Faded genes
Lynn Dicks’s review of Defenders of the Truth
(8 April, p 57)
does a disservice both to history and to the complexity of the debate over
sociobiology. E. O. Wilson did not “suggest” in Sociobiology (1975)
that, as Dicks puts it, “genes might play a role in human behaviour”. He argued
that our behaviour, up to and including our social relations, is genetically
determined. Sociobiologists were heard to insist鈥攖o cite one significant
example鈥攖hat the “traditional” social roles of men and women were
biologically driven, were therefore “natural,” and so should not be changed. In
Consilience (1999), which I read as an extended argument for regarding
the humanities as a branch of biology, Wilson argued that free will is “a
biologically adaptive illusion”.
Such strict biological determinism is no more persuasive now than it was
then. Accepting that behaviour is drawn from a complex interplay of “nature” and
“nurture” doesn’t make genes pre-eminent鈥攁ny more than accepting that
green paint is a mixture of blue and yellow makes green simply a version of
blue.
If Dicks is interested in further exploring how politics and science cross,
try this question. Why did the same folks who lionised Wilson鈥攚hen,
intentionally or not, he gave them intellectual cover for their privileged
social positions鈥攎anage to ignore him so completely in his other notable
guise, as a leading proponent of protecting biodiversity? Or does politics only
matter when it can be presented as “Marxists” and “radicals” opposing “science”?
Saved from doom
While I believe that the impacts of humans on our home planet are great (I’ve
worked for a regional environmental action group for 25 years), I worry that the
mathematical musings of people like Anne Weil and James Kirchner, reported in
11 March (p 18),
can foster the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
Such fulminations do little to inspire people to save species, but rather add
to the root problem of hopelessness. I have witnessed the recovery of the sea
otter, the gray whale, the Aleutian Canada goose (from 800 in 1970 to 35 000
today), the brown pelican, the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon鈥攁nd
even the rediscovery of a couple of plant species that were thought to be
extinct.
Our group is now working on policies relating to endangered salmonids in the
Pacific Northwest of the US. A recovery of these fish will be difficult,
particularly if policy makers are encouraged to believe that it can’t be
done.
Bug bait
Further to your piece about Windows 2000
(Feedback, 8 April),
I see that the trade magazine Smart Reseller, which is often pro-Microsoft,
reports on a Microsoft memo referring to 63 000 “issues” in the software.
Even if, as the article acknowledges, only about 28 000 of these are actual
potentially harmful “bugs”, any hapless customer who reported them all, at the
price you quote of 拢675 plus VAT for five “incidents”, would pay 拢3
780 000.
Am I just old-fashioned in thinking that companies making money out of
customers reporting deficiencies in their inadequate products are acting less
than honestly?
Wind power
The idea of limiting methane emissions from ruminants by incorporating
methane-oxidising bacteria in their food
(15 April, p 6)
is a great one and has huge potential worldwide. However, the article mentions
only the effect on methane production in sheep. Although significant鈥攁bout
30 litres per sheep per day鈥攖his is dwarfed by the recorded 200 litres per
cow per day.
Obviously, if the quoted 17 per cent reduction in methane production by sheep
can be extended to cattle, major worldwide reductions in ruminant-derived
methane production are possible.
That is the researchers’ intention鈥攖o scale the method up to big,
expensive cows if it works in relatively manageable sheep. This point was cut
from the story for space reasons鈥擡d
Not junk
It seems odd that DNA replication might exploit quantum effects to maximise efficiency
(15 April, p 20)
when it wastes time replicating all that “junk DNA”. If Apoorva Patel turns out to be right,
this will surely be a strong argument that that DNA is not junk at all.
Peak parlance
Since Feedback appears to be edging towards lifting the ban on examples of
nominative determinism, I would like to share with you some observations about
a rather different field which may yet be of interest.
Many in Britain will have heard of the Munros, the hills in Scotland that are
at least 3000 feet high and which are named after Sir Hugh Thomas Munro, who
first listed them in 1891. (Sorry about the imperial units, but 914.4 metres does
not have quite the same ring to it!)
Far fewer will know of the equivalents in the rest of the British Isles. In
Ireland the first compiler was named Claude Wall, and in England and Wales we
have E. Moss, George Bridge, Terry Marsh and Michael Dewey.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that no one talks about climbing the Walls or
the Bridges, though in my experience the Marshes would be a most suitable name
for many hills above 600 metres. But I fear that Marsh’s name will not go down to
posterity in this way.
The most recent (and accurate) set of lists are compiled by Alan Dawson and
published by Dave Hewitt as a chapter on absolute heights in The Relative
Hills of Britain.
Recycled jet
So the Japanese have unveiled a revolutionary new jet engine
(15 April, p 10)?
Hardly. They appear to have reinvented the Pratt & Whitney J-58, most
famously used in the SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance plane. This is early 1960s
technology, from the intake geometry to the afterburner via the bypasses. The
SR-71 first flew in 1964.
Physics firecracker
Of course, one great book or paper can inspire a scientist’s life and career
(8 April, p 50),
but some can even determine the course of scientific thinking
in one or more centuries. Most readers will think of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin,
Einstein and Freud, and some will add Marx.
