Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley (born 7 February 1958), commonly known as Matt Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He writes on science, the environment and economics, and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper. Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, during which period it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years. He resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.
Ridley is a libertarian, and a supporter of Brexit.The Times, January 2017 He inherited the viscountcy in February 2012 and was a Conservative hereditary peer from February 2013, with an elected seat in the House of Lords, until his retirement in December 2021.
Early life and education Ridley's parents were Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley (1925–2012), and Lady Anne Katharine Gabrielle Lumley (1928–2006), the daughter of Roger Lumley, 11th Earl of Scarbrough. He is the nephew of the late Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and minister Nicholas Ridley and the great grandson of Edwin Lutyens.
Ridley attended Eton College from 1970 to 1975, and then studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, earning a BA degree with first class honours in zoology. He then pursued doctoral research on the mating system of the common pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), supervised by Chris Perrins, and was awarded a DPhil in zoology in 1983.
Career
Journalism Ridley joined The Economist in 1984, first working as a science editor until 1987, then as Washington, D.C., correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and as American editor from 1990 to 1992.Debrett's People of Today 2007, p. 1406. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph and an editor of The Best American Science Writing 2002.
From 2010 to 2013, Ridley wrote the weekly "Mind and Matter" column for The Wall Street Journal, which "explores the science of human nature and its implications".
Since 2013, Ridley has written a weekly column for The Times on science, the environment, and economics.
Ridley wrote the majority of the main article of the August 2017 edition of BBC Focus magazine., #311 The article explains his scepticism regarding resource depletion, challenging the widespread belief that resource depletion is an important issue. He cites various previous resource scares as his evidence.
Northern Rock, 1994–2007 In 1994, Ridley became a board member of the UK bank Northern Rock. His father had been a board member for 30 years, and chairman from 1987 to 1992. Ridley became chairman in 2004.The Times, 19 September 2007 Northern Rock chairman gives chief full backing
In September 2007, Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances, at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. The bank applied to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding at the beginning of the crisis, but failed, and Northern Rock was nationalised. Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007. A parliamentary committee criticised him for not recognising the risks of the bank's financial strategy and "harming the reputation of the British banking industry".
Business From 1996 to 2003, Ridley served as founding chairman of the International Centre for Life, which opened in 2000 as a non-profit science centre in Newcastle upon Tyne; and is now its honorary life president. From July 2000 to June 2008, he was a non-executive director of PA Holdings Limited, with Victor Halberstadt.
Until 2010, he was a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences to further education and understanding of Britons and North Americans. He participated in a February 2000 Ditchley conference.
Ridley serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the World.Minds Foundation.
Patronage The Banks Group and Blagdon estate developed and sponsored the construction of Northumberlandia, or the Lady of the North, a land sculpture in the shape of a reclining female figure, which was part-commissioned and sponsored by Ridley. Now run by a charity group called the Land Trust, it is the largest landform in the world depicting the human form, and, through private funding, cost £3m to build. Attracting over 100,000 people per year, the Northumberland art project, tourism and cultural landmark has won a global landscape architecture award, and has been named 'Miss World'.
The Royal Agricultural Society of England awarded the Bledisloe Gold Medal in 2015 to Ridley for the work done on his Blagdon estate, saying that it "wanted to highlight the extensive environmental improvement work that has been undertaken across the land".
Publications Ridley has written a number of popular science books, listed below.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, 1993
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets the Red Queen who stays in the same place no matter how fast she runs. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it evolved so that the resultant genetic variation would thwart constantly mutating parasites.
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, 1996
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999
This book examines one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2000.The Samuel Johnson Prize http://www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk/sjnav/books/2
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, 2003 (also later released under the title The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture in 2004)
This book discusses reasons why humans can be considered to be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture.
