Moral dilemma
As a molecular biologist and a Christian clergyman, I share John Postgate’s admiration for the scientific virtues of honesty, openness and willingness to face the truth (Forum, 8 April). Curiously, he does not seem to realise that these virtues are also highly prized by religion. They have been characteristic, for example, of all the great Christian mystics.
I have less time for Postgate’s surprisingly muddle-headed polemic against religion. He clumsily contradicts himself when he claims simultaneously that “Science is (morally) neutral” and that “Science imposes a stern, austere morality upon its adherents”. This contradiction pervades in his argument: we find him at one moment claiming that religion is the cause of many horrors because, “unlike science, it is not (morally) neutral”, and at the next, asserting that “Science’s morality is wholly incompatible with such murderous imperatives”. Is science morally neutral or sternly, austerely moral? It cannot be both.
And it is disappointing that he should descend to the old, less-than-respectable polemicist’s trick of comparing the very best of one’s own tradition with the very worst of one’s opponent’s. He cheerfully dismisses scientific fraud and concealment as minor lapses, while mulishly insisting that the command, “Kill the infidell” represents the mainstream of religious tradition. He could with equal logic have compared the religion of a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King with the science of eugenics, which was both popular and academically respectable in the first half of this century, and which underpinned the “euthanasia programme in Nazi Germany.
Postgate’s moralising fails to take into account the way in which science is actually done. In the real world, the way in which knowledge progresses has more to do with the decisions of funding committees, personal prestige, intellectual fashion and laboratory politics than a dispassionate search for truth.
It also fails to acknowledge that, where science appears to refute the mythologies of traditional religions, the new “scientific” explanation will itself take on the status of myth. Fixed this way in the popular consciousness, an ostensibly scientific world-view can become as irrational as that which it seeks to replace.
杏吧原创s, like other professionals, are simply human beings trying to do a worthwhile job to the best of their abilities. Pretentious claims to uniqueness of morality or vision simply play into the hands of those who caricature science as an alternative pseudo-religion and make scientists look ridiculous.
Postgate contrasts the intellectual structures of science, which are morally neutral, with the applications of science, which are as good, or as evil, as people make them. In religion, too, we can distinguish the intellectual structures of the scriptures from the uses of the religion. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, and its analogues in other scriptures, is part of the intellectual structure of religion. I am aware of no religion in whose intellectual structure (scripture) we find the commandment “Kill the infidel!”
If we are going to contrast the intellectual structures of science and religion, we compare “Thou shalt not kill” with “Thou shalt not fabricate data”. If we are going to contrast the uses of science and religion we have a surfeit of wars and atrocities, both for science and religion, from which to choose. My suggestion is that students of science need to be made more aware of the moral implications of science and not trained into moral blindness by misguided reassurances of the moral neutrality of science.
Certainly, Postgate is right in holding that to be a good scientist one has to be completely honest and sharing. He says that these virtues spill over into the rest of the scientist’s life. Well, maybe.
But are these two virtues, which together comprise integrity, the whole of morality? Does scientific integrity offer a complete code of moral behaviour? What about sexual morality? Does the scientific code forbid adultery? Does it forbid being a traitor to one’s country? Or murder? Does it, indeed, forbid using science for immoral purposes?
A more serious deficiency is that science has nothing to say about love as a guiding principle, which is the basis of Christian morality. Science is admirable in its persistent search for truth, but it is truth in a limited sphere 鈥� the material world 鈥� which can never be ultimately satisfying. It cannot infringe on the sphere of philosophy which takes a wider view of reality. Scientific morality is a cold, stoical, limited belief system which can hardly be expected to appeal to any other than the elite.
It is a great mistake to see a conflict between science and religion. Some of the greatest scientists 鈥� for example, Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur 鈥� have been ardent, practising Christians. These men saw no conflict between their science and their religion.
Beefing about veal
A. T. Lawton’s “solution” to the veal calf problem reveals the huge misconceptions some people have about farming (Letters, 8 April).
A cow has a profitable milking life of about 8 years. To lactate, she must calf annually. To replace that cow takes one heifer calf. This leaves up to seven “un-needed calves” during the cow’s life. There is no advantage in these being female, indeed bull-calves grow faster. If all calves were female and kept for dairying we would soon not be able to move for cows.
