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Wrong roots
Your feature “Making a monkey of human nature” by Meredith Small (10 June) seems to rest on a giant non sequitur, and little-else, to make its argument convincing 鈥� “that our primate roots lie in the flexible social and mating systems of the New World monkeys rather than the cercopithecines”.
Small reminds us that the expanding interest shown in Old World primate behaviour, from the 1960s on, related to a wider research front focusing on the origins of human social behaviour. In particular, two tendencies that sadly characterise much of human history 鈥� status division between individuals and the subordination and diminished mobility of females 鈥� rather than being quirky features of recent cultural development, might have been present in the earliest hominids.
Perhaps, it was argued, the environmental circumstances in which early hominids arose in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the selection for a particular kind of social structure adapted to that environment, could explain the similarities between baboon behavioural patterns and those regrettable traits so typical of humans.
In contrast, Small prefers to highlight an alternative model for human behaviour, based on the New World monkeys with “their lack of hierarchies and their broader ranges of social structures”. Of course, all models for early human behaviour based on primate ethology are worth consideration. But why discard the baboon for the ecologically and geographically far less appropriate New World monkeys? Presumably because the researchers promoting the revisionist viewpoint find New World social behaviour a more appropriate model for human behaviour.
I find this approach weak on logic but strong on political correctness. What if our propensity to dominate each other, particularly males to females, is deeply-rooted in the very origins of the human species? Running away from this disturbing possibility 鈥� across the Atlantic in this case 鈥� seems to me to risk losing our ability to own up to our problematic social nature. It was Thomas Buxley who challenged us to face up to the worst, potential implications of our primate origins, so that through that awareness we could direct our cultural skills at counteracting the negative inheritance of that descent. Have we lost the courage to confront that challenge today?
Who's in control?
John Emsley provides a useful review of an important book, Facing the Future: The Case for Science (Review, 10 June). However, his opening tone makes one uneasy. He suggests that science has run the world for 300 years or so. It hasn’t. Politicians, generals, company directors, ideologists and dictators have. Even the original inventions that shaped the modern world were not science-based. In particular, the steam engine was around for a century before Nicolas Carnot found out how it worked 鈥� effectively by studying it as though it were a manifestation of nature.
Then to suggest that we may fall under the control of New Age nonsense-mongers is, frankly, absurd. It is the very weakness of those who oppose governmental manufacturing of poverty and environmental degradation that causes their drippy-hippy vapourings. In the debate on where our (arguably unsustainable) civilisation is to go, scientists are to be found on both sides. The most-cited scientist of the modern world 鈥� Noam Chomsky 鈥� is hardly a member of the “you never had it so good” school.
Science is gaining ground as a major component of high culture, and it is a grave disservice to identify it with the use of technology by corporate adventurers. In this connection, the title of Emsley’s prize book (The Consumer’s Good Chemical Guide) is unfortunate. It is the big corporations that have reduced our status from citizen to consumer.
Raymond Williams said of the word consumer: “It is a way of seeing people as though they are either stomachs or furnaces.” This way of seeing is surely not one that scientists would wish to identify with.
Risk and reality
For over twenty years whilst working as a regulator in the nuclear industry, my personal scientific discipline was taunted by proponents of the numbers game: a game played with dice and the tricks of Monte Carlo. If you don’t understand it give it a probability number, grind the computer and then add weighting factors to get the interpretation you want.
This is probably OK if all one wishes to do is to put risk into perspective, but in my opinion it is no substitute for deterministic experimentation, avoiding as it does the reality of the complex synergisms so important in the living world. Parochial manipulation of numbers can ascribe almost any connection between events.
Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment should not be worried that British Nuclear Fuels is providing substantial funds for studies into the frequency of non-inherited genetic mutations (This Week, 17 June). At least this long overdue work is going to be done. Does it matter who pays for it?
I welcome the BNFL intervention in a difficult study. Published results can be criticised if need be by the scientific community.
Fleming fallacy
Stephen Kaposi (Letters, 10 June) is right in drawing attention to Nikola Tesla and his unique place in history as possibly the inventor who has made the most significant impact on the way we live.
On the subject of injustices as a result of media attention and incorrectly slanted history books, other victims are Howard Florey, his colleague Ernst Chain, and the team of workers at Oxford who were responsible for establishing the therapeutic powers of penicillin and making their discovery available worldwide for medical use.
