Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

I have just found at Spiked Online Brendan O'Neill's superb recent essay on whether the earth is finite, and I heartily recommend it. Here's a sample:

Over the past 200 years, Malthusians have tended to look at people as simply the users-up of scarce resources. They have tended to view nature as the producer of things and mankind as the consumer of things. And their view of people as little more than consumers - almost as parasites - inevitably leads to them seeing human beings as the cause of every modern ill, and therefore reducing the number of human beings as the solution to every modern ill. Their focus on finiteness means they conceive of humanity as a kind of bovine force, hoovering up everything that it comes across.

I read this while sitting in a hotel room at San Francisco airport. Huge jets queue for take off in full view of my window. I am in the middle of a great conurbation. But between me and the jets lies a stretch of water, an arm of the Bay itself. And the water is a bird watcher's paradise. There are rafts of ducks such as buffleheads and wigeon. There are pelicans, grebes and two speces of gull. Along the shore there are great white and little egrets, willets, whimbrels, grey plovers, stints, dowitchers, avocets, yellow-legs and tight flocks of sandpipers. Sea lions cruise a litle further out, and an osprey has just plunged into the water after a fish.

Here is my latest Wall Street Journal column. It led me into the etymology of the word `optimism' and the realisation that at first it meant almost the opposite of what we now mean by it, namely that the world was at its `optimum' and could not improve.

A Haitian who survived the January earthquake and has so far escaped cholera recently told a reporter that this month's Hurricane Tomas wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, "thank God." I know it's often just a verbal tic, but it has always struck me as odd that people who survive natural disasters thank God for saving them but rarely blame Him for the disaster.

It has been quite a decade for natural disasters: the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Burma's cyclone, Pakistan's floods, China's quake. Only once to my knowledge has there been much media debate about whether these disasters were "acts of God"-after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, perhaps because it happened on the day after Christmas. In any case, I always felt the phrase applied better to 9/11, considering the motivation of the terrorists.

A new paper in Science casts further doubt on the usefulness of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as a warning of what we face from man-made carbon emissions. Tropical rain forests became more diverse, not less, during the warm spell.

The paleontologist who made this discovery told Science News:

"We were expecting to find rapid extinction, a total change in the forest," says study leader Carlos Jaramillo, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. "What we found was just the opposite - a very fast addition of many new species, and a huge spike in the diversity of tropical plants."

Here is the letter that David MacKay sent me following my article in The Times and to which I replied.

(I have gone to weblinks for his charts and in one case come up with a slightly different version -- the sea ice graph I could not find the exact one he included so I have found another from the same source which has more years on it than his version, but it's the same data and the same source.) Update: all graphs now correct!

Don Boudreaux has a lovely essay in the Christian Science Monitor (interest declaration: he mentions my book) in which he makes the point people often miss about markets, that they encourage diversity rather than one-size-fits-all solutions:

Contrast the multitude of different market-generated and voluntarily adopted ideas with the ideas of progressives - for example, progressives' idea thatgovernment must regulate the fatcontent of foods.

Each of us can decide how much we value, say,juicy burgersand double-dark chocolate ice cream compared to how much we value a trim waistline and longer life expectancy. And each of us values these benefits differently. The dietary choices that I make for myself are right for me, but I cannot know if they are right for anyone else. Progressives, in contrast, falsely assume there's a single correct metric, for the whole country, that determines for everyone how to trade off the satisfaction of eatingtasty but fatty foodsfor the benefit of being healthier.

There is a hilarious letter in today's Times from three FRS professors about my recent artilce on ocean acidification.

Despite conceding the factual truth of my article in detail, they tell me to brush up on chemistry then give no examples of me getting anything wrong.

They concede my point that any shift of acidity will be within natural ranges. Thanks. But say it could be much larger `in the future'. No numbers, note. They mean in several centuries.

UPDATE: David MacKay's letter is now up in a separate post here

Some weeks ago I wrote an article for The Times about why I no longer find persuasive the IPCC's arguments that today's climate change is unprecedented, fast and dangerous.

Update: I'd like to add one thing to the story below. Stewart Brand, who I know and admire, played a prominent part in the Channel 4 film. He's not a `convert' to these views. He has always been strongly pro-GM food and mildly pro-nuclear. So my comments here were not aimed at him.

Last night saw a TV programme in the UK called What the Green Movement Got Wrong, in which various greens admitted that they had done terrible harm by opposing nuclear power and GM food and indoor DDT. It was a pretty good programme, especially on Chernobyl.

I have an article in The Times today (behind a paywall) on ocean acidification. Here's the gist:

Today in Beijing an alliance of scientists called Oceans United will present the United Nations with a request for $5 billion a year to be spent on monitoring the oceans. High among their concerns is ocean acidification, which `could make it harder for animals such as lobsters, crabs, shellfish, coral or plankton to build protective shells'.

As opinion polls reveal that global warming is losing traction on the public imagination, environmental pressure groups have been cranking the engine on this `other carbon dioxide problem'. `Time is running out' wrote two activists in Scientific American in August, `to limit acidification before it irreparably harms the food chain on which the world's oceans - and people - depend.'