The present situation, that of low demand for home-bred beef coupled with the revulsion felt against the veal industry, can only lead to the slaughter at birth of the majority of calves.
The present veal-calf situation is entirely created by unbalanced consumer demands. The large rise in numbers of vegetarians consuming dairy foods whilst scorning meat, plus many meat eaters choosing the products of intensive poultry systems, are direct causes of unwanted calves.
If you really wish to help redress the balance, there are choices; opt out altogether and become a vegan, or consume less dairy produce and eat beef.
Off the shelf
I write concerning your editorial comment (8 April) on the “fuss over Canada’s seizure of a Spanish fishing vessel on charges of grievously threatening the North Atlantic turbot”. There are two related points which I believe should be clarified.
This “‘turbot”, as it is referred to currently by the British press, is not Scophthalmus maximus, the species commonly known by this name in the eastern Atlantic region, but what we know as the Greenland halibut, Rheinhardtius hippoglossoides. They are quite unrelated.
The former, a left-eyed flatfish (family Scophthalmidae), lives on the continental shelf to depths of about 70 metres. The Greenland halibut, however, is a deep-water species of the family Pleuronectidae (right-eyed flatfishes), which lives in depths of 200 to 2000 metres on the continental slope. It is most frequently caught at midslope levels of around 700 to 1000 metres.
The distinction is important since it has bearing on the international nature of this issue. Indeed, currently “only 10 per cent of the world’s commercial fish stock are in international waters”; the majority are restricted to the relatively shallow continental shelf seas which cover only some 7.5 per cent of the world ocean area. Yet the Greenland halibut fishery is representative of a modern trend toward the exploitation of slope fish assemblages, pioneered by the New Zealand Orange Roughy fishery for example.
These previously little exploited, and likely fragile, stocks occupy a further 8.8 per cent (4.4 per cent each of the 200 to 1000 metres and 1000 to 2000 metres depth zones) of the total world ocean area 鈥� seaward of the marginal continental shelves and often in international waters.
Thus, while the attendant problems to fishery management that you mention still pertain, an international dimension is becoming increasingly important.
Where's the water?
An internal combustion engine uses fuels removed from deep holes in the ground, burns them with varying efficiencies for diverse purposes and eventually exhausts them into the atmosphere. The fuels convert by burning, giving off energy, gases and water.
As the number of engines increases and more fuels are dug up and used, where does the exhausted water go? It cannot very quickly return in a cyclic sense to its hole in the ground; it must join the existing natural atmospheric water cycles. If so, the effects must be accumulative and not a little damaging. (I realise that some of the effects may be an advantage in one area but disastrous in another.)
Recent information about the world’s oceans, increasing cloud areas in some latitudes (and corresponding decreases in others), rising rainfall patterns (and the opposite in other areas) and shifting ocean currents all seem to point to an increase in the water content in the atmosphere 鈥� or do they?
Unmoved
I see that yet another book on the fabulous iceman has arrived (Review, 25 February); and in the same issue your excellent Kate Charlesworth devotes her talents to explaining icecaps, icebergs and glaciers.
Yet the most important mystery of the iceman continues to be ignored and even charming Kate avoids mention of the age of glaciers. Geologists tell us that the ice of even the slowest moving glacier is totally renewed every two hundred years. If that is so, how come the iceman was hanging about in an Alpine glacier for about 3000 years? Did he get stuck behind a hidden spur of rock beneath the ice or something?
The iceman was on a col, a ridge at the top of a glacier which does not normally move as the glacier does 鈥� Ed
Age of the Internet?
Regarding Ian Gadd’s letter on the impact of the Internet compared with that of printing (Letters, 8 April): How can anyone doubt the impact of printing? Printing equals literacy.
It is estimated that in the year 1000 literacy was restricted to barely 1 per cent of the population of Europe. The literate were mostly religious and mostly men 鈥� some lawyers and few women. But those able to read were not all able to write. Book production was largely the work of monks for most of the Dark Ages 鈥� craftsmen who depended on eyesight, daylight and nimble fingers. A book could take months to make and cost 拢25 鈥� in 1433’s money, not today’s.
So, printing equals large editions equals cheap books equals wider availability equals greater demand equals literacy; at least for large numbers of middle-class laity.
The problem now is to make the Internet as available, useful, and as user-friendly (that is, cheap) as books and libraries.
