Back in 2021 Matt Ridley teamed up with Alina Chan to publish a book promoting the lab leak conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. (See my summary of a review here.)
Yesterday (March 25, 2025) Michael Shermer interviewed Matt Ridley on The Michael Shermer Show podcast. The reason for the interview was to promote Ridley's new book Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea but Shermer started off the interview by asking about Ridley's previous book with Alina Chan. At 2 mins he asks,
Before we get into the new book, do you want to take a victory lap for your previous book. I mean the lab leak hypothesis is looking more and more like you called it years ago.
It's all downhill from there. I have lost all respect for Michael Shermer. It's a shame that this podcast is hosted on the Skeptic magazine website.
3 comments :
I'm way ahead of you: I never had a lot of respect for Shermer.
It's like watching a couple creationists clapping each other on the back and meanwhile kvetching about how they are being treated badly by the mainstream. I don’t care about either of these people, but I am saddened about a couple academic friends of mine who also keep falling into the lab leak rabbit hole. It’s weird, bc one should think they would know better.
I don't know about Ridley's book on sexual selection, but from this recording it seems similar to the claim of Richard Prum who published a book arguing that Darwin was right about the subject- that animals (seen in females especially) have a sense of beauty. I had gotten about ½ way through that book and gave it up. There was nothing there. Prum, and apparently Ridley (and Darwin) are entirely basing their view on vertebrates, and especially on birds. This is meanwhile IGNORING the majority of species that perform intersexual selection, which are the invertebrates. There, we see the same sort of displays and calls in crustaceans, spiders, and insects. Have a look at a peacock spider. In what way could a female peacock spider, with a brain that would be lost on a pin-head, possibly have a sense of beauty?
At any rate, I don't see how a sense of beauty explains anything. How did the animal get such a sense? This seems nothing more than a way of describing female preference. Presumably it's adaptive in some way and needs an evolutionary explanation. What causes them to find some males more beautiful than others?
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