Not Taylor-made
As an organisational consultant and a sometime teacher of undergraduate business students, I was intrigued by Stephen Gosden’s linking of the Hawthorne experiments with Frederick Winslow Taylor (Letters, 14 January). Regrettably, Taylor was not an industrial psychologist, but an engineer who was the father of Scientific Management, a method still prevalent today, which didn’t (and doesn’t) deal with workers’ psychologies at all. He carried out most of his work in a Philadelphia steel mill.
Taylor was long dead when the Hawthorne experiments were carried out between 1924 and 1933, in a Western Electric factory in the Chicago suburb of Hawthorne by a group of people, the most prominent of whom was the Australian Elton Mayo. Results of the experiments, lauded in many undergraduate business texts, were in reality inconclusive, a fact brought out by a recent study by Richard Gillespie entitled Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which I recommend to all readers.
Toeing the line
It was interesting to compare John Becklake’s review of Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space by Stuhlinger and Ordway (Review, 17 December) with the vitriolic comments of Tom Gehrels on the same book in Nature (vol 372: 8 December).
Von Braun has a high ranking SS officer who worked intensively and successfully under first the Nazis, then, without noticeable pause, under the Americans, to evolve the unstoppable long range delivery systems that made the Cold War possible.
Were it not for his technical utility, he may well have been tried as a war criminal for his complicity in the use of slave labour to produce his V-2 rocket at the slave labour factory in Nordhausen, where he was a regular visitor. It does not need very much imagination to picture conditions in such a concentration camp, for the documentation is good. Von Braun was hardly unaware of the conditions, or of the summary torture and execution of the unwilling, starving, slaves.
Becklake asks how far did von Braun toe the (Nazi) line. I think the answer is revealed by his continued zealous toeing in the US. This was an opportunist egocentric concerned only in furthering his own career 鈥� whatever the cost. American folk singer Tom Lehrer put it well:
‘”I make them go up 鈥� who cares where they come down. That’s not my department,” Says Wernher von Braun.’
Snowed under
Your article on snowflakes (Technology, 24/31 December) claims that William Wergin and his colleagues at the Electron Microscopy Laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture “鈥� is producing the first images of snowflakes taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM)”. In the interests of fair recognition, I would point out that Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey and myself first carried out this procedure using snowflakes collected at the GRIP (Greenland Icecore Project) drilling site at Summit in central Greenland, and the scanning electron microscope in the Institute of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Lancaster University. This work was undertaken in 1991 and was published in full in the Journal of Glaciology in 1994.
This work was funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council under an Antarctic Special Topic Award for investigating the location of impurities in Antarctic snow and ice. Applications for continued funding of this work were turned down in 1992 when the Antarctic Special Topic Award was concluded. As a result, no further progress has been made on this work since 1992.
Once again British expertise and innovation have lost out to budgetary restrictions and as a result other countries have taken up the challenge and will rapidly overtake our initial lead. The true malaise in British science may indeed be the reticence shown by our home grown talent, ourselves included, to publicise their work.
Dear Darwin
As the authors of the scientific paper reported on by Ian Anderson (This Week, 10 December) we would like to point out a number of errors.
First, the title (“Gene heretic mounts fresh challenge to Darwin”) is erroneous and misleading, since we are not challenging Darwin’s natural selection theory at all, but are suggesting an additional mechanism of genetic change upon which natural selection operates. This suggestion is consistent with Darwin’s “Pangenesis” theory.
Secondly, the article, supposedly based on one of our recent papers, only addresses part of the analyses that we report, thus presenting an incomplete picture of the work on which we based our conclusions.
Thirdly, the article stated that “鈥� genes contain three regions which code for the parts of an antibody that bind to a foreign protein.” This is wrong. The germ line genes we analysed in our paper only contain two of these regions; the third region is generated during the somatic DNA rearrangement process that generates the complete antibody gene in B lymphocytes.
Finally, at the end of the article Ian Tomlinson is attributed with the assertion that human data does not support our interpretation of mouse data. We have analysed all available published sequence data from humans and other vertebrates and found it to be consistent with our interpretation.
Quarkless
Samuel Baron poses a question: “Are the number of quarks in an electron sufficient to account for the electron’s mass?” (Forum, 17 December).
