age (and some still do), while socialists championed growth, technology and innovation to liberate the working class.