Letters : Story of O
Boncath, Dyfed
If Charles Pochin would look at an old-fashioned telephone dial that displays
letters and numbers, he would see that “O” and “0” occupy the same position
(Letters, 2 March, p 50, and 13 April, p 50).
Long before push-buttons and mysterious “hash” symbols, we were instructed to
“dial `O’ for operator”. Millions of people continue quite correctly to
pronounce the “O” as a letter, because that is what it was.
Letters : Silent lake
Baku, Azerbaijan
I empathise with James Geary’s worries over salvaging pristine natural
sounds (Forum, 13 April, p 45). Coming from New Zealand, I expected that the
country to which I was moving鈥擜zerbaijan鈥攚ould be one of the
quietest on Earth. But even deep in the remote bush, the ambience consists of
the drone of jet aircraft (albeit only one or two an hour at 30 000-odd
feet).
It was therefore a surprise to discover the most peaceful place I have ever
come across was in Europe. Lake Myvatn in Iceland had no mechanical thrum, no
human hum all day. It was only then that I realised how rare “silence” actually
is and it is this that became my most enduring impression of that beautiful
place. It was with a degree of guilt that I corrupted it by returning to my car
and starting it up to leave.
Letters : Keep it simple
John Shaw is probably correct in his analysis of the difficulty of using
bioelectric potentials detected on the scalp” to control prostheses (Letters,
13 April, p 49). The article he refers to is definitely an example of floating
wilder ideas (“Thought control”, 9 March, p 38).
Potentials generated when muscles contract are already in common use to
control artificial arms, but their functional range when used conventionally is
limited because the number of independent control sites one can readily
establish is small.
Although it might be possible to train someone to control a wider number of
muscular outputs so they could instruct much more complex devices, the truth is
that if you asked the opinion of many persons who had lost a hand or arm, they
would not regard themselves as disabled, but rather inconvenienced. They
certainly do not wish to devote much time to complex training regimes. Life is
too short.
The control must be simple and practical and as easy to use as a pair of
glasses. It is only when people have much more to gain that they will tolerate
the hassle associated with learning complex concepts.
Letters : Fossil farce
Thurso, Caithness
Around 1850 a Thurso fossil collector was obliged to sell his collection to
avoid bankruptcy. He remarked at the time that it would probably take about one
hundred years for the rocks to recover in this area (Letters, 13 April, p
48).
About one hundred years later, when I came to live in Thurso, fossils were
abundant. I made a collection, learned how to classify them and deposited the
bulk of my collection in the British Museum.
When word got around that fossils were to be had in the north of Scotland,
people came from all over Europe to collect. By the mid-1960s quarry spoils were
stripped bare and natural exposures were ripped out; the fossils were taken away
by the truckload, some trucks making the journey several times a year, from
mainland Europe.
The Nature Conservancy Council and the land owners became concerned and tried
to curb this indiscriminate destruction. But the damage was already done. There
is nothing now worth collecting north of the Highland Boundary Fault.
The stories I have heard from all over Europe show that this rape of fossil
and mineral sites has become big business and the criminal element is also
involved in this. At a recent rock and fossil fair in the US, I saw material on
sale from European classical localities. Specimens were changing hands for
thousands of dollars.
In my own area, here in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, there is,
already, nothing left to collect. It will take another one hundred years for the
rocks to recover.
Letters : Certainty principle
Rochdale, Lancashire
The ultimate answer to the question of life, the Universe and everything is
far too important to the human race for scientists to be able to tell us that,
since this answer is beyond them, it is therefore beyond us all (Forum, 13
April, p 46).
Science is based on a theory of knowledge that limits knowledge to our
perceptions, yet we have knowledge beyond both any possible perceptual
experience and any formal proof: metaphysical knowledge. The fact that our
metaphysical judgments are formally unprovable propositions, not subject to the
law of contradiction, means that our perceptually-based knowledge is not
ultimate truth.
It is not true that scientists accept metaphysical “systems” through an “act
of faith” (as Baggott would have us believe); they accept them because they are
intuitively sound and necessarily true, to such an extent that they simply could
not be otherwise.
None of this means that an ultimate answer can never be found鈥攊t just
means that it can never be subjected as a whole to the formal proofs of an
empirical system. Niels Bohr proved this in 1927 when he endorsed Max Born’s
suggestion that the wave-functions of Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg
(being formally undecidable) can only be known statistically鈥攂y
probability. That is the limit of scientific measurement, and for an empiricist,
it is also the limit of knowledge.
But there is a truth beyond the wave-function, and since it is beyond
measurement, it must be a formally unprovable truth: a thing-in-itself. Science
is not allowed access to this forbidden region, since its basic doctrine is that
only the formally provable can be said to exist.
Everybody involved in theoretical physics knows that Einstein banged the nail
right on the head when he showed that outside our perceptions “parallel lines
meet at infinity”鈥攖he beauty and simplicity of the general theory of
relativity itself proves that the theory is correct (the fact that it is a
metaphysical theory does not detract from this perfection).
Baggott may be sure that there is “no such thing as certainty”, and he may
rest happy with his belief that nature is uncertain鈥攂ut is it not a
greater truth to say that outside our minds there is only certainty. After all,
we are the ones doing the measuring, but we are certainly measuring something
that exists independently of our measurement.
Letters : . . .
