Letters : Vincent's van
Sydney
I enjoyed your story concerning the paper by Vincent, Van and Goh (Feedback,
30 November). There is, of course, a very famous example of this sort of
cheekiness.
One of the seminal papers concerning the big bang (the one which predicted
the cosmic microwave background) was being written in 1948 by George Gamow and
Ralph Alpher. They couldn’t resist bringing their colleague, Hans Bethe, into it
so that the author list would read “Alpher, Bethe and Gamow”.
Letters : . . .
by e-mail
In the journal Surface Science (1989, vol 221) there is a paper
entitled “Interactions of N2 molecules adsorbed on smooth and roughened NI (III)
surfaces” authored by A. Quick, V. Browne and S. Fox (and P. Hollins).
Letters : . . .
by e-mail
You mention an article written by Vincent, Van and Goh, and claim that Van
was a temporary worker from Korea whose first names were Moo Ving.
Moo Ving Van. Hmmmm鈥�
I suspect never-never land rather than Korea.
Letters : Cat's curdle
South Hobart, Tasmania
It is not the lightning that curdles milk (The Last Word, 30 November), but
rather the accompanying thunder. This is yet another example of the
well-documented phenomenon of sound being able to curdle liquids. A better-known
example is the curdling effect of high-pitched screams on blood.
It takes the longer lower-pitched frequency of rolling thunder to similarly
affect milk. Does anyone have any data on which frequencies curdle other body
fluids?
This effect may be the reason for the apparent underutilisation by visiting
aliens of the buttered cat array to power their spaceships (Feedback, 19 October
and 16 November). To make a journey between star systems, a large quantity of
milk is required to keep the moggies going, which is kept in saucers hung from
their necks. (From the ground these look like flying saucers). As the spaceship
travels through the atmosphere of a planet, the resulting sonic booms curdle the
milk within a few minutes. It is likely that the aliens would find frequent use
of the buttered cat array uneconomic, until they resolve this intergalactic
technical problem.
Letters : . . .
The length of the graphite nanofibres in “Green cars go farther with
graphite”, (Technology, 21/28 December), should have been given as 5 to 100
micrometres, not millimetres as the article stated.
Letters : Beyond metaphor
Berkeley, California
I found Eugene Stanley’s review of my book, The Web of Life,
stimulating and fair in spite of several differences of opinion (Review, 7
December, p 46). However, the review has a serious flaw which, I feel, needs to
be corrected: it deals only with half of the book.
Stanley makes many interesting comments on the first six chapters (150
pages), which contain my historical account of the emergence and development of
systems thinking in 20th-century science. But strangely, the review does not
deal with chapters 7 to 12 (137 pages), in which I discuss contemporary theories
of living systems and offer a synthesis that allows us to integrate these
theories into a coherent conceptual framework.
Stanley summarily dismisses the very core of my book with the remark that it
is based on the work of “the more metaphorically inclined scientists of our
present age”. I find it hard to believe that in “the half-month I have spent
reading The Web of Life” the reviewer did not notice that the theories
discussed have now advanced far beyond the metaphorical level. It is true that
Ilya Prigogine, for example, has a great gift for powerful metaphors, but his
theory of dissipative structures is formulated in mathematical language, as I
took great pains to explain.
Other examples of theoretical advances beyond metaphors discussed in the book
include Brian Goodwin’s application of Prigogine’s theory to the development of
single-celled algae; Francisco Varela’s computer simulation of an autopoietic
network; Stuart Kauffman’s successful predictions of several details of cell
development in multicellular organisms by modelling their genomes as Boolean
networks; the discovery and studies of chemical autopoietic systems by
researchers at the Swiss Polytechnical University; the application of
autopoiesis to the Gaia system by Lynn Margulis, based on her work in
microbiology; and the application of the Santiago theory of cognition to the
immune system by researchers at the University of Paris.
I also feel that a serious discussion of the framework of my
synthesis鈥攖he three conceptual dimensions of structure, pattern, and
process, which are the very essence of the book鈥攚ould have given readers a
better idea of the contents of The Web of Life, and might even (who
knows?) have brought the reviewer closer to understanding my answer to
Schr枚dinger’s question.
Letters : Seven long days
Hove, East Sussex
I am surprised and somewhat disappointed by the naivety of your editorial on
taking creationists to court (30 November, p 3).
Do you seriously suppose that all “creationists” believe the same things?
Surely not. The idea that we all believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, for
example, is ludicrous. Some creationists do indeed believe this, but many more,
myself included, recognise that the word translated as “day” in the seven days
of creation was originally used to denote an unspecified period of time, and
that an Earth of massive antiquity is wholly acceptable.
Likewise there are some creationists who believe that the loading of Noah’s
Ark was a miraculous event involving two of every species. Others, recognising
that adaptation is a perfectly acceptable notion, believe that a single pair of
animals might have been the precursors of all canine species, another pair might
have been the precursors of all feline species, and so on.
