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birth name	Matthew White Ridley
birth date	February 07, 1958
birth place	Northumberland
occupation	Author, journalist
nationality	British }}

Matthew White Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland) is an English journalist, writer, and businessman.

Career

Ridley was educated at Eton College from 1970–1975 and then went on to Magdalen College of the University of Oxford and completed a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in zoology and then a Doctor of Philosophy in zoology in 1983.

Ridley worked as the science editor of ''The Economist'' from 1984 to 1987 and was then its Washington correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and American editor from 1990 to 1992.

Ridley was non-executive chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, in the period leading up to the bank's near-collapse.

He was the first chairman of the International Centre for Life, a science park devoted to life sciences in Newcastle, and he served in this position for seven years. He formerly had been a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences at its stately home in Oxfordshire. He is a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Books

He is the author of several works of popular science:

1993 ''The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature''

In Lewis Carroll’s ''Through the Looking-Glass'', Alice meets the Red Queen who runs everywhere but stays in the same place. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it was invented to keep changing the genetic locks so as to remain one step ahead of constantly mutating parasites. The Red Queen also addresses dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture – including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and why the human brain may be like the peacock’s tail – a seduction device.

1996 ''The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation''

In ''The Origins of Virtue'', Ridley argues that the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange that enables us to reap the benefits of co-operation, ostracise those who break the social contract and avoid the trap of being 'rational fools'. It traces the evolution of society first among genes, then among cells, then in ants, vampire bats, apes and dolphins, and finally among human beings. Along the way, it plays games with computers, traces the psychological roots of football riots, finds trade to be ten times as old as economists believe, compares dead mammoths to lighthouses, explains the evolution of human emotions and shows how to save the rain forest. In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, former US President Bill Clinton named this book as one which had influenced his thinking.

1999 ''Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters''

The human genome, the complete set of genes in 23 pairs of chromosomes, is an 'autobiography' of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been edited, abridged, altered and added to as it has been handed down, generation to generation, over more than three billion years. This generation is the first to read this book, and to gain hitherto unimaginable insights into what it means to be alive, to be human, to be conscious or to be ill. By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes, and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, described the book as "lucid and exhilarating".

2003 ''Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human'', also later released under the title ''The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture'' in 2004

This book chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes, recounting the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. The emerging truth is far more interesting than a stale antithesis between heredity and environment. Nurture depends on genes, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; through the pattern of their turning on and off they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.

2006 ''Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code''

Ridley's biography of Francis Crick won the Davis Prize for the history of science from the US History of Science Society.

Ridley also edited ''The Best American Science Writing 2002'', one of a series of annual science writing anthologies edited by Jesse Cohen, and 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 (edited by his near-namesake Mark Ridley).

2010 ''The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves'', HarperCollins. Reviewed in ''Nature'' 465, 294–295 (20 May 2010)

Ridley creates a wide-ranging history of human society from early Hunter-gatherer groups into the early 21st century. He argues that human beings have an often underestimated capacity for change and social progress. From early on in human evolution, Ridley writes, trade and other kinds of exchanges between groups "gave the Species an external, collective intelligence". He continues with histories of socio-economic progress under free market capitalism and democratic civil institutions. He then dismisses what he sees as overly pessimistic views of global climate change and Western birthrate decline. The book contains numerous graphs depicting social changes, such as how world GDP per person grew from about $1,000 in 1900 to $6,000 in 2000.

Publications and articles

Ridley writes the weekly "Mind and Matter" column for the Wall Street Journal, which "explores the science of human nature and its implications". Recent writings include "Connecting the Pieces of the Alzheimer's Puzzle" and "Does a Different Nuclear Power Lie Ahead?".

"Where Progress Comes From: Africa Needs Growth, Not Pity and Big Plans", ''The Wall Street Journal'' (27 November 2010)

"Humans: Why They Triumphed", ''The Wall Street Journal'' (22 May 2010)

"Why ban genetic modification?", ''Wired'' (UK) (20 January 2010)

"Will history condemn Al Gore?", ''Wired'' (UK) (4 December 2009)

"When Ideas Have Sex: The Role of Exchange in Cultural Evolution", Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology (23 September 2009)

"Why are we all getting cleverer?", ''Wired'' (UK) (9 June 2009)

"Robber barons got rich by making things cheaper", ''Wired'' (UK) (21 April 2009)

"Darwin's Legacy", ''National Geographic'' (February 2009)

"Bjorn Lomborg", ''Time Magazine'' (April 26, 2004)

"What Makes You Who You Are", ''Time Magazine'' (May 25, 2003)

"Will We Clone a Dinosaur?", ''Time Magazine'' (April 10, 2000)

"Life's Twisted Plot Line", ''Time Magazine'' (February 28, 2000)

"Will We Still Need to Have Sex?", ''Time Magazine'' (November 8, 1999)

''Down to Earth: A Contrarian View of Environmental Problems'' (collection of columns from the Sunday Telegraph), ''Institute of Economic Affairs'' (February 1995)

''Down to Earth II: Combating Environmental Myths'' (collection of columns from the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and others), ''Institute of Economic Affairs'' (August 1997)

"Can Selfishness Save the Environment?" (co-author), ''The Atlantic'' (September 2003)

Personal

He is the son and heir of Viscount Ridley, whose family estate is Blagdon Hall, near Cramlington, Northumberland. Ridley is married to the neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert and lives in northern England; he has a son and a daughter. He is a great grandson of Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Northern Rock

Ridley was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, earning £300,000 a year, having joined the board in 1994. His father had been chairman from 1987 to 1992 and sat on the board for 30 years.