Wrong tube
I read your report on an artificial rabbit for training laboratory technicians (Technology, 15 April) with interest; similar human-based devices are being increasingly used in teaching medical students.
I cannot help feeling, however, that training people to feed animals via “an artificial trachea leading to the stomach” is not really the best way to advance the welfare of laboratory animals or indeed that of their handlers.
Helium hero
I was disappointed to see no mention in Marcus Chown’s article on helium (Forum, 8 April) of the role played in its discovery by Edward (later Sir Edward) Frankland. He was the joint discoverer, with Norman Lockyer, of the new element in 1868. No doubt he shared Lockyer’s satisfaction in 1895 when the element was detected on Earth.
Frankland (1825-1899) pioneered several important branches of chemistry and became the first president of the Institute of Chemistry. It is only in recent years that his work has become widely recognised.
Breeding gorillas
I presume that Helen Epstein’s statement about the failure to breed gorillas in captivity referred especially to mountain gorillas (This Week, 8 April). At Bristol Zoological Gardens and at some of the Continental zoos, lowland gorillas have been successfully bred and are being bred.
The problem with primate breeding at the present time seems to be one of public antagonism rather than of any innate incapacities of these creatures to produce outside their native habitat. With mountain gorilla numbers down to near extinction level there is certainly a need to reexamine captive breeding lest we lose them for all time.
Rethink required
“Arctic fossils may blight evolutionary tree”, said Douglas Palmer (Science, 8 April) but the tree is already blighted. I have pointed out (Larvae and Evolution: Towarda New Zoology, Chapman & Hall, 1992) that, in most cases, the terms protostome and deuterostome apply only to embryos and larvae, and that several phyla include representatives that develop differently.
For example, all echinoderm larvae are bilaterally symmetrical deuterostomes in which the coelom develops by enterocoely, and the phylum is classified accordingly.
Several echinoderms, however, develop directly as schizocolous protostomes and are radially symmetrical throughout life. I regard this as the ancestral method of echinoderm development; the larvae were added later.
One mollusc is known to develop as a deuterostome with a short-lived enterocoel, in spite of the usual classification of the phylum. In this case, the embryo was added later.
Arctic fossils and living larvae provide evidence from two independent sources that we need to take a new look at animal phylogeny.
Oodles of uncles
David Brokensha’s logic regarding the avuncular conundrum (Letters, 1 April) is impeccable, but has he realised that John’s mother (or father) may have a number of brothers, each with an extensive collection of hats? In any case, the uncle in question might not be John’s. He could well relate to someone mentioned in the preceding (but unquoted) sentence. So who really took off whose hat?
If we can also accept that the number of Johns 鈥� and streets 鈥� in the world, if not infinite, is certainly too large to be measured with accuracy, the number of possible meanings is high indeed.
Any advance?
Can I have my book?
I am extremely grateful to you for the information in your article about the exhibition at the British Museum (Review, 8 April). I was searching everywhere for the floppy discs of my book How the World Was One (not Won). Will the British Museum please return them to me when the exhibition is over?
Adrian Bowyer suggests that quasars may be spacecraft (Letters, 1 April). Well, about 50 years ago the great J. B. S. Haldane suggested to me that that is exactly what the cosmic ray background is 鈥� the exhaust products of a vast interstellar commerce.
Finally, in reference to the article about computer clocks failing to move forward to the date 2000 (This Week, 15 April), if the problem “only dawned on the business world about three years ago”, it only has itself to blame. I described both problem and the cure in the chapter “The Century Syndrome” in The Ghost From The Grand Banks, published in 1990 鈥� and I’m fairly sure that I had heard of it several years before that date. It’s amazing how long it takes people to see the obvious.
Nimble numerates
Ian Stewart explains why juggling, which involves moving objects and periodic patterns, is enjoyed by mathematicians (“Juggling by numbers”, 18 March).
Did you know that mathematicians also make very good Scottish Country Dancers? Indeed, you will find this entertaining, aerobic, sociable form of exercise enjoyed by many people of a numerate frame of mind, such as computer scientists, engineers and accountants, to name but a few.
Correction
Captain Jerry Sellers is a PhD researcher at the University of Surrey. He is not “a satellite salesman 鈥� on loan from SSTL [Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd]”, as stated in the picture caption in “Psst 鈥� Wanna buy a satellite?” (15 April).
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