Choppers on show
There is contemporary evidence supporting Steven Mithen’s theory that Stone
Age hand axes may have been, in part, a sexual display whereby dextrous males
advertised their skills to prospective mates
(This Week, 9 May, p 16).
You may be interested to learn that on 9 May, during a visit to Normandy by
the Dorset group of the Geologists’ Association as guests of the Normandy
Geology Society and the Friends of Le Havre Museum, a modern flint-knapping
industry emerged spontaneously on the beach at F茅camp.
Young male French geologists manufactured flint hand axes and arrowheads to
present to the young ladies of the Dorset party. These tributes undoubtedly
served as introductions between the parties concerned鈥擨 have no theory
about the lasting effect, but I am still grinning.
Letter
In your article on “dental danger” you say: “A plastic used by some dentists
to provide a protective coating over their patients’ teeth can disturb the
sexual development of unborn mice.”
Unless there are some very weird people out there, this must be a quantum
effect.
Toeing the line
It may be an extraordinary coincidence, but the story you broke about the tobacco industry
(This Week, 16 May, p 4) is being mirrored in the oil industry.
The only difference is that what the tobacco companies tried to do about passive
smoking, the oil companies are trying to do about climate change.
The US oil industry association, the American Petroleum Institute, is trying
to recruit a team of scientists to go public against climatologists on climate
change, according to a plan leaked in the US earlier this month.
The plan includes a programme to train scientists to pour cold water on the
work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and spin a
climate-sceptical line to the public. The idea is that these scientists will not
declare their links to the industry when appearing in the media.
It all sounds horribly familiar. Will this be the scandal which hits the
scientific community ten years from now?
No chance?
Paul Marston believes that words like “purposeless”, “chance” and “blind”
should not be used by scientists to express scientific ideas because these are
metaphysical terms. He also believes that, in denying God’s existence, atheists
express religious convictions
(Letters, 16 May, p 53).
So, if a person states that the Universe is not purposeless, is not governed
by blind chance but by the fiat of gods, there is nothing a scientist can do to
counteract this opinion, since any attack on it would necessarily include these
words, which are no-nos for scientists. This will make debate on the subject
rather difficult.
No. Metaphysics, religion and philosophy hold no patent rights on vocabulary
where scientists or anyone else is concerned.
And to call atheism a “religious view” because it attacks religion is like
calling people who don’t believe the Earth is flat Flat Earthers, because they
hold views on the subject.
Letter
Marston argues that science has fixed “tenets” (supposedly, the analogues of
Christian dogma), while religion displays “aspects of open quest” (similarly
analogous to scientific conjecture, perhaps).
Alas, this fig leaf is a little too small. 杏吧原创s remain such even while
they reject fundamental “tenets”, which they periodically do. Can Christians be
so cavalier? How open are they about the nature of God, this side of accusations
of blasphemy or heresy?
Letter
I don’t think the American National Association of Biology Teachers made a
good decision when it chose to censor words like “chance”, “impersonal” and
“unsupervised”. I think this was a watering down due to creationist
pressure.
Crop theft
Ismail Serageldin indicates that the World Bank is trying to ensure that the
highly important crop samples held by the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Resources (GIAR) gene banks remain “available to the world
community” and cannot be registered under intellectual property rights
legislation
(Letters, 9 May, p 57).
The chosen mechanism for this is a blanket claim by the World Bank of “public
domain” status for the contents of CGIAR gene banks. The implications of this
for developing countries and their farmers is very great. About half of the 600
000 samples in CGIAR gene banks are duplicates of originals in national gene
banks of the country of origin. A claim of “public domain” for the CGIAR
duplicate samples will undermine the national sovereignty over original
collections now guaranteed by the Convention on Biological Diversity. The
“country of origin” is known for about 95 per cent of CGIAR samples.
However, I am more concerned that the World Bank claim undermines the
property rights of Third World farmers. I estimate that up to 200 000 CGIAR
samples are duplicates of traditional varieties (landraces) still grown in
farmers’ fields, mainly in developing countries. It is in these fields that
landraces “have developed their distinctive properties” as required by the
Convention on Biological Diversity.
Under most national “plant varietal rights” (PVR) legislation, “public
domain” status for duplicate samples held in CGIAR collections would prevent the
farmers who deposited samples from ever registering their own varieties for PVR
protection. There would have been increasing future opportunity for this, as the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) now requires all countries to
introduce effective plant varietal rights legislation.
So the World Bank claim entirely removes a market-driven incentive for very
poor farmers to conserve and further develop some excellent varieties鈥攁n
incentive of great value to us all. Its position also undermines the policy of
last year’s British White Paper on International Development, which
states: “We will also work to ensure intellectual property rights promote the
conservation of biodiversity.”