In September 2007 Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances at the start of the credit crunch. It was forced to apply to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding, following problems caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis. Matt Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007, having been blamed in parliamentary committee hearings for not recognizing the risks of the bank's financial strategy and thereby "harming the reputation of the British banking industry."

Debate over Ridley's political philosophy

In a 2006 edition of the on-line magazine Edge published by the Edge foundation, 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 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. In the same newspaper Terence Kealey defended libertarianism, arguing that the performance of the government's regulatory agencies confirmed scepticism about state intervention, because the government had crowded out the market's own regulatory mechanisms.

On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's latest book 'The Rational Optimist'. 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.

In November 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy exchange between Ridley and Microsoft founder Bill Gates on topics discussed in Ridley's book ''The Rational Optimist''.

Gates wrote: Those two ideas, said Gates, are that "the key to rising prosperity over the course of human history has been the exchange of goods" and "rational optimism...there have been constant predictions of a bleak future throughout human history, but they haven't come true."

Gates went on to conclude

Ridley replied:

Ridley then summarized his own views in response to Gates:

References

External links

Matt Ridley's website

Treasury - Minutes of Evidence: Examination of Witnesses: Dr Matt Ridley, Chairman, Northern Rock

Ridley interviewed for Massive Change Radio in January 2004

Biography page on Edge.org

Matt Ridley, "We've never had it so good - and it's all thanks to science," ''The Guardian'', 3 April 2003. Article in newspaper.

Matt Ridley, "What's your dangerous idea?"The Edge On-line magazine 2006

Matt Ridley, "Darwin's Legacy", National Geographic, February 2009.

Matt Ridley, "Putting Darwin in Genes", Thinking Digital, May 2009.

Matt Ridley, 'When Ideas Have Sex', a video of his TED talk

Category:Science journalists Category:English journalists Category:English science writers Category:Human evolution theorists Category:People from Newcastle upon Tyne Category:Deputy Lieutenants of Northumberland Category:Old Etonians Category:Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford Category:English atheists Category:English libertarians Category:1958 births Category:Living people Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:English bankers Category:Northern Rock

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{{infobox scientist |name

Steven Arthur Pinker |image Steven_Pinker_Göttingen_10102010c_crop.JPG |image_size |caption Steven Pinker (''Göttingen, 2010'') |birth_date September 18, 1954 |birth_place Montréal, Québec, Canada |residence United States of America |citizenship Canadian-American |ethnicity Jewish Canadian-American |field evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics |work_institution |alma_mater Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University |doctoral_advisor |doctoral_students |known_for How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate |prizes Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society) }}

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include ''The Language Instinct'' (1994), ''How the Mind Works'' (1997), ''Words and Rules'' (2000), ''The Blank Slate'' (2002), and ''The Stuff of Thought'' (2007).

Biography

Career

Pinker was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada in 1954, and graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker was named one of ''Time Magazine's'' 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004 and one of ''Prospect'' and ''Foreign Policy'''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In 2010, he was named by ''Foreign Policy'' magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers' remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the ''New York Times''. Gladwell published a rebuttal in the ''Times'' regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal. The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Personal

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of ''The Sexual Paradox''. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, ''I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.'' As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as ''neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian''. Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.

Theories of language and mind

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In ''The Language Instinct'' (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work

Pinker's books, ''The Language Instinct'', ''How the Mind Works'', ''Words and Rules'', ''The Blank Slate'', and ''The Stuff of Thought'' combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. ''The Language Instinct'' has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, ''The 'Language Instinct' Debate''. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's ''Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling)'', which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography

Books

''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984)

''Visual Cognition'' (1985)

''Connections and Symbols'' (1988)

''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989)

''Lexical and Conceptual Semantics'' (1992)

''The Language Instinct'' (1994)

''How the Mind Works'' (1997)

''Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language'' (1999)

''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' (2002)

''The Best American Science and Nature Writing'' (editor and introduction author, 2004)

''Hotheads'' (an extract from ''How the Mind Works'', 2005)

''The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature'' (2007)

''The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes'' (2011)

Articles and essays

Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), ''Language evolution: States of the Art'' New York: Oxford University Press.

S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" ''Chicago Sun-Times'', July 15, 2007

A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References

External links

C-SPAN BookTV In Depth video interview with Steven Pinker, 3 hrs.

Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation

Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought TED, July, 2005

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence TED, March, 2007

Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"

Steven Pinker discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct" ''The New York Times'', January 13, 2008

Steven Pinker on The Hour

Steven Pinker 2003 TEDTalk: Chalking it up to the blank slate

;Debates

The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose

The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk''

;Vitae

Steven Pinker's Website

Time magazine page on Pinker

Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files

"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''The Guardian'' Profile, November 6, 1999

Live interview with Steven Pinker on ''The Blank Slate''

Online video interview with Pinker

"Basic Instincts" - ''The Guardian'' profile by Oliver Burkeman, September 22, 2007.

Advisory board biography for the Secular Coalition for America

;Reviews

Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple

Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, originally published in ''The New Yorker'' magazine

"Meet the Flintstones" by Simon Blackburn, a critique of The Blank Slate.

Biology vs. the Blank Slate ''Reason'' magazine interview with Pinker

Evolutionary Psychology of Religion

"The Blind Programmer", a review of ''How the Mind Works'' by Edward Oakes.

Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007

Category:1954 births Category:Living people Category:American atheists Category:American linguists Category:American psychologists Category:American science writers Category:Canadian atheists Category:Canadian skeptics Category:Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Category:Jewish Canadian writers Category:McGill University alumni Category:American people of Canadian-Jewish descent Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Evolutionary psychologists Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:Jewish atheists Category:People from Montreal Category:Anglophone Quebec people Category:American humanists Category:Dawson College alumni Category:Canadian linguists Category:Canadian psychologists Category:Canadian science writers

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Name	Nancy-Ann DeParle
Office	White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy
President	Barack Obama
Alongside	Alyssa Mastromonaco
Term start	January 27, 2011
Predecessor	Mona Sutphen
Office2	Director of the Office of Health Reform
President2	Barack Obama
Term start2	April 8, 2009
Term end2	January 27, 2011
Predecessor2	Position established
Birth date	December 17, 1956
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Jason DeParle
Alma mater	University of TennesseeBalliol College, OxfordHarvard Law School
Profession	Lawyer }}

Nancy-Ann Min DeParle (born December 17, 1956) is the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the administration of President Obama. Previously, she served as the director of the White House Office of Health Reform., leading the administration's efforts on health care issues. She served as the director of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) from 1997 to 2000, administering the Medicare program for the Clinton administration, and before then worked at the Office of Management and Budget.

Education and personal life

DeParle was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Rockwood, Tennessee, where she graduated from Rockwood High School. Her mother died of lung cancer when Nancy-Ann was 17.

She attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where her major was history and her senior thesis was entitled "Uncle Sam, Hirohito, and Resegregation: The Tule Lake Segregation Center, 1943-1946." She was awarded a B.A. degree with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and selected as a Phi Kappa Phi scholar. She was the first female president of the University of Tennessee student body and was a member of the Gamma Alpha chapter of Delta Gamma. In 1978 ''Glamour'' magazine named her one of the year's top ten college women.

After graduating from Tennessee she enrolled in Harvard Law School, but interrupted her studies there when she was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. As a Rhodes scholar, she went to Balliol College of Oxford University, receiving a B.A. from Oxford in 1981. After returning to Harvard, she earned a J.D. degree in 1983.

She is married to Jason DeParle, a reporter for ''The New York Times''.

She has Chinese ancestry.

Career

DeParle was a partner at the law firm of Bass, Berry & Sims in Nashville before serving as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services in the cabinet of Governor Ned McWherter from 1987 to 1989.

DeParle has also served as a trustee at the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a research fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a fellow at the Wharton School of Business. She has also been a Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC).

Corporate connections

DeParle has drawn criticism for her lucrative service on corporate boards after her tenure in the Clinton administration. Msnbc.com reported that she was paid more than $6 million, and served as a director of half a dozen companies that faced federal investigations, whistleblower lawsuits and other regulatory actions. Many of these companies have a stake in the health care reform that she led.

She served as a director of Accredo Health Inc., Boston Scientific, Cerner Corp., DaVita, Guidant, Medco Health Solutions, Speciality Laboratories, and Triad Hospitals. She was a managing director of CCMP Capital.

See also

List of czars of the Obama administration

References

External links

HealthCare.gov

Health Care Reform Newsmaker Series: Nancy-Ann DeParle, Director, White House Office of Health Reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation

Nancy-Ann DeParle's file at PolitiFact.com

Reality Check: Nancy-Ann DeParle's Stellar Record at WhiteHouse.gov, September 28, 2009

Category:1956 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:American people of Chinese descent Category:American Rhodes scholars Category:Harvard Fellows Category:Harvard Law School alumni Category:People from Roane County, Tennessee Category:People in health professions Category:State cabinet secretaries of Tennessee Category:United States Department of Health and Human Services officials Category:University of Pennsylvania faculty Category:University of Tennessee alumni Category:Women in Tennessee politics

it:Nancy-Ann DeParle