According to current perceived wisdom, the electron is a fundamental particle belonging to the leptons, which do not interact via the strong nuclear force, and possess no quarks.
If Baron had instead posed the question with a proton or neutron instead of with an electron, his question would have been meaningful.
Biblical sons
Seeing your interesting article on “Why presidents have more sons” (3 December), I miss a reference pertinent to the subject. Ten years ago I read Marcia Guttentage and Paul Secords (1983) original Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question.
If I remember correctly, they not only explored consequences of demographic sex imbalances, but also presented some empirical data. Thus they demonstrated that the more orthodox a Jewish congregation was, the more sons were born.
They suggested an explanation that fits with your sperm motility theory: Y sperms would be somewhat more likely to encounter a fresh egg if sexual activity conforms with the Bible’s recommendation on intercourse with a “clean” wife only (prescribed abstinence during menstruation, and some days thereafter).
Whether such practice was or is more “adaptive” or evolutionarily advantageous is, however, not clear to me.
Egg needed
I was interested in your article on sperm motility and contraction waves in the uterus and Fallopian tubes (New 杏吧原创, Science, 24/31 December).
But in the final paragraph it states: “Women with abnormal waves have their best chance of conceiving around the time of ovulation because this is when the waves are most likely to move in the right direction.”
I would disagree. The reason that conception is most likely “around ovulation” is because this is the only time there is an ovum available for fertilisation.
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Cross gender
I have observed the inherited characteristics of human offspring, both mental and physical, for some fifty years (Letters, 10 December and 14 January).
The obvious likeness between offspring and the parent of the opposite gender is, I agree, strongest with the first-born, usually becoming much diluted and sometimes reversed with members of the same family born later. The first-born, however, are the most important, since there are more in this category.
There are of course exceptions to this observation. Some of these exceptions may be accounted for by failed earlier births or aborted pregnancies.
The “cross-over” phenomenon is, I believe, essential to ensure a physical, and much less obviously, mental compatibility between the sexes. If the characteristics of the sexes were replicated along strictly divorced gender lines, then over many generations the sexes would grow apart. As an example, a short female mating with a tall male would produce short female off-spring and tall male offspring. Eventually the differing characteristics would be so exaggerated that sexual compatibility would be challenged.
So the cross-over maintains compatibility and prevents an otherwise sinister and progressive deviation between the sexes, a situation that would threaten the very continuance of the species.
It is natural to assume that this 鈥� gender copying opposite gender 鈥� would extend to all other species of animal and probably even plants. Have a good look at your pet cat’s mother, or father if you are able to trace him 鈥� suspect the ginger Tom next door.
Tabloid biology
The idea that the press, and especially the tabloids, is more interested in a “good” story than a true story is widely accepted (but may not be true). Most of us, however, are unable to confirm or refute particular stories. So Pat Morris’s article on media myths about hedgehogs (Forum, 14 January) was interesting. More interesting to me, however, was that the very day that I read it my 5th form GCSE group at school was doing a rehearsal exam which included a question from a GCSE biology exam set by ULEAC (University of London Examinations and Assessment Council) last year. Part of the question read:
“(e) Nature conservationists who have studied populations of hedgehogs for many years now think that there are two types of hedgehog living in Britain.
“One type is the ‘town’ hedgehog which runs away when approached by road vehicles. The other type is the ‘country’ or ‘normal’ hedgehog which curls up when approached by road vehicles and is frequently run over and killed. The difference between the two types is thought to be caused by a gene.
“Explain the process which has resulted in ‘town’ hedgehogs becoming much more common than the ‘normal’ ones in places where there is heavy traffic.”
Not only does this question perpetuate an idea that is, to quote Morris, “without a shred of evidence”, but it goes on to claim that this behaviour is “thought to be caused by a gene.”
I do have some sympathy with ULEAC in setting questions on natural selection. Virtually the only example used at GCSE level is the peppered moth and it is encouraging that questions testing the concept, but not necessarily remembered facts, are used. However, there are lots of similar examples for which there is ample evidence (antibiotic-resistance in bacteria, warfarin-resistance in rats, copper-tolerance in grasses, DDT resistance in insects, etc.) and which could also be used to test the concept. Morris gives some admirable advice at the end of his article about how to judge such stories. Unfortunately “tabloid biology” seems to be making unstoppable progress.