Matt Ridley
@mattwridley
Biologist, columnist | Author of Red Queen, Genome, Rational Optimist, the Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, Viral and Birds, Sex and Beauty.
My new book Birds, Sex and Beauty, is on sale in the USA from 25 March. If you love nature, birds, evolution or...sex, then this is the book for you! It argues that mate choice is a powerful driver of evolution.
I’ve done a bit of digging on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation situation. I still don’t like the plan, and still think continued operations in Gaza are doing more harm than good. Still, that’s just my opinion. Let’s try and unpack the nonsense and get to something that looks…
Spain keeps claiming that solar and wind didn't cause the blackout (lack of spinning momentum to ensure power stability) but they've increased their gas power use by 41% to "stabilize the country’s power network" using gas "as a reinforcement of electricity supply security"…
This is insane. An official said “The AI agenda would be way more advanced if it wasn’t for Miliband’s focus on net zero.” We cannot block one of our most important growth sectors in the name of Net Zero. Energy policy must fit what the country needs, not the other way around.
Unbelievable footage: The contents of approximately 950 food trucks, inspected and approved by Israel, are rotting on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing because the UN refuses to distribute them. Today, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) offered to distribute the aid in…
1. The quest for searching the truth behind COVID origins, is an excellent form of citizen science, one of the greatest displayed in the recent years!
🚨BREAKING🚨 Maximum strike prices for Ed Miliband's missing wind auction are out. Gruesome. Offshore wind: £113/MWh Higher than last year. Highest in a decade. And that's before all the extra costs of grid, backup, and wasted wind. As a comparison, the average cost of…
They just can't seem to stop deceiving themselves...
For AR7, DESNZ has reduced expected load factors by astonishing amounts. It has been common knowledge that the numbers in the last auction were cynical lies. This is what you expect from DESNZ. The current values are still grossly overstated. (1/2)
Climate NGOs and legacy media outlets focus obsessively on solar and wind energy. But since 2011, the global growth story has been natural gas, and it's not even close. My latest, on another platform:
As the UK Met Office continues to open more junk temperature measuring sites, suspicions are mounting that the apparent incompetence hides an agenda to inflate the warming trend to drive the alarmist Net Zero narrative. climateskeptic.org/p/suspicions-m…
It's surprising, how many people are suprised by Milei's economic success. Free-market economics has always worked, when given a chance. I agree that the surprise is how politically savy he has been and how receptive the Argentinian people are to him reforms. Lots more work to…
thefp.com/p/niall-fergus… 5/5
This is indeed a truly magnificent essay in all senses: exquisitely well written, ferociously well argued, devastatingly persuasive, admirably courageous.
Superb piece by Paul Friesen. Tolerance is a virtue but should not be extended to tolerating violent intolerance. In particular, why does the liberal West give a free pass to the intolerant medieval bigotry of Islamism? Please read the whole article. pfriesen.substack.com/p/the-crescent…
At first they said it was only polite to refer to someone by their preferred pronounds. Then, they demanded social media censorship. Now, governments are fining, and may soon jail, people who deny the lie that men can become women. This is as terrifying as anything in "1984."
Let's remember that George Gao went in retirement as head of Chinese CDC one year ahead of schedule. He was also the head of the team whose data were hacked by Florence Debarre to invent her raccoon dog hoax.
Gao is open about this issue. In a May 2020 interview, he acknowledged that early in the pandemic, they mistakenly required an association with Huanan for the criteria. Worobey misinterprets this; they claim that the initial cases were only about symptoms and not the market.
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
In fact, these 700 sequences in Latinne et al were ⑴ the RdRp sequences that the WIV had agreed to disclose for ⑵ only the PREDICT 2 samples of ⑶ BatCovs ⑷ which the WIV had processed. Released Morens FOI:
"The calendar reveals ongoing efforts to manage scrutiny of the Latinne et al. paper, particularly regarding ethical compliance in Laos and editorial coordination with Nature Communications."
This time, we are comparing Deep Seek R1, DeepSeek V3, Grok 3, Llama 3.3 70B, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-4o on Daszak's calendar items about NatComms. DeepSeek R1 regularly surprises (image). @PeterDaszak @sciencecohen @Lake_Octopus @R_H_Ebright @emilyakopp @thackerpd @mattwridley
Says a lot that they're hated for the one thing they actually got right (for 5 minutes). The political class is useless, but the general public are worse.
The only thing making Labour unpopular is WFA, joke country 😂