Even worse, the World Bank’s claim, if upheld, would favour advanced plant
breeding and biotech companies, including those from the US, which has not yet
ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. Anyone with the technology can
readily derive new varieties from public-domain samples, and then legally
register these new varieties under PVR. This is a subsidy from the poor to the
rich.
I urge the World Bank to retreat from this weak legal and ethical position by
acknowledging that the CGIAR samples of farmers’ varieties are not in the public
domain.
Repeat performance
Your report on the possible danger of a tooth coating used by dentists
(This Week, 16 May, p 14)
may have inadvertently misinformed readers by not reporting
the full uncertainties in the science.
The article mentions a study in which male mice at birth were smaller and had
seminal vesicles “12 per cent smaller than those in controls”, but does not
mention the preliminary nature of the study. For instance, only the results of a
single experiment are reported and only a
small number of laboratory animals were used in the study鈥攋ust 7 mice
per dose tested and 11 mice in the control group.
Two recent studies have pointed out the difficulty of relying on unconfirmed
laboratory studies to draw conclusions about human health effects, particularly
those based on observations of small changes in reproductive organs in
laboratory animals. Last November, John Ashby and his colleagues at Zeneca in
Alderley Park, Cheshire, reported that they were unable to replicate three
studies which seemed to show small changes in reproductive organs due to a
hormonal effect. In one case they reported reproducible effects where no effects
had been observed, while in other cases the converse was found. In no case was
the reason for the discrepancy obvious.
Last month Richard Sharpe of the Medical Research Council Reproductive
Biology Unit in Edinburgh and his colleagues reported that they were unable to
replicate their own results on the effects of hormonal compounds on testes from
a laboratory study which included three replicates with between 23 and 65
animals in each group.
There is thus considerable uncertainty about whether the results of the study
you report can be replicated by other scientists, and whether there is any
significance at all for human health or even for laboratory animals.
Letter
Your article mentioned geometry quite a number of times, but failed to
mention the likely energetics. The way the molecular diagrams of adenine and
guanine were drawn hid the fact that the key hydrogen bonds necessary in
Curtis’s model involved C-H interactions with oxygen, not the usual N-H hydrogen
bonds.
While C-H…O hydrogen bonds do occur, their interaction energy is only about
one-third to one-half that of an N-H…O bond, and they tend to form only when
no better alternative is possible.
The geometries and energies of interaction between molecules are the core of
much of chemistry, and can be predicted quite accurately and reliably using
models based on quantum mechanics. Readers might be interested to view the
predicted geometries of the Curtis models
(http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/newscientist/curtis/).
The Curtis thymine-adenine base pair is actually quite competitive
energetically with the Watson-Crick standard, although the geometry is quite
different from that implied in the article. However, neither the geometry nor
the energy of the Curtis cytosine-guanine model come out very well. But as the
article implies, we may not have heard the last of this yet.
Dubious DNA
If the figure on page 34 of your article on the structure of DNA is an
accurate representation of bonding between base pairs, then the alternative DNA
structure proposed by Mark Curtis cannot be correct
(“Deconstructing DNA”, 16 May, p 32).
Under the classic Watson and Crick scheme, three hydrogen bonds link cytosine
and guanine, whereas adenine and thymine are linked by only two. This bonding
pattern is supported by the observation reported in many elementary biochemistry
texts that it takes more heat energy to separate strands of DNA rich in C-G than
for DNA in which A-T base pairs predominate, partly because C-G pairs are held
together more strongly by their three bonds than A-T pairs are by two.
According to Curtis’s new structure, however, both base pairings appear to be
linked by only two bonds. A double helix held together by such bonds would not
exhibit the thermal stability seen in DNA extracted from many species.
Letter
It would be clutching at straws to give any weight to fixed tenets in
science. Scepticism is a founding principle. On the other hand, religion is a
totally “open quest” since nothing on which it is founded is verifiable.
That year again
Further to your earlier correspondence on when the new millennium really
starts, in the 7 May issue of the Institution of Electrical Engineers’s IEE
News there is an article on how to beat the millennium bug.
The first paragraph reads: “Just because a company doesn’t rely on computers
in its day-to-day business doesn’t mean that it’s immune to the threat of the
date change from 1999 to 2001.”
Wrongly reptile
Jonathan Knight suggests that the Texas blind salamander is descended from lizards
(“Busy doing nothing”, 25 April, p 32).
Now that would really be worth an article of its own, since salamanders are
amphibians and lizards are reptiles.
Letter
Why is the telephone number of the British Millennium Commission 0171 880
2001?
Letter
Because of my surname I wanted to learn the bassoon, but my parents forbade
it for the same reason. They said that “Solo: G. Sassoon (bassoon)” would not
look good on a concert programme.
Letter
I suppose I am a victim, however prosaic, of nominative determinism. I write
books for a living.
