Easy washing
I was interested to read about the “revolutionary laundry discs” (Feedback, 8 July). It reminded me of the “improved patent quick easy washer” which made its debut in the East Lancashire village of Edenfield in 1904.
Each washer consisted of a glazed earthenware disc fitted in the bottom of a dolly tub. Ridges on the surface of the disc rubbed against the clothes as they were swished around with a “dolly”.
This was supposed to dispense with the need to bend over a rubbing board to rub the clothes by hand. As one of the advertisements said, it made “washing day the easiest day of the week”.
I am not sure for how long the discs continued to be produced (discarded discs now make up a large proportion of garden ornaments in Edenfield) but in view of the arrival of Clean Power Plus from Japan, perhaps it is time for the Quick Easy Washer Co to go into production once more.
Built on sand
Re the plan to create a deepwater port at Gaza (This Week, 22 July): Why go to the expense of pumping sand when an offshore Mulberry-type wharf system connected to the coast by road and rail and mounted on concrete caissons, widely spaced to allow the littoral drift northwards to continue unimpeded, could be installed quickly, with minimal environmental impact and at no additional cost in preservative measures?
The technique is well established and within the unsophisticated capabilities of the local industry to execute.
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Weak on whales
Kazuo Shima, Japan’s commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, says that Japan’s reason for remaining a member of the IWC is to uphold the purpose of its charter (Letters, 22 July). Although he implies that this charter is being undermined, the arguments he advances to support his case are far from convincing.
Shima claims that the IWC kept its moratorium on commercial whaling in place “over the time limit after the completion of necessary comprehensive assessment”. In fact, no time limit was placed on the moratorium 鈥� it is indefinite.
The IWC did call for “a comprehensive assessment of the effects of this decision (the establishment of the moratorium) on whale stocks”. This has not yet been done, in part due to Japan’s insistence that assessments be focused on whale populations that might support future whaling operations. Also, the IWC’s Scientific Committee has repeatedly said that it is not able to determine those effects, in part because the numbers of whales are not known accurately enough.
Shima suggests that the establishment of a sanctuary (in the Southern Ocean) is a departure from the spirit of the IWC’s charter. But when the IWC established the Indian Ocean sanctuary in 1979, Japan did not file an objection to that decision.
Ten years later when the sanctuary was due to expire, Japan joined the consensus to extend it for a further three years, and, in 1992 to make the Indian Ocean sanctuary indefinite.
Shima argues that future generations will face food shortages associated with growing human populations, requiring greater protein supply from the oceans. However, his assertion that “management” of whales is necessary to do this in order to “keep the balance of the marine ecosystem” is simplistic beyond belief. The failure of human beings to “manage” even single species has been amply demonstrated by a century of devastation by commercial whaling and now the mass depletion of fisheries on a global scale.
The welcome address of Irish minister Michael Higgins at this year’s IWC meeting is quoted as saying” 鈥� it would be wrong 鈥� to impose our cultural values on those nations whose populations have developed on the whales for generations”. The next line of the address was not quoted. It says: “Yet we will seek to convince them of our position.”
The aims of the IWC charter that Shima defends are contradictory. We can’t “provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks” while at the same time “make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry”.
Using current marketing techniques, the whale products market in Japan can be readily stimulated to grow to a far larger size than current or foreseeable whale resources can satisfy. Indeed, this is already happening in Japan, where PR campaigns encourage the population to eat whale meat as a cultural duty or for health reasons.
With demand far exceeding supply and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude regarding whale meat sources pervading the Japanese distribution system, illegal whaling can and does flourish.
Shima has long represented Japanese whaling industry interests as a government official. His words on whaling should be treated with the same degree of scepticism one applies to statements about cigarette smoking from tobacco industry spokespeople.
Little leaks
I should like to refer to Rob Edwards’s article, “Leaky drums spill plutonium on ocean floor”, 22 July. It may convey the impression that the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and the participants in the Coordinated Research and Environmental Surveillance Programme (CRESP) wish to belittle, if not ignore, the potential impact of plutonium leakage from the drums dumped into the northeast Atlantic until 1982.
This is obviously not the case. NEA safety analyses concerning dumping in the Atlantic have always been carried out on the basis of a limited lifetime of the waste drums, sometimes on the assumption of instantaneous release.
The last comprehensive safety assessment published in 1985 pointed out that the level of predicted peak individual doses to humans from all radionuclides including plutonium dumped in the northeast Atlantic until 1982, was about 10鈭�5 millisievert per year, which is about 100 000 times less than natural background levels.
