Proof and belief
Creationists believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that
evidence to the contrary was itself manufactured by God.
For an entity capable of creating the entire Universe, providing Earth with a
history by burying a few fossils capable of fooling folk with hammers and hand
lenses (or even JCBs and microscopes) would be child’s play
(22 April, p 32).
Astronomers would present a different problem. Each object created would have
to have its sphere of photons with shells like the layers of an onion, reaching
across the entire Universe, recording the changing output in the history, not
only of the object itself, but also of other objects the photons interact with.
This is an altogether more demanding task, perhaps several orders of magnitude
greater than the creation of the objects themselves.
If we are the only sentient beings around, it would only be necessary to
provide the photon history in our line of sight. This would reduce the task, but
not by that much. I’ll stick with evolution.
Letter
Regarding the discussion about creation versus evolution: when you look
carefully at the two books on which the argument centres, you will find that,
ironically, On the Origin of Species is a work of creation (by one man,
Charles Darwin, published at a precise moment in time, in 1859, and not changed
since).
On the other hand, the Bible as we now know it is the result of evolution
over at least 2000 years, in which the original (Jewish) text was shortened and
lengthened, changed and translated many times, until it eventually became a
whole range of Bibles with their own slightly different text. Many in-between
versions have been lost and so has the original.
Not only is the Bible a product of evolution, but so is the present set of
Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions, which clearly stem from the same origin,
but have since (under the influence of the environment) evolved so strongly that
“interbreeding” between them is not only well-nigh impossible, but strictly
forbidden in some of the more radical branches.
Letter
Dan’l Danehy-Oakes’s comments on Debora MacKenzie’s creationism article
betray a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between evolution and genetic
information鈥攁 misunderstanding that is widespread among both evolutionists
and evolutionary sceptics
(13 May, p 51).
Oakes states that mutation adds information to the genome, while natural
selection does not. This is true of only one sort of information, sometimes
known as Shannon-Weaver information. You can think of this as a measure of how
difficult it would be to describe something in detail. Random or noisy
processes, such as genetic mutation or the proverbial monkey at a typewriter,
are a source of Shannon-Weaver information. There is no shorter description of a
book of random letters than the book itself.
As Oakes contends, natural selection does actually decrease the
Shannon-Weaver information content of the genome by weeding out much of the
random noise produced by mutation. At the same time, however, it adds structure
to the genome, increasing its complexity. The genome evolves towards something
more like a Shakespeare play than a book of random letters.
This results in an increase in a different sort of information, which we
might call “semantic” information鈥攊nformation with meaning. It is this
sort of information that natural selection increases over time.
The Shakespeare play has considerably less Shannon-Weaver information than a
book of random letters, but it has much more meaning and much more complexity.
The great achievement of evolutionary biology has been to explain the origins of
this semantic information鈥攖o demonstrate how, from simple beginnings, a
material process can give rise to extraordinary complexity.
Letter
Please don’t let another “hard scientist” try and convince me that evolution
isn’t true because he’s done science. I don’t ask my doctor to repair my car.
Letter
Nick Barker is anagramatically concerned that that there is no middle way
between science and creationism
(13 May, p 52).
Of course there is. It’s called the Third Way and “It is Tony, the Creator”
maps neatly onto “creationist theory”.
Crazy correlations
Your comments on champagne fizz and the dangers inherent in accepting
apparently linked events without control data
(13 May, p 39)
bring to mind a comment my biology teacher made to me years ago: “You often hear of dolphins
escorting distressed swimmers back to land, but you never hear of the cases
where the swimmer is carefully escorted out to sea.”
World of phonies
Feedback
(29 April)
quotes a headline from the online science news agency
EurekAlert!, “Smoking cessation aids help smokers to quit”, and then implies
that the headline is obvious with the comment: “Hands up who’s surprised.”