I have been wondering which great thinker set off the explosion in
theoretical physics in Germany and its environs during the early part of the
20th century鈥攖he epoch of Konrad Lorenz, Albert Einstein, Max Planck,
Niels Bohr and so on. Was it Immanuel Kant? In his Critique of Pure
Reason (1781) and the explanatory Prolegomena (1783) he proposed
that such concepts as space, time and causality are subjective features of human
perception and the organisation of the human mind, while the “thing in itself”
would remain unknowable.
Both books became best-sellers in Germany, and those countries whose science
was German-oriented, until the Second World War. Did Kant’s concepts, in
combination with the later development of sense physiology and the anti-Kantian
polemics of Hermann Helmholtz, open the minds of theoretical physicists to the
subjective aspects of scientific thinking on space, time and causality?
Anglo-American physicists, by contrast, seemed to have concentrated their
efforts on a more experimental and less theoretical approach. This may have been
due to the influence of William James’s pragmatic philosophy on, for example,
Albert Michelson and Ernest Rutherford, with James Clerk Maxwell in an
intermediate position.
So was Kant in fact the trailblazer鈥攁nd as such the
grandfather鈥攐f modern theoretical physics?
Moving language
Laura Spinney says, “Everybody gestures. Sometimes a visual sign is used as a
substitute for speech . . .” and continues, “It’s not clear why we do it”
(8 April, p 30).
I suggest that it is very clear why we do it. We are in fact drawing in the air.
As a scuba diver I know that the basic signs used underwater can be greatly
extended using gestures. Being totally deaf, I combine hearing aids, lip reading
and body language to pick up clues. And Method actors are encouraged to start
their lines 30 seconds before saying anything. Watching TV with the sound off
will show how good actors do this.
Gestures were undoubtedly our earliest method of communication. Animals mime
and gesture to each other, and early hunters who imitated their actions would
have been better hunters. Primitive humans could draw extremely well, yet had no
written language. Drawing itself is an extension of gesture, and a good
storyteller draws in the air. I teach animation as drama, and get students to
act out movements before they draw them. Russian animators used to study drawing
at ballet school. Most good animators are competent actors.
Having worked with hundreds of special needs children with communication
difficulties without finding one who could not draw, it is good to know that
non-verbal communication is being given the consideration it deserves. The next
big leap for humankind might be teaching drawing and acting as core subjects in
the curriculum.
Walk this way
Your report “No walkover”
(15 April, p 14)
seems to illustrate yet another
case of scientists not fully understanding the matter they are pursuing.
Standing and walking are not a matter of co-ordinating the actions of many
muscles. The problem of bipedal motion is one of constantly adjusting the body’s
position to keep the centre of gravity above the points of support鈥攖he
feet.
To do this we control the joints at toe, ankle, knee, hip and vertebrae by
using information sent from these points, as well as inputs from those
little-understood sensors, the eyes and inner ears. The servo action required is
not a steady affair, but a successive approximation.
I agree that to achieve this by strap-on electronics is a very tall order,
even when the researchers are fully aware of their problem. It takes us more
than six years to learn to walk safely鈥攍et alone run鈥攚hen we have a
whole body. Such experience is all but impossible to design.
Glowing error
Hugh Robertson is of course right to work for safer environments for his union members
(8 April, p 64).
However, there are a couple of errors in his
letter. The average annual dose limit for workers in the European Union is 20
times the public limit, not 50. It is 20 millisieverts (mSv) per year, and this
was enacted in Britain by the Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999.
It is not strictly true to say there is no safe level. No effects have been
proved at the 20 mSv per year level. The risk factors are derived by
extrapolation from much higher doses. So it is only true to say that there is no
known safe level.
Hidden hordes
Feedback pokes fun at Sid Bain of CSIRO for saying that several hundred
thousand Australian insect species have yet to be discovered
(15 April).
Such estimates are made by using a very important statistical technique鈥攐ne
that ought to be more widely practised outside biology, where it is
commonplace.
It’s called a double-labelling experiment, and it goes like this. You want to
know how many foxes there are in a given area. You go out and catch a thousand
foxes in the area. You tag them and release them. A while later, you go out and
catch another thousand foxes, and count how many are tagged. If there are a
hundred, you know your initial thousand were about 10 per cent of the local
population, which must total about 10 000. All this depends upon the null
hypothesis that your caught foxes are typical, and not (for example) those too
slow or dim to avoid your traps.
To answer the original question of how many unknown insect species there are
in Australia, you do a similar, but even simpler, experiment. You catch 1000
insects and count the number of new species among them. As you already have the
number of known species, this tells you roughly how many remain to be
discovered. The trick is knowing where to do your catching to get typical
samples.
Mean mode
Rob White’s comb, which came in a package emblazoned with “Average contents1”
(Feedback, 8 April),
reminds me of the old riddle: “How many people in the
world have more than the average number of hands?” Ask 100 people this, and 99
will say “Nobody”, imagining that two is the “average” (the mean) and that
nobody has three hands. In fact, the answer is “almost everybody”.
Most of us have two hands, and a few unfortunates have only one, or none.
Hence, the average number of hands per person is fewer than 1.9999 and almost
all of us have more hands than that. Averages certainly are funny things.