Credit for the development of penicillin was overwhelmingly given by the world to Alexander Fleming, who played no part in the work and yet he became a world hero and a joint Nobel prize winner for a chance observation which he failed to exploit. This was due to the media attention given to him by Lord Beaverbrook, a patron of St Mary’s Hospital, where Fleming was a bacteriologist.
Fleming was the discoverer of an antibacterial strain of mould in 1929 but did not develop it because he did not believe it would be clinically effective. In 1942, when most of the war news was depressing, the news of Florey’s discovery reached Fleming, who curiously laid claim to the mould. Misinformation and the support of Almroth Wright, in whose department he worked, led to the press and the Ministry of Information beginning the Fleming myth, not only for the benefit of St Mary’s Hospital but also for propaganda purposes.
The real achievement, ingenuity and practical development of the antibiotic belongs to Florey and his co-workers and not Fleming. Anyone who has any doubts should read the biographies of both men by the late Gwyn Macfarlane: Howard Florey 鈥� The Making of a Great 杏吧原创 and Alexander Fleming 鈥� The Man and the Myth.
Chilling fact
I was surprised to read that it has recently been discovered that Listeria monocytogenes grows more rapidly after a spell in the fridge (This Week, 10 June). It is my recollection back some 30 years that it was common practice in veterinary microbiology to chill samples prior to culturing for Listeria. In fact, if you did not pre-chill you were unlikely to recover the organism. I hope they did not spend too much time and money making this discovery.
Proud record
It never ceases to amaze me that Australia’s science and technology critics continue to get it so wrong. In his story regarding Australia’s Budget, Ian Lowe tells us that Australia has a static “science” budget (“Antipodes”, 20 May).
This gives a very false impression of the situation. Since 1984/5 expenditure on R&D by government agencies and the higher education sector has increased by 42 per cent in real terms. Most of this increase has taken place in the universities, where research expenditure has grown by 74 per cent since that year.
The claim that South Korea and Taiwan are devoting more of their national resources to “science and innovation” than Australia might create the impression that these countries are expending relatively more on science than we are. This is unlikely to be true.
Both of these countries have emphasised engineering rather than science. This is evident from the statistics of education and of R&D expenditure. In the period 1975-90, South Korea graduated more than three times as many engineers as natural scientists and computer scientists combined. Taiwan has also concentrated on the education of engineers. Relative to population, both countries graduate many more engineers and far fewer natural scientists than either Australia or the UK. This is true of both undergraduate and postgradate completions.
So far as R&D expenditure is concerned, South Korea and Taiwan respectively devote 0.21 per cent and 0.51 per cent of GDP to research in the nonbusiness sectors. Australia commits 0.87 of its GDP to that purpose and thus compares very favourably indeed with those countries. Since, unlike business sector R&D, public sector R&D is predominantly related to scientific work, the level of support of Australian science is unlikely to be inferior to that of the two Asian “tigers”. The weakness in Australia’s R&D is to be found in the poor level support for engineering R&D in the manufacturing sector.
In 1993 the number of persons completing bachelor degrees in natural science and computer science in Australia reached the record level of over 13 000. Relative to population, this is the highest level in the World. Furthermore, Australia spends 0.41 per cent of GDP on basic research in the nonbusiness sectors. Only three or four countries exceed this level. Should we really believe that Australian science is so badly served?
Stay off steroids
In your article on eye drops, you talk of, “an antiglaucoma drug called dexamethasone” (Technology, 22 April). This is incorrect: detamethasone is a provocative test to detect the phenotypes in glaucoma families. The test is well-known and in the 1950s we were the first to publish the finding that applying steroids such as dexamethasone can actually increase intra-ocular pressure in glaucoma patients.
I am not commercially interested and write this letter only to raise the standards of this otherwise excellent article.
Babbage's pocket
Your cartoonist Kate Charlesworth depicted Charles Babbage attempting to patent a laptop version of his “Difference Engine” (Feedback, 10 June). Charles Babbage wrote his fascinating memoirs Passages From The Life of a Philosopher, which were published in London in 1864. (His manuscript of that book is part of the large Babbage collection at Wanganui Regional Museum, in New Zealand).