Well, I’m surprised. The headline should be obvious but, unfortunately, you
can’t trust people. Just because someone claims an aid will do something doesn’t
mean that it will. The market is full of products advertised as aids to reduce
weight, improve fitness, kill germs, filter water, provide luck, destroy cancer,
cure AIDS and so on, and many of these products do not work. (Why aren’t
regulatory authorities hitting these untested and unsubstantiated products
harder?)
Hence, these days, if an aid does what it’s claimed to do, then it is
surprising.
AIDS heretics
Your editorial criticises President Mbeki’s decision to debate the true
nature of AIDS in Africa
(6 May, p 3).
However, you do not explain why New
杏吧原创 is so vehemently opposed to scientific debate.
President Mbeki himself comments on the hostility to the views of Peter
Duesberg and others who question the causes and nature of AIDS, in an open
letter to world leaders including President Clinton, published in The
Washington Post (19 April 2000): “It is suggested . . . that there are some
scientists who are `dangerous and discredited’ with whom nobody, including
ourselves, should communicate or interact. In an earlier period in human
history, these would be heretics that would be burnt at the stake! Not long ago,
in our own country, people were killed, tortured, imprisoned and prohibited from
being quoted in private and in public because the established authority believed
that their views were dangerous and discredited. We are now being asked to do
precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did,
because, it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the
majority, against which dissent is prohibited.”
Just who has discredited Duesberg you do not make clear. To date, no
scientists have been able to refute the principal criticisms levelled by
Duesberg against the received wisdom concerning HIV and AIDS. Moreover, as
Gordon Stewart, a fellow member of Mbeki’s expert AIDS panel, has observed in
The Lancet (21 August 1999): “A more fundamental question is why . . .
has HIV never been isolated by electron microscopy or gradient
ultracentrifugation from co-culture cellular material from any African
patient?”
Non-stick NASA?
Washington Diary suggests that the powdered fruit drink Tang plus Teflon
and Velcro would have been developed with or without NASA’s help
(29 April, p 49).
In fact, all three of the products were developed without NASA’s help. Tang
was introduced by General Foods in 1965 after 10 years of development by food
scientists. Tang became popular when NASA featured it in space and Moon
missions. The development of Teflon began in April 1938 and DuPont registered
the Teflon trademark in 1945 (the material was used in classified military
electronic equipment during WW2). Velcro had its beginnings back in the early
1940s as the brainchild of Swiss inventor George de Mestral.
All three developments predated the establishment of NASA on 1 October 1958.
NASA therefore has no legitimate spin-off claim for these products.
On the run
Your correspondent Edo Lin asks how to recognise hedgehog droppings
(20 May, p 51).
Hedgehogs are an ancient group, with a unique mammalian defence mechanism.
This may be why they are also unique in that they do not bother to stop moving
while they defecate. Hence the appearance of their long, tapering droppings
(about 10 by up to 100 millimetres), almost black and sometimes iridescent from
insect chitin, on my lawn at this time of year.
A not-very-good illustration appears on page 110 of Corbet and Ovenden’s
Mammals of Britain & Europe, published by Collins (1980).
Coming the prawn
The Daily Express considers stir-fried locusts to be “very similar to prawns”
(Feedback, 13 May).
From personal experience, I can safely say this is not the case.
Damned if you do . . .
The report of a “heavy dose of allergens” received by nearly half of
Americans as they settle down to sleep
(13 May, p 5)
is an extremely timely one, given the almost simultaneous report indicating
a link between increased allergen exposure and a lower incidence of asthma
in children (The Lancet, 13 May).
In the former report it was stated that more than 23 per cent of homes have
dust mite allergen levels sufficient to cause asthma symptoms, so implying a
need for increased cleanliness in these homes. However, in the latter study it
appears that exposure to such high allergen levels may actually induce some
immunity against asthma in later life.
The dilemma comes where homes contain both children who do not yet suffer
from asthma and parents and/or siblings who do. Should the house be kept
spotlessly clean to ease the asthma symptoms of the sufferers, or should a less
rigorous approach be taken to cleaning, in the hope of increasing immunity to
asthma in the children?