Well done, parties
Fred Pearce’s assessment of the first Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (This Week, 17 December) was altogether too gloomy. The political process, far from being paralysed, may be outpacing the necessary scientific cooperation.
In the 30 months since the Earth Summit 103 nations have ratified the convention. No other treaty on biological resources has progressed so fast.
Over 30 nations have been preparing biodiversity country studies and, surprisingly, a handful of nations (including Britain) have already published action plans. Over two dozen more are in preparation, and this is before the draft UN Environment Programme (UNEP) guidelines have been distributed.
The Cop’s subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) is the think-tank for the CBD. It needs to work fast, but the key question is whether it will really be scientific and technical. The Mexico meeting of experts last February was too political. SBSTTA must be allowed to identify the scientific backdrop to reporting and priority-setting.
This clearing house for scientific and technical cooperation will pump lifeblood into the convention. The Nassau decision to put off for a year rather than spend millions on computers for the secretariat was prudent. Key questions include how to structure the clearing house, and how to introduce the north’s information and technical resources.
The CBD is a comprehensive instrument covering all species and ecosystems. The work plan may have deferred on forests to the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), but gave welcome emphasis to marine and coastal work.
The CoP meets again in just 12 months. We must use that time to support and steer the process cooperatively, not blow it off course or down narrow channels.
As the leader of the British delegation to the meeting, I would like to set the record straight on several issues. First, the decisions which the parties are criticised for putting off are ones which they never intended to take at Nassau, namely the location of the secretariat and the need for and modalities of a biosafety protocol.
Secondly, Pearce failed to mention any of the important decisions that were taken, such as those on the spending guidelines to the Global Environment Facility, the agreement of the medium-term work programme for the convention and the designation of UNEP as host of the secretariat.
Thirdly, while it is true that decisions on how to tackle forests will be taken in the light of next year’s CSD meeting, it is certainly not true that the CSD process is being coordinated by Canada and Malaysia. Theirs is only one of several initiatives feeding into the CSD and working towards building a consensus on forestry, including one of our own in partnership with India.
Finally, while few countries, apart from Britain, have produced formal national plans, many countries are in the process of doing so.
Conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity is a long-term process which does not start with the convention. Nor can the convention be expected to halt the decline of species in its tracks. But the fact that 104 countries have ratified a convention which has come into force remarkably quickly by the standard of major international treaties is one which should give us hope in the fight to reverse the trend of species loss.
Future leaks
John McCrone discusses the experiments on possible human influence on random systems performed by Robert Jahn at Princeton University (“Psychic powers: what are the odds?”, 26 November, and Letters, 7 January). While it is instructive to examine one laboratory’s claim in isolation, evidence for the existence of a valid anomaly cannot rest on a single group’s effort.
In the case of a putative interaction between the cognitive intent of an individual and a hardware random-number generator, there is a substantial database of laboratories that have collectively conducted over 600 replications of the basic experiment. D. I. Radin and R. D. Nelson conducted a careful meta-analysis of this database and concluded that there is prima facie evidence for an anomaly that cannot be accounted for by selective reporting, methodological flaws or selected subjects (Foundations of Physics, Vol 19 No 12, 1989).
In McCrone’s article, he remarks on the possibility of data selection. We, too, have noticed that the sum of data for high, low and no aims yields a mean chance expectation distribution. An additional clue to what may be happening is that Jahn’s Z score statistic does not increase with the number of bits sampled in each trial. If the effects were due to a shift in the probability of each bit away from 0.5, the Z score on each trial should increase as the square root of the number of bits sampled.
Assuming that Radin and Nelson’s meta-analysis is correct, we provide a different explanation for Jahn’s and other results. We propose that subjects are statistical opportunists and initiate a trial to capture a locally deviant sub-sequence from an otherwise unperturbed physical system. This model explains why the high, low and control samples add to mean chance expectation, since they comprise sub-samples of an unbiased distribution. Furthermore, with a given ability to select sub-sequences meeting the trial aim, the Z scores of the samples will be independent of the number of bits sampled: just what the data show.
How are subjects able to “select” when to initiate a trial? We suspect that there may be a statistical “leakage” of information about the upcoming sequence from the future. This information allows the subjects slightly, but systematically, to bias their decisions (for example, when to initiate trials) to more favourable outcomes.
C. Honerton and D. C. Ferrari analysed all the so-called precognition experiments from 1935 to 1987. Their analysis included 309 separate studies reported by 62 investigators. Approximately two million individual trials were contributed by more than 50 000 subjects. After a careful flaw analysis and a correction for selective reporting, they found a statistically robust but tiny effect (Journal of Parapsychology, Vol 53, 1989).
We find this database as compelling as any we have seen in the social sciences.
With strong independent evidence for the kind of information leakage needed to explain Jahn and others’ data in terms of anomalous selection, we view all these experiments into anomalies as pointing to a single underlying mechanism of information transfer.
McCrone is concerned about the fact that most of the “successful” data appear to be contributed by a single subject, operator 10. If one is trying to understand the mechanism of a phenomenon, as opposed to studying its distribution in the population, then one should study talented individuals. If one wanted to study violin playing and sampled Jascha Heifetz and the writers of this letter, summing the results one would conclude that violin playing was impossible.
Watered down
No doubt Caroline Pond is correct (Review, 26 November) when she writes “many reputable scientists remain unconvinced” by the aquatic ape theory (AAT); but can someone cite for me a summary of her “large body of evidence that refutes it”?
The AAT arises from (is consistent with) a large suite of facts about human anatomy, physiology, and molecular biology. Each attack upon AAT that I know proceeds along a narrow front, offering an alternative explanation for just one fact of the suite and, often, ignoring any fact embarrassing to AAT’s older rival, the savanna theory (ST).
