[13] He is the nephew of the late Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and minister Nicholas Ridley[14] and the great grandson of Edwin Lutyens.

[17] 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".

[28] Now run by a charity group called the Land Trust,[29] it is the largest landform in the world depicting the human form, and, through private funding, cost £3m to build.

[30] Attracting over 100,000 people per year, the Northumberland art project, tourism and cultural landmark has won a global landscape architecture award, and has been named 'Miss World'.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, 1993 The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, 1996 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 1999 Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, 2003 (also later released under the title The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture in 2004) The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, 2004 Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, 2010 The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge,[36][37][38][39][40] 2015 How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, 2020 Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea,[48] 2025 Ridley's first book was Warts and All: The Men Who Would Be Bush (1989), which chronicled the evolution of George H. W. Bush's public image during the 1988 United States presidential election.

[52] In a 2006 edition of the online magazine Edge – the third culture, Ridley wrote a response to the question "What's your dangerous idea?"

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.

[7] On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which had just been published.

Ridley summarised his own views on his political philosophy during the 2011 Hayek Lecture: "[T]hat the individual is not – and had not been for 120,000 years – able to support his lifestyle; that the key feature of trade is that it enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that there is nothing so anti-social (or impoverishing) as the pursuit of self sufficiency; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress.

I am not a conservative who defends large monopolies, public or private: I celebrate the way competition causes creative destruction that benefits the consumer against the interest of entrenched producers.

I do not preach what the rich want to hear—the rich want to hear the gospel of Monbiot, that technological change is bad, that the hoi polloi should stop clogging up airports, that expensive home-grown organic food is the way to go, that big business and big civil service should be in charge.

suggesting that climate scientists' explanations were implausible, was challenged by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Sachs termed "absurd" Ridley's characterization of a paper in Science magazine by the two scientists Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung.

[63][64] Ridley replied that 'it is ludicrous, nasty and false to accuse me of lying or "totally misrepresenting the science..I have asked Mr. Sachs to withdraw the charges more than once now on Twitter.

[67] However, he has been found to have breached the Parliamentary Code of Conduct by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards for not orally disclosing in debates on the subject personal interests worth at least £50,000 in Weir Group,[68] which has been described as "the world's largest provider of special equipment used in the process" of fracking.

He makes the case that it is misleading to refer to 'capitalism' and 'markets' as the same thing because "commerce, enterprise and markets are – to me – the very opposite of corporatism and even of 'capitalism', if by that word you mean capital-intensive organisations with monopolistic ambitions.

Markets and innovation are the creative-destructive forces that undermine, challenge and reshape corporations and public bureaucracies on behalf of consumers.

"[72][73] Ridley wrote in May 2020 that "research into the origins of the new coronavirus raises questions about how it became so infectious in human beings" and included as one possibility "perhaps laboratories".

In his acceptance speech, Ridley said: "As Hayek understood, it is human collaboration that is necessary for society to work... the key feature of trade is that it enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that attempts at self-sufficiency are the true form of selfishness as well as the quick road to poverty; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress.

[citation needed] In 1989, Ridley married Anya Hurlbert, a Professor of Neuroscience at Newcastle University; they live in northern England and have a son and a daughter.