Letter
Nils Erik Grande asks what Lulu Skidmore’s natural career should be
(Letters, 16 May, p 54).
There is a bicycle shop in Oldham called Skidmore’s Cycles.
Happy families
I’ve been tempted to send in this example of nominative determinism for
months now. I was finally prompted to do so by Richard Holt’s letter
(25 April, p 57)
in which he mentions Bridport in the west of England.
The Mecca of nominative determinism must surely be the delightful town of
Dartmouth, Devon. Here, within a hundred yards of each other, you will find the
shop and gallery of Mr Drew the artist, the pharmacy of Mr Killer the chemist,
the shop of Mr Cutmore the butcher and finally Blewitt’s the Bookmaker.
I believe that a few years ago Mr Drew produced a pack of “Happy Families”
playing cards based on these characters, which were then sold for charity. As
far as I am aware, there is no truth in the rumour that the charity event was
organised by a Mr Ben Evolence.
Disc danger
Karl Erik Birkeland and Fiona Vincent advocate using CDs as solar filters
(Letters, 9 May, p 59).
This is dangerous advice. As Ralph Chou of the School of Optometry,
University of Waterloo, Canada, has pointed out, CDs have a wide range of
optical densities and many are unsuitable for use as solar filters. They are,
therefore, not recommended for this.
Sensible sheep
I was intrigued by the article on least action with its comments on footpath routes
(“Easy does it”, 9 May, p 44).
When I walk on streets and pavements where the surface is smooth underfoot, I
take a straight line to walk the shortest distance, cutting diagonally across a
bend in the road, saving time. When walking on grass I notice that I always
follow a ready-made track, even if it is not quite direct. Presumably I am
unconsciously choosing a different strategy to secure least action according to
whether the terrain is rough or smooth. Sheep do the same.
I watched my neighbour’s sheep respond to a shout announcing food. Each
animal headed the shortest distance to a track which led diagonally across the
field, turned right onto it like drivers turning onto a main road, and headed
off in single file. Not one of the sheep took a straight line to the food.
Relatively right
In his review of On Giants’ Shoulders, Fred Pearce quotes Roger
Penrose as saying that if Einstein had not discovered general relativity, “it
might not have been arrived at by anyone else”
(Review, 16 May, p 46). He goes
on to say, “Considering what has flowed from it鈥攊ncluding nuclear
weapons鈥攖hat is some claim.” This is a misunderstanding. For nuclear
weapons, all one needs is E=mc2, part of special relativity, developed
by Einstein in 1905. If he had not done so, there can be little doubt that
others would have: Lorentz and Poincar茅 were half way there already.
It was in the invention of general relativity in 1915 that Einstein’s role
was arguably unique.
Careful driver
I was disappointed to note that new cars in Britain consume around 8 litres
of fuel per 100 kilometres, equivalent to roughly 35 miles per gallon in more
familiar units
(This Week, 25 April, p 18 and
Letters, 23 May, p 56).
Improving this is as much a matter of education of the public as design
improvements by car manufacturers. It is perfectly possible to achieve much
better than this with cars presently available, simply by choosing the right
car, driving at the permitted speeds rather than greatly in excess of them, and
accelerating thoughtfully.
I drive a diesel VW Passat estate, not a small car, and achieve 55 miles per
gallon (5.15 litres per 100 km) routinely. Trying hard (driving at no more than
60 miles per hour, or 100 kilometres per hour), I can reach 65 miles per gallon
(4.36 litres per 100 km). Enforcing existing speed limits would be a major step
towards achieving the objectives you present.
Counting on the Web
As other correspondents have noted, Roger Silvester may well suffer from “dyscalculia”
(Letters, 9 May, p 58, and
30 May, p 57). I suggest he begins by
reading the useful online information provided by the Dyscalculia Forum at
http://www.shianet.org/~reneenew/mathLD.html.
Frightened fish
The conclusion that fish do not show emotions, based on increased heart rate
during stress, is flawed
(In Brief, 9 May, p 24).
Rather than regulating their
cardiac output by varying heart rate like mammals, lower vertebrates change the
stroke volume of their hearts. The heart of most fish is a simple volume pump
coupled with a single circulation, so too much excitement might rupture the
gills if there were a link between the heart and stress.
Moreover, it is well known that the primary endocrine responses to stress in
fish are a surge of catecholamines, followed by a sustained release of
cortisol鈥攑recisely the same mechanism as in humans.
The circulating concentrations of adrenaline and cortisol that occur in fish
exposed to such mild stresses as a person walking into the viewing gallery of an
aquarium suggest that fishes are sensitive souls indeed.
Measuring up
Perhaps in our species, size does matter.
The Curtain Company at Welwyn Garden City has a sign which normally says
“Free measuring and estimating service”. It has been changed by obliterating the
letters “esti”.