Buxted, East Sussex
I do wish that your writers would not keep on making false remarks about
religion. We do not believe in blind faith, which is a contradiction in terms.
We are entitled to the same concern for accuracy as the scientists apply in
their own disciplines.
I do not have blind faith in anything, not even in the pronouncements of
science. Like everything else they have to be tested in real life.
But Baggott is of course right in saying that absolute certainty is not
possible.
Letters : Flipping DNA
Rochester, Michigan
Lou Bergeron’s piece on the evidence from Steens Mountain indicating
extremely rapid variations (days instead of thousands of years) in the
geomagnetic field during a reversal omitted one other delicious possibility in
his list of dire consequences (“When north flies south”, 30 March, p 24).
In a 1984 article in Science, I speculated that time-varying
magnetic fields during geomagnetic reversals might play a role in species mass
extinctions. Indeed, there is some evidence in support of the view that
extinctions often accompany reversals. This is really rather different from
Joseph Kirschvink’s concern over navigational problems that might happen for
birds and whales.
Although the public has seen a good deal concerning the relation of
power-line 50-hertz and 60-hertz magnetic fields to childhood leukaemia, we know
that time-varying magnetic fields have also been implicated in a wide variety of
biological responses, not the least of which is altered DNA synthesis. The
mechanism responsible for this type of interaction is still rather mysterious,
but there is no question that it occurs.
I have elsewhere reasoned that higher noise levels in the geomagnetic
environment, occurring during a five thousand to ten thousand year reversal,
would necessarily affect the genome, especially in single-celled organisms. An
event such as that described by Rob Coe, Michel Prevot and Pierre Camps would be
even more interesting, considering the large rate of change of field.
Letters : Kind by accident
London
Gail Vines’s article Inside the Social Cage (Review, 13 April, p 40)
is fascinating. One of the elements of fascination is a near repeat of the
common misunderstanding of evolution’s basic tenet that the species which
continues is the species that reproduces survivors at or above the replacement
rate鈥攁nd that genes contribute deliberately to this survival.
In fact, the “paradox” that “genetic self-advancement at the expense of
others鈥攚hich is the basic thrust of evolution鈥攈as given rise to
remarkable capacities for caring and sympathy”, as de Waal has put it, is no
paradox, but merely an illustration that species whose behaviour includes these
“social” habits produce adequate numbers of successful parents. The so-called
selfish genes carry the whole package and can’t deliberately shed the useless or
counterproductive bits.
In this sense, “social behaviour” should be viewed in the same way as all
other characteristics, from fangs to iridescent tail feathers, which all evolve
slowly and almost accidentally鈥攕ome being ideal for survival, some only
incidentally useful, and others serving no obviously useful purpose whatsoever.
It was the undirectedness of the above that caused as much distress to the
irreligious as to the religious in Darwin’s time and still appears to cause
intellectual difficulties today, though hopefully not to de Waal or Vines.
Letters : Brain shift
Your recent article detailing the case of Alex, a sufferer from Sturge-Weber
syndrome who acquired language at nine years of age after hemispherectomy,
highlights the importance of examining the consequences of brain damage acquired
relatively early in development (New 杏吧原创, Science, 20 April,
p 16).
The evidence in support of the existence of brain plasticity suggests that in
many instances, the brain is able to compensate for early damage by shifting
function from brain areas traditionally believed to subserve certain cognitive
skills, to other regions.
Such work as has been carried out suggests that the male brain retains
potential for relocating language function longer than the female brain鈥攕o
a female Alex may not have fared so well. Previous research also suggests that
the relocating function can “crowd out” the function usually associated with the
area now subserving the relocating function. It would be interesting to know
whether Alex’s visual/spatial skills have suffered as a consequence of language
emerging.
Letters : Bad timing
Richard Collingridge raises some interesting issues in his article about
science funding (Forum, 20 April, p 55). But many caveats are needed.
First, one might include all of particle physics and most of
astronomy鈥攚ith the exception of real-time events such as eclipses and
supernovae鈥攊n his Any Time group, from the standpoint of the continuing
existence of the phenomena to be studied. But were these areas all to be put on
hold, the failure to develop new instruments and train young scientists in these
fields would soon transform them from Any Time to projects which would need long
start-up times, as expertise is lost and equipment deteriorates.
Secondly, in raising the Just in Time above the Any Time group, Collingridge
is in danger of falling into the pitfall of rating the urgent over the
important. If there is just one pair of blue-spotted whirligig beetles left in
the world, it is certainly urgent to study their mating rituals while we still
can. But is it important, if they are, regrettably, going to die out anyway? Is
a soon-to-be irrelevant animal behaviour study more important than fundamental
research tracing the origins of the Universe via its imprint on the cosmic
microwave background?
And thirdly, one never knows when research is going to jump categories. I’m
sure that the underemployed vicars of the last century who spent their time on
their hands and knees closely observing insect species and their behaviours
would have classed their researches as Any Time. They did not know about the
extinction of species. But their work (some of it, anyway) turned out to be Just
in Time for today’s ecologists.
Similarly, one never knows when the study of Earth-crossing asteroids might
change from being an Any Time project into Just In Time. Wouldn’t it be terrible
if it became a Too Late enterprise and we went the way (according to some
theories) of the dinosaurs, when we might have done something about it?