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, 2004
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006
Ridley's biography of Francis Crick won the Davis Prize for the history of science from the US History of Science Society.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, 2010
The Rational Optimist primarily focuses on the benefits of the innate human tendency to trade goods and services. Ridley argues that this trait is the source of human prosperity, and that as people increasingly specialize in their skill sets, we will have increased trade and even more prosperity. It was shortlisted for the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.
The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge, 2015
In The Evolution of Everything, Ridley "makes the case for evolution, rather than design, as the force that has shaped much of culture, technology and society, and that even now is shaping our future." He argues that "Change in technology, language, mortality and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous...Much of the human world is the result of human action, but not of human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few." The science writer Peter Forbes, writing in The Independent, describes the book as "Ridley's magnum opus, ... decades in the making." Forbes states that Ridley was inspired by the Roman poet Lucretius's long work on "atheistical atomism", De rerum natura, whose "arguments seem uncannily modern: like those of a Richard Dawkins 2000 years avant la lettre." Forbes found the chapter on technology to be "utterly convincing", the most satisfying in the book. But he finds the "sustained polemic on behalf of libertarian anti-State ideas not a million miles from those of the US Republican Tea Party." Forbes calls Ridley "a heretic on most counts", stating that the book has many excesses. All the same, he considers the book necessary reading.
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, 2020
This book argues that innovation is a disorganized, bottom-up process that emerges through the aggregate work of many low-level individuals, rather than the work of solitary geniuses at the top. Moreover, innovation is poorly understood by economists, and it is often impeded by politicians. He says that the striking thing about innovation is that how mysterious it still is. And he tries to solve this puzzle by a little abstract theorizing, sometimes by argument, but mainly by telling stories. Ridley builds his argument through vivid historical narratives, tracing incremental breakthroughs in innovations ranging from the steam engine and electric light bulb to jet propulsion, vaccines, search engines, and emerging fields such as gene editing and synthetic biology.
Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
Written jointly with Alina Chan, it was published in November 2021.
Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea, 2025
Ridley's first book was Warts and All: The Men Who Would Be Bush (1989), which chronicled the evolution of George H. W. Bush's public image during the 1988 United States presidential election. Ridley has since described his first book as "bad" and has expressed gratitude that few people know about it.Science Salon Podcast #117: Michael Shermer with Matt Ridley – How Innovation Works: and Why It Flourishes in Freedom. May 26, 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A_zzJKDXdI>. He no longer promotes the book on his personal website."Books by author Matt Ridley." Bibliography on Ridley's personal website. Accessed June 20, 2020. http://www.mattridley.co.uk/books/
In 2006, Ridley contributed a chapter to Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, a collection of essays in honour of his friend Richard Dawkins.
Ridley's 2010 TED conference talk, "When Ideas Have Sex", received over 1.7 million views. Ridley argues that exchange and specialisation are the features of human society that lead to the development of new ideas, and that human society is therefore a "collective brain".
Political and scientific views
Role of government regulation In a 2006 edition of the online magazine Edge – the third culture, Ridley wrote a response to the question "What's your dangerous idea?" which was entitled "Government is the problem not the solution", in which he describes his attitude to government regulation: "In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it ... The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be."
In 2007, the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote an article in The Guardian connecting Ridley's libertarian economic philosophy and the £27 billion failure of Northern Rock. On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which had just been published. Monbiot took the view that Ridley had failed to learn from the collapse of Northern Rock.
Ridley has responded to Monbiot on his website, stating, "George Monbiot's recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply." On 19 June 2010, Monbiot countered with another article on the Guardian website, further questioning Ridley's claims and his response. Ridley was then defended by Terence Kealey in a further article published on the Guardian website.
In November 2010, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy exchange between Ridley and the Microsoft founder Bill Gates on topics discussed in Ridley's book The Rational Optimist. Gates said that "What Mr. Ridley fails to see is that worrying about the worst case—being pessimistic, to a degree—can actually help to drive a solution"; Ridley said "I am certainly not saying, 'Don't worry, be happy.' Rather, I'm saying, 'Don't despair, be ambitious.