(The Origins Podcast will appear every other Thursday.) Matt Ridley is a veteran journalist and science writer, with a training in genetics. He is also a Conservative member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and I were able to discuss his training, and his move from scientist to journalist, as well as the spectrum of his experiences in his various roles. We then moved on to the centerpiece of our dialogue: His newest book, Viral, written with geneticist Alina Chan. Together they produced what I view to be a masterpiece of science writing and detective work, exploring the origins of Covid-19. Our discussion, like the book, allowed us to illustrate a lot of the science related to the virus, and the current pandemic.
I just went out and got a copy. It already has 1 advantage over Sharri Markson's excellent book "What Happened in Wuhan" - Ridley's book has an index!
One of the more amazing things about this whole saga is how partisan and corrupt science institutions can be. You see the extent of China's influence over academia (the head of Harvard's chemistry department was recently convicted for being a paid Chinese agent) and journals like Lancet, and you see how journalists were desperate for the lab leak hypothesis to be discredited once Trump started talking about it. It's sort of reminiscent of the "banality of evil" - where people will go along with evil entities like the Chinese Communist Party for petty, banal reasons.
And yet, they are set to overtake us. Sergiu Klainerman, Percy Deift and Svetlana Jitomirskaya wrote in Quillette last year that "China has the highest number of STEM grads in the world—at least 4.7 million in 2016. (By comparison, the United States came in third at 569,000. And as noted previously, a large portion of these graduates are foreign nationals.) China also has vastly increased the quality of its top universities, with six now ranked among the best 100 in the world. Tsinghua and Peking (ranked 17th and 18th respectively) now narrowly outrank Columbia, Princeton, and Cornell." The regime clumsy enough to unleash this plague onto the world is about to rule the scientific world, and we're too busy with "woke" masochism to do anything about it.
I just went out and got a copy. It already has 1 advantage over Sharri Markson's excellent book "What Happened in Wuhan" - Ridley's book has an index!
One of the more amazing things about this whole saga is how partisan and corrupt science institutions can be. You see the extent of China's influence over academia (the head of Harvard's chemistry department was recently convicted for being a paid Chinese agent) and journals like Lancet, and you see how journalists were desperate for the lab leak hypothesis to be discredited once Trump started talking about it. It's sort of reminiscent of the "banality of evil" - where people will go along with evil entities like the Chinese Communist Party for petty, banal reasons.
And yet, they are set to overtake us. Sergiu Klainerman, Percy Deift and Svetlana Jitomirskaya wrote in Quillette last year that "China has the highest number of STEM grads in the world—at least 4.7 million in 2016. (By comparison, the United States came in third at 569,000. And as noted previously, a large portion of these graduates are foreign nationals.) China also has vastly increased the quality of its top universities, with six now ranked among the best 100 in the world. Tsinghua and Peking (ranked 17th and 18th respectively) now narrowly outrank Columbia, Princeton, and Cornell." The regime clumsy enough to unleash this plague onto the world is about to rule the scientific world, and we're too busy with "woke" masochism to do anything about it.