Why, then, do you feel that one needs to be “gullible to believe in
creationism”?
Wouldn’t I need to be just as gullible to believe Richard Dawkins’s
“explanation” of the development of the eye? According to Michael Behe (
Darwin’s Black Box), that’s exactly what I would need to be.
In short, while there may well be plenty of propeller heads in the
creationist camp, there are also a good many people who hold their views for
what are, to them, perfectly sound reasons. And why not, given the late Peter
Medawar’s remarkably frank statement that “acceptance of the hypothesis of
evolution does not rest鈥pon the validity of so-called proofs of
evolution, most of which are unconvincing or open to other interpretations”?
Generalisations such as those in your editorial may well satisfy the converts
on your side of the fence, but I wonder if they really do anything to lead us
towards a more mature, reasoned debate?
Letters : Burger bullies
Darwin, Northern Territory
Described as “aggressive to handle and difficult to keep in cages”, mice in
the recent Birmingham plague “got so worked up by being confined that they often
died of stress” (This Week, 30 November, p 6). The suggestion that the mice may
have become physiologically acclimatised to eating refuse found around burger
restaurants may also account for their behaviour.
Among the approximately sixty ingredients in a well-known brand of burger,
there are five preservatives (calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, butylated
hydroxyanisole, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid) and four naturally occurring
food chemicals (natural monosodium glutamate, salicylates, amines and annatto
colouring) which have been associated with dose-related adverse effects in some
humans. Reactions include those possibly suffered by mice: irritable bowel
symptoms such as poor digestion of certain cereals, irritability, aggression,
restlessness, hyperactivity, addiction to the problem-causing foods and even
withdrawal symptoms.
It would be interesting to feed several generations of the “bumpkin” mice
solely on burgers and see if they turn into “streetwise” mice.
Letters : Stealing time
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire
Two items in This Week (23 November, p 14) may be more related than at first
appears. One tells of tests on a new drug containing ampakines, which appear to
boost memory efficiency in the elderly and to some degree in the young, and the
second item covers research into why “time flies” in old age.
In my 70th year (and still writing full time) I can confirm that time seems
to fly disturbingly faster each year. As suggested, maybe one’s brain clock runs
more slowly as the years pass, but is the effect partially explainable because
as one’s memory-intake efficiency drops, so the number of events occurring in a
given time appears to decrease? Then, as the ratio of recorded events to lapsed
time changes, time will appear to pass more quickly.
Whatever, I reckon I could do with a course of ampakine pills to boost memory
intake, rather than having to write notes the instant I receive useful
information.
Letters : . . .
Barry, Glamorgan
In Peter Mangan’s experimental results, a 20 per cent difference between
younger and older people is nowhere near enough to account for actual
experience.
At five years old, it is very hard to remember what happened last summer, or
last Christmas. In middle age, it seems like yesterday. Why should this be?
Surely we relate time intervals to our total experience. For a five-year-old,
a year is a fifth of a lifetime. For a fifty-year-old, it is only a tenth of
that. This is why the year has gone before we know what happened to it.
Letters : . . .
Shalford, Surrey
Your article confirms my personal suspicion that children actively steal time
from their parents by some subtle process of temporal osmosis, possibly in order
to prolong the school holidays.
Letters : Collective wisdom
London
Ian Stewart calls “the notion of a single unconscious mind for all of
humanity鈥 mystical and rather silly concept鈥�” (“Think maths”, 30
November, p 38). Rather synchronistically, my Jungian (of course) analyst has
just told me that “silly” derives from an Arabic word meaning “wise” or
“enlightened”.
Perhaps Stewart’s clearly demarcated subconscious is trying to tell him
something?
Letters : Different sexes
Leatherhead, Surrey
I refer to the article by Kurt Kleiner on sex discrimination in education in
the US (Forum, 23 November, p 49).
There cannot be an overall bias against females in American higher education
since the proportions of male and female new graduates in all subjects (as an
aggregate) have been roughly equal for some years, in fact slightly higher for
females. So an attempt to increase this proportion would be politically
incorrect.
Much more dramatic is the effect of subject choice: many academic subjects
are more likely to be pursued by men and, if only as a consequent arithmetic
necessity, others much more by women. To take one subject as an example, females
tend to pack into psychology.
Of about a million new BA graduates in the US in 1995, 70 000 were in
psychology and 75 per cent of these were female. Equal female dominance in
psychology also exists in Britain and several other countries, and nobody knows
how it might be changed.
Sex segregation may be increasing rather than decreasing. The increased
proportion of females in universities has to a great extent been accommodated by
increasing the numbers of students in female-dominated subjects.
Very little evidence can be found for the hypothesis that males and females,
taken as groups or statistical distributions, are academic and occupational
identities, that is, are identical across all relevant psychometric
variables.
On the contrary, there is much evidence that gender differences (behavioural
dispositions) related to sex are strongly inherited or partially brought about
hormonally. Attempts to “re-gender” or merely “de-gender” very young people of 5
to 6 years old have failed.