Here (a bit late) is my latest Wall Street Journal column, on epigenetic inheritance

In the debate over whether our fates as individuals are ruled by nature or nurture-that is, by innate qualities or personal experience-one of the most baffling features is the way the nurture advocates manage to cast themselves as the great foes of determinism. "Genes don't determine who we are," they insist-all the while positing that environmental causes often do. Remember how some Freudians tried to blame autism, schizophrenia and even homosexuality on the way parents treated their children? True, they claimed these effects were treatable, but so are many genetic problems. I wear glasses to correct a partly genetic tendency to myopia.

Nor has environmental determinism escaped moral stain. When Soviet agriculture was forced to obey crank theories that environmental conditioning rather than breeding could determine the frost-resistance of wheat-not coincidentally echoing the notion that human nature could be remade by communism-the result was famine.

I have just sent this letter to the Guardian:

In response to Donald Brown's call for climate scepticism to be classified as a crime against humanity (1st November),

in which he said `We may not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity':

Over at LIberal Curmudgeon, Steve Budiansky has a good insight into a subject he knows well, ever since writing the book Nature's Keepers: claims about species extinction.

The whole science behind the extinction crisis is riddled withcircular reasoning, but this is an especially fine example. No new research was involved, no field studies, no nothing that involved actual science as we know it. (The researchers for example concluded that habitat loss is one of the "root causes" of global biodiversity loss; this conclusion was derived from the fact that many of the species listed as threatened on the IUCNRed Listwere presumed to be threatened, and accordingly placed on the list in the first place, because of . . . habitat loss)

Like Steve, I care about extinctions. In my youth I worked on three different projects to try to diagnose and arrest the decline of rare birds in the Indian subcontinent. But like me he fears that mega-political statements and exaggerated claims will only do that cause harm:

Here is Sunday'sNew York Times variety puzzlewhose solution was a nice surprise for me (hat tip Steve Budiansky).

Tim Worstall has an enlightening essay on his specialist subject, rare earths.

Rare-earth minerals are the 15 elements in that funny box at the bottom of the periodic table -- known as lanthanides -- plus two others. About 95 percent of global production takes place in China, largely at one huge mining complex in Inner Mongolia. The lanthanides are essential to much of modern electronics and high-tech equipment of various kinds. The magnets in windmills and iPod headphones rely on neodymium. Lutetium crystals make MRI machines work; terbium goes into compact fluorescent bulbs; scandium is essential for halogen lights; lanthanum powers the batteries for the Toyota Prius. For some of these products, alternative materials are available (moving to a non-rare-earth technology would make those cute little white earbuds about the size of a Coke can, though). For others, there simply isn't a viable substitute.

In other words, those vast wind turbines depend on surface mining just as much as the fossil fuel industry does.

Further evidence that ocean acidification is a non-event, scientifically, even while being a big event for scientists financially:

Thus, both of the investigated coastal plankton communities were unaffected by twenty-first century expected changes in pH and free CO2. This may be explained by the large seasonal, and even daily, changes in pH seen in productive marine ecosystems, and the corresponding need for algae to be pH-tolerant.

Yup.

My latest column in the Wall Street Journal is about the psychology of bureaucracy. just as we need to understand the human proclivities that give rise to booms and busts in markets, so we need to understand the human proclivities that motivate officials. Here are five identified by Slavisa Tasic, starting with `illusions of competence':

Psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students' problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were false.

The issue of action bias is better known in England as the "dangerous dogs act," after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the rash of legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulator to stand up and say "something must not be done," lest "something" makes the problem worse.

Here's anhour long conversationI did on Econtalk with economist and novelist Russ Roberts about trade, prosperity and Adam Smith. It includes a discussion of why animals can manage reciprocity but not, apparently, exchange.

My latest Wall Street Journal column, Triumph of the Idea Smugglers, argues that from time to time in history good ideas need rescuing from bad regimes. If Thales of Miletus had not infected Greece with rationalism after travelling in Egypt, and if 1700 years later, Leonardo Fibonacci had not infected Italy with Hindu numerals after growing up in what is now Algeria -- then these ideas might not have flourished.

The secret of human progress is and always has been to keep ideas moving, both so that they meet and mate with new ideas and so that they escape suppression at home. As the philosopher David Hume was the first to observe, China suffers from a geographic disadvantage in this respect: It is too easy to unify. When disunited it grows rich and innovative. But time and again emperors, from the Ming to the Maoist, have been able to establish tyrannical centralized rule and shut down trade, diversity and experiment.

Europe, with its centrifugal rivers, its peninsulas and mountain ranges, is very hard to unify by conquest. Ask Constantine, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler. So European states could harbor commercial, intellectual and religious refugees from each other, keeping flames alive. The history of technology is littered with examples of Europeans who fled from one jurisdiction to another to a find a more congenial or generous ruler: Columbus, Gutenberg, Voltaire, Einstein.