As far as doses to marine organisms are concerned, calculations indicate that dose rates in the dump site would remain several orders of magnitude below the dose rates at which deleterious effects on populations of marine organisms have been observed. During the past 10 years, the results obtained from CRESP have not altered these findings, although much scientific information was gained, contributing to increased confidence in the safety assessment.
While the decision has not been formally taken yet, there is a possibility that the CRESP activities will come to an end in 1995, recognising that it is more and more difficult to justify this programme in its present form from a strict safety standpoint. In the meantime, proposals have been put forward for other ad hoc forms of international cooperation to keep marine radioecology issues under review, including within the NEA.
In conclusion, we are faced here with a classical situation where decision-makers are confronted with the need to reassess the level of resources to allocate to a safety related area where a relatively long experience is already available. It may however be difficult for non-specialists to appreciate the pros and cons arguments, particularly when research interests and public perception do not necessarily coincide with the results of realistic safety assessments.
Memory traces
Wolf Seufert in his article on memory assumes, like almost everyone else, that memory is recorded in physical traces in the brain (Forum, 22 July). But this leads to logical difficulties. This was pointed out many years ago by Professor K. G. Denbigh: “鈥� a memory of a memory implies the laying down of a trace of a trace, and the memory of a memory of a memory requires the laying down of a trace of a trace of a trace. If so, this would seem to be an odd state of affairs to say the least” (An Inventive Universe, 1975).
No one doubts that the brain is intimately connected with memory and consciousness, but the connection must be more subtle than is generally thought.
Perilous pipes
Fred Pearce’s contention that children are being put at risk of brain damage to save water companies’ money (This Week, 15 July) is, to be charitable, ill-judged.
The fact is that most lead piping remaining in the water supply system is in customers’ domestic plumbing, not in the mains network. Water companies have no responsibility for replacing customers’ old pipes 鈥� any more than electricity companies have responsibility for replacing old wiring.
Drinking water supplied from treatment works is nowadays virtually lead-free. The mains themselves are virtually lead free. And remaining lead communications pipes, linking the mains to customers’ own pipes, are being replaced as part of a nationwide programme. These communications pipes are replaced as a matter of course when customers replace their own lead pipework.
Horses and carts
Ian Hill says that an animal’s morphology determines its lifestyle, not the other way around (Letters, 29 July). He criticises zoologists for putting the cart before the horse, citing my conclusions about mammalian sensory systems as an example; frugivores, according to Hill, go for fruit because they’ve got colour vision, rather than having colour vision because they are frugivores.
In fact, both arguments are right, but they are different types of argument. To be sure, the immediate causes of an animal’s lifestyle are its physiological and morphological adaptations, together with the particular environment in which it lives. But that doesn’t explain how it came to have those adaptations in the first place; zoologists want to know how and why primates’ colour vision, giraffes’ long necks and spoonbills’ spoon bills evolved.
The answer is that they are, by and large, adaptations to particular ways of life. This does not imply any “predetermined purpose”. It simply means that morphology and behaviour co-evolve in continuous cycles.
Spooky lotteries
We are glad that Feedback (22 July) spotted the article by Mark Zilberman on “Public Numerical Lotteries” which we originally published (Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, vol 60, no 838).
The article has evoked lively interest and controversy among our own members and we would be happy to send a reprint to any reader of New 杏吧原创 with expertise in this field who may wish to study the text in full or to contact the author. Inquiries should be addressed to: The Secretary, The SPR, 49 Marloes Road, London W8 6LA.
The race card
It seems that New 杏吧原创 mirrors society’s confusion about human diversity. Your editorial (27 May) acknowledges that “only a tiny percentage of the DNA is different between the races” but very properly comments that “what matters 鈥� is phenotype”.
Quite so. Rather minor genetic differences can produce large divergences in morphology 鈥� for example, between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Yet straight away, you downplay phenotype with a surprising appeal to the subjectivity of “our daily experience that humans of all races are virtually identical”.
Bernard Wood (Review, 20 May) goes further, proposing that racial classification is biologically meaningless (albeit people originating “from the same geographical region are more likely to be similar than individuals from different regions”), while Morris Bradley (Letters, 24 June) suggests that racial differences are real but trivial.
In each case, the reason given is that most human genetic variation is individual, not racial. The same message is underlined in Gail Vines’s “Genes in black and White” (8 July) and it is implied in Waqar Ahmad’s review of The Bell Curve Wars (22 July).
When considering racial phenotype, this is supremely irrelevant. Underlying genetic similarity, and the percentage of genome that is responsible for the observed racial differences, in no way invalidates the realities of physical anthropology, which are not as superficial as Bradley believes.