This is true of each negative contribution, including that by Pond herself, in the only organised exchange for and against AAT: The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction? (Roede et al, eds., Souvenir Press, 1991). Pond deals with the “subcutaneous” fat deposits that extend across much of the human body. She shows how these deposits correspond with smaller deposits of fat in other primates.
She offers nothing, however, to explain the “baby fat” that holds the skin of a newborn human infant taut, like a marine mammal’s and in contrast with the slack skin of an ape neonate. A human baby floats easily, contentedly, right side up. Its fat layer has developed during its last few weeks in the womb. It’s as if the chimpanzee’s 8-month pregnancy has been extended by a month to allow time for baby fat to accumulate.
The extra month places a heavy burden upon the human mother. In comparison with the chimp female, she must be equipped to furnish her fetus with something like 50 per cent greater flow of calorific matter. I have seen no credible explanation how this extra burden on the mother, or how our species’s subcutaneous fat, could be advantageous on Africa’s savanna.
Opponents of AAT have not assembled a consistent body of anatomical and physiological facts in support of the ST, which arose from, and appears still to rest upon, just one geographical circumstance: the large number of hominid fossils from East Africa’s Rift Valley. The discovery of A. ramidus, lying in an ancient tropical forest, is a big embarrassment for ST and a small one for AAT: although A. ramidus, unlike other hominid fossils older than two million years, seems not to have been found near an ancient lake or river, even so, its discovery brings hominid fossils closer to where our story began, at the intersection of the Rift Valley and the Red Sea.
All for me
As a parent and grandparent I can assure James Ward (Letters, 24-31 December) that the “anthropic principle” has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with psychology 鈥� the desire of every child to think of itself as at the centre of the Universe.
Its theme is the Me! Me! Me! principle. God (or “something”) made the Big Bang the way it was simply in order that I, wonder of wonders, could eventually come into existence. On philosophical, let alone scientific, grounds this supreme arrogance is not the behaviour of grown-up people.
Thirty-six per cent of the British population have learnt to live without religion and that proportion is increasing. This change to a non-mystic and more scientific outlook does not support Ward’s contention that we need quasi-religious, anthropic beliefs to prevent “a caste system of scientists and lay people, with no possibility of communication between them”. Prepare to duck as more and more of the public caste their Pampers to the wind.
Square hole
John Galbraith’s new screw with triangular hole may well be too late (Technology, 3 December and Letters, 24/31 December). In Canada there is already in hardware shops a screw with a square hole which must share many of the advantages, and screwdrivers with a tapering square end to fit it are available.
I can confirm that the tapering fit does provide a very secure grip, and of course there is no danger of slipping out of the slot, as one does with conventionally slotted heads, or raising a sharp splinter of metal to injure the next handler.
There does seem to be a communication gap across the Atlantic: another excellent North American idea virtually unobtainable in Britain is the spirally fluted ordinary nail (I know the hardened version can be bought here) which gives, at a guess, ten times the grip of an English wire nail. I always restock when I visit Canada.
Monopolised
I refer to Andrei Linde’s idea that our Universe exists inside a single magnetic monopole produced in the first split-second of creation (New 杏吧原创, Science, 12 November and Letters, 17 December).
The answer is a resounding “no”. Linde may be one of the founding fathers of the inflation model of cosmology, but he is, like most theorists, out there in left field, ignoring the experimental evidence for magnetic monopoles. Moreover, these inflation models are based on SU(5), which incorrectly predicts the monopole catalysis of proton decay.
There is no experimental basis for free magnetic monopoles, because they are inexorably linked to the confinement problem of quarks. However, there is evidence for magnetic charge involved in the Zeeman splitting of meson states.
Your article concludes that “monopoles by themselves can solve the monopole problem”. Again, Linde is incorrect. Recently, evidence was presented that shows the involvement of magnetic monopoles in the origin of particle mass (“Further Evidence for Magnetic Charge from Hadronic Spectra”, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 33, p 1817).
I would conclude that without the experimentalists, theorists tend to drift along to nowhere.
Jobs drain
In the past century, legions of unskilled jobs have vanished, taken over by automation; but there remain many tasks which machines cannot perform.
Now a new order is dawning. Thanks to the communications satellites which hang over us like the gods of antiquity, our white-collar jobs can be “moved” to Third World countries where salaries are enticingly low. Routine data-processing work is already going this way; but now computer programming is beginning to leave as well, heading mainly for India, which has huge reserves of highly skilled programmers.
In a few years’ time, software skills may become unsellable in the West.
We need a new word for this enormous Third World reserve of talent. May I suggest “the Brainforest”?
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Bad taste
I read with great interest Sue Armstrong’s article about sharks (New 杏吧原创, Science, 10 December). The notion that sharks use penguins for “target practice” is intriguing, but somewhat hard to believe. It’s just as probable that the shark means serious business as it prepares to gobble up the penguin, but at the last moment remembers that penguins taste horrible. This certainly agrees better with the conventional view of shark intelligence.
Floored
I read Rosie Mestel’s article about a dance floor that “rocks and rolls” with great interest (This Week, 3 December), because I think the “intelligent floor” opens new possibilities for the performing arts.
However, the article addresses the problem of the spongy quality of the layer of foam used by Russell Pinkston of the University of Texas at Austin, to whom the invention is ascribed. This problem, however, was already solved in 1989, when Nico Pezer developed an “intelligent floor” in Bonn using infrared light detectors for the localisation of moving actors or dancers. His floor is made out of conventional material and has been accomplishing all the tasks described in Mestel’s article in public performances for the past five years.
Another interesting feature of Pezer’s development, which is now being used by the Bonn ChipArts Company, is its ability to direct a virtual sound source in a three-dimensional space, thus also allowing it to move around with the dancers or actors on stage.