Here's a video of a discussion I had with Richard Dawkins about `life' back in June: extra-terrestrial life, artificial life and synthetic life.

Continuing the debate about the industrial revolution with Deirdre McCloskey

Here's her reply to me

...We agree at least that innovation is the key. That's a very, very important agreement. Joel Mokyr, Jack Goldstone, and our own Greg Clark join Matt Ridley, Robert Allen, and me in affirming it. It sets us Innovators off from most economists and historians, who are Accumulators. We say that the modern world got rich by (at a minimum) 1500% percent compared with 1800 not, as the sadly mistaken Accumulators say, because of capital accumulation, or exploitation of the third world, or the expansion of foreign trade. The world got rich by inventing cheap steel, electric lights, marine insurance, reinforced concrete, coffee shops, saw mills, newspapers, automatic looms, cheap paper, modern universities, the transistor, cheap porcelain, corporations, rolling mills, liberation for women, railways.

Today I read two contrasting articles about the wonderful rescue of the Chilean miners that I strongly recommend, even though both are a few days old.

The first, by Brendan O'Neill, in Spiked (hat tip: Frank Stott), reveals the degree to which the miners helped themselves to cope by defying the psychological experts 700 metres above them.

The inconvenient truth is that the 33 miners survived underground not as a result of psychological advice and intervention but by sometimes rebellingagainst the psychologists who kept a watchful eye on their every move. The real story of the Chilean miners, for anyone who cares to look, is that the interventions of the various wings of the trauma industry often make things worse rather than better, and people are mostly happier and healthier without them.

At Cato Unbound, there is a set of essays on the subject in response to Deirdre McCloskey, one of which is by me, others by Greg Clark and Jonathan Feinstein.

I champion the theory that coal was crucial, because it showed increasing rather than diminshing returns (the more people mined, the cheaper it got) and it amplified productivity and commerce. But there is more to the story than that.

On the failed promise of genomics.

Is it because common ailments are caused by many different rare genetic variants?

Do you remember how, back in the days when genetically modified crops were as vilifed as climate sceptics were until recently, one of the arguments deployed against them was that they would `contaminate' neighbouring farms with their genetically modified pollen? This was one justification for a total ban, as there still is in Britain, rather than a policy of live and let live.

Now comes evidence of a different kind of collateral contamination by GM crops. Turns out GM maize contaminates neighbouring farms with extra profits. The fact that farmers are growing insect-resistant GM crops raises yields for those who are growing conventional maize, because it reduces the number of pests that are about.

Robin Marantz Henig hits the nail on the head in the New York Times today:

The history of in vitro fertilization demonstrates not only how easily the public will accept new technology once it's demonstrated to be safe, but also that the nightmares predicted during its development almost never come true. This is a lesson to keep in mind as we debate whether to pursue other promising yet controversial medical advances, from genetic engineering to human cloning.

The Nobel prize for Robert Edwards is long overdue. It should not be forgotten what a gauntlet he and Patrick Steptoe had to run when they pioneered IVF. Here's a taste, from an article in The Times in 2003:

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

An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive. World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world's income has octupled. The richest places on Earth are among the most densely populated.

By contrast, it's a fair bet that if you took a few million rabbits and let them loose on Manhattan island, they would starve, fight, sicken and generally peter out. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it can continue forever or not, you cannot deny that when people come together in dense swarms, they often get richer.

Yuk.

This video was made by an organisation funded partly by the UK taxpayer.

Francis Crick's letters from the 1950s, supposedly thrown away by `an over-zealous secretary', have come to light in Sydney Brenner's papers. Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski found them when they went through the Brenner archive. The secretary is exonerated. The Crick Brenner office (they shared a room) was moved twice in the early 1960s.

As one of Crick's biographers I have done some interviews, for example with the LA Times.

My main reaction is that this is a thrilling discovery that adds lots of colour and enriches the story but does not rewrite history in any fundamental way. Not that I have read all the letters yet.

There is a big push on to draw attention to species extinction in the run up to a Biodiversity Jamboree in Japan.

But something struck me as odd as I listened to the radio this morning. There was a lot of talk of `extinctions' of thousands of plants, as turned up by a new report from Kew Gardens. When I opened the newspapers (online), I found that actually the report was not about extinctions, but about threats of extinction. Then I looked at the list cited by the Times and Guardian. Right there at the top:

Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) - critically endangered

I am now writing a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal called Mind and Matter. Here's the first one.

Recently, the psychologist David Buss's team at the University of Texas at Austin reported that men, when looking for one-night stands, check out women's bodies. Or as they put it, "men, but not women, have a condition-dependent adaptive proclivity to prioritize facial cues in long-term mating contexts, but shift their priorities toward bodily cues in short-term mating contexts."

Like many results in evolutionary psychology, this may seem blindingly obvious, but that does not stop it from being controversial. Earlier this month a neuroscientist in Britain, Gina Rippon, lambasted what she called the "neurohype" about sex differences: "There may be some very small differences between the genders, but the similarities are far, far greater."