Skin colour is only the tip of the iceberg. Morphological differences between human races range from the fine detail of the muscles and circulatory system, to significant variation in skull and brain structure: cranial sutures, thickness of supergranular cortical layer, complexity of sulci and gyri, etcetera.
In point of fact, races are clearly meaningful categories at the level of genotype too. Moreover, well over 75 per cent of all people can be placed without error in one or another primary racial grouping. It is therefore difficult to know what to make of “non-racial” taxonomy. Is it really proposed that Homo sapiens exhibits no variations comparable to the subspecies of other animals?
Arguably, human races are as well differentiated as full species in other animal groups. If interfertility were a sufficient criterion of species unity, whole genera, tribes and even sub-families of Anatidae (ducks, for example) would be reduced to single species. The recent divergence of human races likewise offers no impediment: dogs and wolves have been separate for no more than 15 000 years, but few would doubt their distinctiveness.
Moreover, the proposition that modern people constitute more than one species is hardly novel. Does it matter if they do? Or is it only our unacknowledged “speciesism” which feels uncomfortable with the idea?
As for countering racism, I ask why it should be thought that emphasising similarity at the expense of difference is “right and proper” for “peaceful coexistence and cooperation” (quoting Wood). Surely, the real test of antiracism is not the facile acceptance of people who are conceived to be “really” almost the same as oneself, but one’s attitude to those who are perceived and recognised to be very dissimilar. Otherwise, it is merely a respectable cover for the intolerance of differences.
Vines appeared to suggest that “racial” definition was illusory. It depends. The political nonsense, for example, of categorising as “black” certain Asians and also many Americans who are genetically mostly “Caucasian” has no basis in biological anthropology. But the human species is still rationally classifiable into subgroups of varying degrees of mixture and divergence.
The welcome and interesting development in this respect is precisely the combination of genome analysis with phenotype patterns resulting from many centuries of migration and separation, mating and assimilation, adaptation to climate and disease, population expansion and extinction, and differential average capacities for distinctive cultural attainment.
This cannot proceed if typology in any form is ruled out altogether in the investigation of ancestral relationships and divergences back to prehominid stages.
Scientific data can always be suppressed, misrepresented or abused for political or social purposes. Academic freedom must enable thorough discussion, for instance, of the different eugenic evaluations of “crossing” by K. F. Dyer and R. R. Gates.
Vines says she wants “racial” information used to “celebrate” our “mongrel” future. An enthusiast for a comparable canine destiny would not, however, try to pretend that different breeds of dog were “just an illusion”.
DNA is a coded blueprint for the organism for its outer structure and inner character. Small differences in this message can bring about significant changes in the individual. The two following two pairs of messages may illustrate this point:
Give me a pot of milk/Give me a lot of silk 鈥� two errors in 21 characters;
Rudolf the Red knows rain, Dear/Rudolf the Red-nose reindeer 鈥� identical pronunciation.
I tried to guess to myself the origins of the people whose faces illustrated “Genes in black and white”. Here is my guess: pages 34 to 35, left to right: Kenya, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Australia, Japan. Pages 36 to 37, left to right: US, Somalia, Tibet, Sicily, China, Sumatra, Brazil.
How well did I do?
I am sorry to see that New 杏吧原创 has followed its ancient practice of having books on intelligence reviewed by nonpsychologists with only the foggiest ideas about what modern research has to say, and what experts on the topic are really thinking.
Indeed, Waqar Ahmad’s review doubles the crime by reviewing, not The Bell Curve itself, but a collection of trivial essays by (mostly) other nonpsychologists like Stephen Jay Gould, famous for his ignorance of matters psychological. The only characteristic holding together this band of critics is the fact that they are all bathed in the holy oil of political correctness 鈥� with the accompanying smell of factual incorrectness.
Ahmad gives the game away by calling The Bell Curve “infamous” 鈥� a term applied to Darwin’s and Galileo’s great works by the politically correct of their day. The only support he quotes is from Time, rather than the reviews which appeared in the scientific literature.
Your readers might like to consider a review which appeared in Contemporary Psychology, the reviewing journal of the American Psychological Association. It concludes: “This is a superbly written and exceedingly well-documented book. It raises many troubling questions regarding the organisation of our society. It deserves the attention of every well-informed and thoughtful citizen.”
Others have been more critical, and indeed the statement of the problem is clearly more scientifically accurate than the suggestions for a solution, which is inevitably political and argumentative.
In his review of writing subsequent to The Bell Curve, Waqar Ahmad is free with epithets. The Bell Curve is “infamous”, while a book largely agreeing with it is “indecent” and “morally repugnant”.
This is a vast subject and we are still learning; we should be examining the facts only and not decrying anything that does not fit in with a picture we would perhaps like to see.