The capacity for humankind to find out ways of figuring out about this incredible universe

we live in is magnificent. But it happened often because somewhat maverick people said

I've got this theory, I know it's unpopular and in my heretic, but hear me out. And I'm

sorry to say that science as an institution has in the last few decades behaved more and

more like a church, more and more like a cult, frankly, in which you are made to sign up to a so-called

consensus of truth and punished if you deviate.

Hello and welcome to the Brendan O'Neill show with me, Brendan O'Neill. This is a podcast in which

an esteemed guest joins me to talk about the big ideas, the bad ideas, the problems and the

controversies of life in the early 21st century. In this episode I am delighted to be joined by Matt

Ridley. Matt is a businessman, columnist and renowned author of numerous books on science and ideas.

Matt writes for the Times and he's also written for the Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph

and The Economist. His books include The Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature,

The Evolution of Everything, How Ideas Emerge, and the widely praised The Rational Optimist,

How Prosperity Evolves. Matt's latest book, Co-authored with Alina Chan,

is Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Matt, let's talk about your new book. I guess we

should start at the beginning. At the beginning, early 2020, this strange virus starts to spread around

the world and the story we all told ourselves and the story we all believed for quite a long time

is that this was a disease that leapt from animals into human beings, possibly via a wet market

and notorious wet market. We had all these nightmare reports about how horrible these places are.

There were jokes about batsoup and I remember people making slightly

untoward jokes about Chinese food for a long time and that was basically the story of the origin

of COVID-19. It was an accidental leap from animals into humans. But when you look at that and this

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