Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

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."

From Cafe Hayek comes this:

When materials are worth recycling, markets for their reuse naturally arise. For materials with no natural markets for their reuse, the benefits of recycling are less than its costs - and, therefore, government efforts to promote such recycling waste resources.

Everyday experience should teach us this fact. The benefits of recycling clothing, for example, are large enough to prompt us to buy costly clothes-recycling machines that we routinely use to recycle for tomorrow the clothes we wear today. We call these machines "washers and dryers." And when American families no longer want their clothing, organizations such as Goodwill come by to gather the discarded garments to recycle them for use by poor people.

Chris Anderson's brilliant talk at TED Global is now on the web.

Among the take-home messages:

- that innovation is accelerating thanks to the ability to compare and combine. Dance is a great example.

Update: George Monbiot has made it clear that he did not ask for the deletions of comments referred to below, but that the Guardian moderators made the deletions for legal reasons and without his knowledge. But he still fails to take the opportunity to discuss the evidence that Williams and Niggurath produce.

George Monbiot is in trouble. He has already had to make an apology for his mistakes in an attack on Richard North.

He's swinging like a weathervane on issues like vegetarianism and feed-in tariffs.

The brilliant philosophical writer (and my old friend) Anthony Gottlieb has been ruminating on whether science should be sceptical about itself.

There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism-all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be-they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong.

Very true. On scientific questions where I am orthodox (eg, alternative medicine, evolution), I notice that the heretics use precisely the same sorts of arguments as I do in those fields where I am a sceptic (eg, climate projections, crop circles). There seems to be no easy answer to the problem: when should you go for a heresy.

Here's the text of an opinion piece I wrote, which was published in the Western Daily Press (link to home page, not article itself) this morning to publicise a talk I am giving in Wells Cathedral on Tuesday 14th. Come along if you live nearby for the peculiar sight of me speaking in a church. Will I get to use the pulpit?

``If you write a book saying the world is getting better, you might get away with being thought eccentric. But if you write a book saying that the world is going to go on getting better and that in 2100 people will be healthier, wealthier and wiser -- and have more rainforests too - you will be though stark, raving bonkers. It is just not sane to believe in a happy future for people and their planet.

Yet I cannot stop myself. I've looked at all the statistics, facts, anecdotes, predictions and pronouncements I can get hold of and they all seem to me to suggest that we will be better off in 2100 than we are now. Much better off.

Ben Pile at Climate Resistance has a nice essay on the `environmentalist's paradox'. This is the superficially puzzling -- and to many greens, infuriating -- fact that people keep on getting healthier and wealthier when really they should, in all decency, be suffering terribly because of the deterioration of the earth's ecosystems.

Pile's starting point is a new paper that grapples wih the paradox. It puts forward four explanations

(1) We have measured well-being incorrectly;

Stephen Budiansky's two essays on the `locavore' movement, one in the New York Times and one on his blog, have received quite a bit of attention already. They are remarkably fine rants not least because Steve (an old friend) is not some pontificator. He actually grows a lots of his own food on his small farm in Virginia. He knows what he is talking about. And yet, like me, he concludes that

Twice, while being interviewed about my book I have been told by the interviewer that it is a bad thing that I can buy green beans from Africa `because the food should be kept in Africa to feed people there'. The sheer ignorance of this statement, let alone its patronising tone, left me open-mouthed on both occasions. Think how many calories of wheat an African bean exporter can afford to buy for the price he receives for the few calories in his beans. He is growing the most valuable crop he can so that he can afford to import things of greater value to him than surplus beans.

Distant food is efficient, sustainable, safe and moral.

Russ Roberts, over at Cafe Hayek, has this lovely hymn to progress:

In 1979,Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable music player. It weighed 14 ounces and cost $200. It could play a cassette that could hold about 90 minutes of music. It was a little bigger than a cassette. It was pretty ugly.

A new nano from Apple was announced yesterday. It weighs less than an ounce. The 8GB model is $149. It holds about 60 hours of music. It is smaller than a matchbook. It is very beautiful.

Steve Budiansky has a good piece at his Liberal Curmudgeon blog. He argues -- and I agree -- that heavy handed legal attacks on climate scientists, like Attorney general Ken Cucinelli's in Virginia, are reprehensible, but that to some extent environmental scientists are reaping what they have sown, for example in their reaction to Bjorn Lomborg's 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist:

Environmental scientists responded with a determination to stamp out this heresy that would have done Torquemada or Khomeini proud. A dozen scientists served Cambridge University Press with a demand that it cease printing the book, fire the editor who oversaw it, and "convene a tribunal" to investigate the book's "errors." Nature ran a truly egregious review by the scientists Stuart Pimm and Jeffrey Harvey attributing to Lomborg ridiculous statements that he never even remotely made in the book or anywhere else. And Pimm and Harvey along with other members of the environmental goon squad lodged a complaint with the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty - a legal body of the state - alleging that Lomborg had committed "scientific misconduct" for having reached conclusions that Pimm and Harvey did not like.

Walter Russell Mead has a powerful essay in the American Interest online about how the environmental movement suddenly turned into the establishment. Have you noticed the irony of being told to shut up and trust the experts by the likes of Greenpeace? Nothing is quite so amusing about the modern environmental movement as its sudden volte-face on the argument from authority: from `don't believe the experts' to `do as you are told'.

I suppose one should not be surprised. Every movement, from Christianity to Bolshevism, had the same transformation. How the church went from being a radical insurgent organization that gave a voice to the poor to one that insisted on papal infallibility without a backward glance always struck me as entertaining.

Mead argues that the entire environmental movement was founded on not trusting experts:

Update: Links added to sources

From today's Times, my op-ed piece.

This month, after a three-year investigation, Harvard University suspended a prominent professor of psychology for scandalously overinterpreting videos of monkey behaviour. The incident has sent shock waves through science because it suggests that a body of data is unreliable. The professor, Marc Hauser, is now a pariah in his own field and his papers have been withdrawn. But the implications for society are not great - no policy had been based on his research.