Babbage told of the severe difficulties which he had experienced in getting his ideas about “calculating engines” taken seriously in England. The government had actually provided money to support research and development, but Babbage had spent more from his own pocket.
The Polish explorer Paul Edmund de Strzelecki travelled in China from 1834 to 1839, and then he made a geological survey of the interior of Australia in 1839 to 1840. Babbage wrote that:
“A short time after the arrival of Count Strzelecki in England, I had the pleasure of meeting him at the table of a common friend. Many inquiries were made relative to his residence in China. Much interest was expressed by several of the party to learn on what subject the Chinese were most anxious to have information. Count Strzelecki told them that the subject of most frequent inquiry was Babbage’s Calculating Engine.
“On being further asked as to the nature of the enquiries, he said that they were most anxious to know whether it would go into the pocket. Our host now introduced me to Count Strzelecki, opposite to whom I was then sitting. After expressing my pleasure at the introduction, I told the Count that he might safely assure his friends in the Celestial Empire that it was in every sense of the word an out-of-pocket machine.”
Butty to butty
The word butty meaning a close friend or work mate, reported in Ireland by John Tarver (Letters, 17 June), is also in common use in South Wales. It was once explained to me that it originated in an old mining practice, in which miners digging coal by hand would work in pairs back to back or, more accurately, butt to butt. The word may be related to the butty boats, which were narrow boats that used to work on the canals, tied together in pairs.
Butty in this sense is undoubtedly the same as American buddy, but I am not so sure about the connection with butty meaning a sandwich; the latter probably derives from (bread and) butter.
Ghost potions
The idea advanced by John de Rivaz that the phenomena experienced in “haunted houses” might be caused by the spores of psychoactive fungi growing on the walls, is not new (Letters, 15 April). It was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1883.
Unlike the case in 1883, however, science is now capable of properly investigating this appealing theory. The pharmaceutical firms that are prospecting for new drugs in threatened tropical forests might also consider taking mycological cultures from the world’s dwindling stock of haunted houses. Amazing psychotropic chemicals could result. But we must be realistic; any substance powerful enough to reveal ghosts would probably be criminalised within a year of its discovery.
Catatonic state
Following Feedback’s revelation on the researches of entomologists with a self-defecating attitude (3 June), when will the next step be taken by an entomologist leaving his body to forensic study of the sequence of decomposition by insects?
Much might be learned from sector beetles, coffin flies, blue bottles and others already used to establish the time and place of death.
P.S. If the scientists succeed in producing a new sleeping pill from the lipids in cats’ brains (New 杏吧原创, Science, 17 June) will they call it Moggydon?
Virtual Dick?
Reading Marcus Chown’s review of the The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick (Review, 27 May) shifted my reality back to a night in Sydney in about 1968.
I was waiting on the Circular Quay taxi stand when the shabby looking man preceding me in the queue turned to me and said: “You don’t know who I am, do you?” I confirmed his supposition though hoping to halt this conversational ploy before it took wing. “I am Philip K. Dick”, he said.
At the time I was regularly given to reading pulp SF magazines and novels, and the name was familiar to me. I guessed, however, that the chances of any other randomly accosted person being similarly informed were slim.
The man was of middle height and appeared to be of early middle age. He was gaunt, perhaps (memory fades) gap-toothed. He was clearly drunk, drugged or mad. His accent was not readily discernable but didn’t seem American. Neither was it Australian. Whatever he was, he did not fulfil any preconceptions I had of a prolific and successful American writer (of pulp SF or any genre).
I politely humoured the fantasist, shook his hand, praised his supposed work, resisted the temptation to introduce myself as Isaac Asimov, and was soon pleased to see a cab appear and whisk him away.
I put it down to disconcerting coincidence but certainly this would-be Mr Dick had drawn me rapidly into his delusion. Perhaps he was who he said he was, but I remained sceptical. Some years later I met an American woman who claimed to have known the real Philip K. Dick in California. She seemed certain that he had never left his native shores and that dispelled my lingering doubts about the incident.
Reading your review, however, shifted my reality once more. Since, apparently, Philip K. Dick was unsure of his own reality, perhaps a psychiatrist could tell us whether it is a recognised condition for other people to experience the occasional delusion (or virtual reality) of being Philip K. Dick.