Matt Ridley

You are currently browsing articles tagged Matt Ridley.

“Almost All Of Us Were Invaders And Usurpers And Miscegenators”

May 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “Ancient DNA Tells A New Human Story,” the “Saturday Essay” at the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley explains how “low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing” has allowed prehistory to come into sharper focus. The facts don’t speak well of humans (we were not nurturers in the big picture), though it does prove what a polyglot race we actually are. There’s also a lot to reveal about the unusual course diseases may have traveled from the earliest societies to the modern ones. An excerpt:

It turns out that, in the prehistory of our species, almost all of us were invaders and usurpers and miscegenators. This scientific revelation is interesting in its own right, but it may have the added benefit of encouraging people today to worry a bit less about cultural change, racial mixing and immigration.

Consider two startling examples of how ancient DNA has solved long-standing scientific enigmas. Tuberculosis in the Americas today is derived from a genetic strain of the disease brought by European settlers. That is no great surprise. But there’s a twist: 1,000-year-old mummies found in Peru show symptoms of TB as well. How can this be—500 years before any Europeans set foot in the Americas?

In a study published late last year in the journal Nature, Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and his colleagues found that all human strains of tuberculosis share a common ancestor in Africa about 6,000 years ago. The implication is that this is when and where human beings first picked up TB. It is much later than other scientists had thought, but Dr. Krause’s finding only deepened the mystery of the Peruvian mummies, since by then, their ancestors had long since left Africa.

Modern DNA cannot help with this problem, but reading the DNA of the tuberculosis bacteria in the mummies allowed Dr. Krause to suggest an extraordinary explanation. The TB DNA in the mummies most resembles the DNA of TB in seals, which resembles that of TB in goats in Africa, which resembles that of the earliest strains in African people. So perhaps Africans gave tuberculosis to their goats, which gave it to seals, which crossed the Atlantic and gave it to native Americans.•

Tags:

“Britain Probably Has More Trees Now Than In 1510”

March 7, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Russell Baker isn’t the only one who thinks humans are living in veritable forests nowadays. From Matt Ridley’s Five Books interview, a discussion about Bjørn Lomborg’s contrarian volume, The Skeptical Environmentalist:

“Matt Ridley:

There is more forest now than there was 50 years ago.

Question:

No. Really?

Matt Ridley:

Yup. Not in the right places necessarily. Rain forest is retreating but go to the Eastern seaboard of America. It’s covered in forest. It used to be farmland. Some of it’s plantations but some of it’s just wild forest that’s regrowing. The total number of trees in the world is going up at the moment, not down. There’s less water pollution, less air pollution, the kinds of things that caused urban smog in LA in the 1960s are going down dramatically.

Question:

With the trees. That sounds so unlikely.

Matt Ridley:

Exactly. A lot of what he says sounds unlikely because, as he says, people have heard the litany over and over again. He went back to reputable sources – UN, World Bank, other sources – and he found that the numbers simply don’t support the pessimism. There aren’t as many trees as there were…well, when?

Question:

1510.

Matt Ridley:

Britain probably has more trees now than in 1510. Huge forest clearances had happened long before that. The forestry commission has planted a lot of trees. There’s certainly more forest today than at any point in the last couple of hundred of years. When it got to be this lightly forested, it was probably the Middle Ages. There were huge forest clearances to fuel the iron industry in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. And real problems because they started running out of charcoal. The iron industry had to leave the South of England because there were no trees left. They moved to Wales and Cumbria and deforested that too. Species extinction rates for mammals and birds peaked around 1900 and they’ve been dropping since.”

Tags: ,

“The New York Times Reported ‘An Increase In Twilight Zone-Type Reports Of Sheep And Rabbits With Cataracts’ In Patagonia”

August 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Matt Ridley’s new Wired cover story, “Apocalypse Not,” reminds of the many endgames wrongly predicted over the past few decades for humanity, from post-peak oil to variants of flu to the hole in the ozone layer. It’s a wise piece, though we shouldn’t relax about doing things in a cleaner, more energy-conscious way. An excerpt:

“The threat to the ozone layer came next. In the 1970s scientists discovered a decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs, and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits, while The New York Times reported ‘an increase in Twilight Zone-type reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts’ in Patagonia. But all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.

There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.”

Tags: