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Good news: the world can only continue getting better. That is the bold prophecy Matt Ridley lays out in his new book The Rational Optimist. It sounds like just the boast we need in these difficult economic times, says Liz Else, but it reads like ideology dressed with cherry-picked science

I鈥橫 ON the way to a smart hotel in Soho, London, to meet Matt Ridley, the aristocratic zoologist-turned-journalist who has become one of the UK鈥檚 foremost science writers. He has a new book out with the daring title The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

I use the word 鈥渄aring鈥� advisedly. Ridley鈥檚 message is one of undiluted optimism: the world is getting better and better, it has been doing so for hundreds of years, and will continue to do so. Nothing stands in his way, not even global climate change, which he dismisses in his book as one of the 鈥渢wo great pessimisms of today鈥�.

As I walk, I can鈥檛 help but notice depressing newspaper placards everywhere. We are in the middle of a grim financial crisis that will affect the lives of millions for decades 鈥� and the Matt Ridley I am about to meet was the well-paid non-executive chairman of Northern Rock bank, where the signs of financial collapse were first spotted in the UK.

I鈥檓 wondering why someone so near the eye of that storm, who faced a grilling from the UK government鈥檚 House of Commons Treasury Select Committee over the bank鈥檚 strategy, is preaching optimism. The only obstacle my curiosity faces is that a condition of this interview is not to ask 鈥渄irect鈥� questions about Northern Rock, which gets only a passing mention in his book.

In person, Ridley is exactly the tall, charming Old Etonian everyone told me he would be, which makes bringing up the subject that little bit tougher. So I ask about the big idea in his book. He takes no prisoners. 鈥淧eople are actually very pessimistic about the world, and I think they鈥檙e wrong. If you look at the past 50 years particularly, we鈥檝e seen extraordinary improvements in human health, income and lifespan. We鈥檝e seen extraordinary reductions in child mortality and in population growth.鈥� And these trends have produced great non-material benefits too. 鈥淎s people get richer, they get happier. I think there鈥檚 evidence they become kinder too, or less tolerant of violence.鈥�

Ridley sees this surge in wealth as driven by the uniquely human faculty for exchange of ideas and division of labour. That idea isn鈥檛 new, but he adds to it, drawing on his background in zoology. 鈥淓conomic progress is an evolutionary phenomenon. In other words, it occurs in an undirected, bottom-up way as a result of the selective survival of ideas and technologies. But there is a critical thing that makes it work 鈥� exchange.鈥�

For Ridley, exchange plays the same role in cultural evolution as sex in biological evolution: 鈥淵ou and I are beneficiaries of mutations that happened in different creatures [in our long evolutionary past]. They happened in different lineages, but because of sex, you can draw on thousands and thousands of different lineages.鈥� By mixing things up, sex allows for different changes to be combined: without sex, says Ridley, that wouldn鈥檛 have been possible in evolution.

Exchange does the same in culture. So, if you are relying on a cultural tradition that has been passed down through your tribe or family, that tradition could be inferior or superior to that of another tribe. But what if both tribes have good ideas? If you exchange them, you get the best of both worlds. This led to the 鈥渋deas having sex鈥� motif in Ridley鈥檚 book. So the story of human exceptionality is not a story of individual intelligence, big brains, problem-solving, reasoning or imagination: 鈥淚t鈥檚 about this collective brain.鈥�

This is a zoologist鈥檚 exciting take on the roots of human success, but I鈥檓 still troubled by his broader thesis that, thanks to these human inventions, the world will go on getting better and better. What about the misery of the current economic crash? I finally broach the Northern Rock question: as someone deeply involved in a major bank crash, how can he remain so optimistic? Ridley is adamant that he will not take questions on the topic, although he accepts that 鈥渋n this country, we may have over-borrowed to the point where we鈥檙e in real trouble for some decades鈥�. That is but a blip in his optimism. 鈥淭he evidence of history suggests we will always get bubbles in asset markets. They will throw economies into disarray from time to time,鈥� he says.

As for wars, dictators, inequalities and the wretchedness of some individual lives, Ridley stresses that we must 鈥渓ook through that and say, yes, but does the process of economic improvement for individual, ordinary people through exchange and specialisation, through ordinary commerce, continue? Yes, it does.鈥�

As I ask him about global warming, I suddenly remember who Ridley reminds me of. It is Doctor Pangloss, in Voltaire鈥檚 satire, Candide, who believed that 鈥渁ll is for the best in the best of all possible worlds鈥�.

Surely the first human-caused, planetary-scale change confronts us with a future about which the economic progress of the past can tell us little. Reading Ridley鈥檚 book, you find that polar bears are adapting as the Arctic ice vanishes, that the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are highly improbable, and that global warming will bring the bounty of extra rainfall just where the world鈥檚 population needs it most.

In person, Ridley denies that he is a climate sceptic, preferring the term 鈥渓ukewarmer鈥�. Nevertheless, many of the claims in his book seem to bear an uncanny similarity to those to be found on the websites of climate-change deniers. But perhaps I am being unjust. So after our interview I decide to test one of Ridley鈥檚 many optimistic assertions by sending a small section of the book (pages 339 to 341) to senior climate researchers for their perusal.

These pages concern a growing worry that as the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, making them more acidic and threatening coral reefs and other marine life. In the book, he dismisses this science: 鈥淥cean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm.鈥� He follows this with a few lines on ocean chemistry to show that any worries are unwarranted.

鈥淥cean acidification looks like a back-up plan in case the climate fails to warm鈥�

Part of the answer from the specialists that I contacted* is that Ridley failed to recognise that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea: in other words, we don鈥檛 have all the answers, but big threats to coral reefs are already apparent.

Add to that what the researchers see as Ridley鈥檚 misconceptions, selective reporting and failure to see the significance of historical changes in ocean acidity, and he starts to appear as someone who is blind to facts that do not fit his ideological framework. Time will tell.

Everyone likes an optimist, but an idealistic optimist can be a dangerous friend. So if you read The Rational Optimist, do so with your wits about you. The phrase to bear in mind is the one ignored by so many of the rash, over-optimistic bankers who lost so much of other people鈥檚 money: 鈥淧ast performance is no guide to the future.鈥