马特·里德利

马特·里德利，第五代里德利子爵（英语：Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley，1946年5月28日—）是一位英国科学记者和商人。

代表作

《红色皇后 : 性与人性的演化》（The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature，1994）

《基因组：人种自传23章》（Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters，1999）

《先天，后天：基因、经验和什么使我们成为人》（Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes us Human，2003）

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.