Letter
How does an animal learn knowledge of its environment and the habits of its
prey or predators? Has it accidentally stumbled on the true scientific method or
does this information not count as knowledge?
Human beings managed to acquire knowledge quite successfully for several
millennia before the scientific method was invented.
Brain goes critical
More modest coughs from a minor prophet: I described the emergence of the
“global brain”
(24 June, p 22)
in Dial F for Frankenstein, published by
your competitor, Playboy magazine, in January 1965 and now in my
collection The Wind from the Sun. It was actually written in 1963, and
I assumed that as soon as communications satellites started operating (which
they did in 1965), the global telephone system would reach criticality.
The slightly dated opening sentence reads: “At 0150 on December 1 1975, every
telephone in the world started to ring.” If I was writing this story now, I
would have “Access denied” appearing on the world’s computer screens.
Letter
Your correspondent Henry Warwick insists that the Internet is not a brain,
but merely a collection of computers passing voltages to each other
(15 July, p 52).
It is truly remarkable that such an observation should emerge, as it
undoubtedly did, from a few litres of lukewarm water and a collection of complex
molecules.
In the face of such a miracle, isn’t it arrogant of us to suppose that our
brains are uniquely governed by some mysterious principle, forever incapable of
affecting any other system, however complex?
Upset elephants
We are told that Karen McComb and colleagues have been playing back the calls
of long-dead elephants, to those that are still alive and are likely to remember
the deceased and recognise their calls鈥攚hich they apparently did
(15 July, p 14).
We know that elephants are highly social animals and have a long period of
grieving when a family member dies (perhaps the longest of all animals). To
reawaken an elephant’s memory of the dead family member could cause further
unnecessary grieving. But, more importantly, it might well have started a new
myth in elephant circles about spiritualism and ghosts鈥攕omething that had
not, as far as we know, troubled them for millions of years.
Lay off the iron
As iron deficiency during pregnancy is so common, I find it difficult to
believe that it is a pathological state that requires treatment, so I was
interested to read the article on oxygen’s role in miscarriages
(8 July, p 6).
If oxygen levels are so highly regulated during gestation, I wonder whether
the reduction in iron, which will reduce the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood,
is a natural mechanism to help control the amount of oxygen available to the
fetus.
Maybe the role of iron therapy during pregnancy should reconsidered, as it
may cause more harm than good.
Up and away
Oh, dear! Two letters on aerofoils, both of them sadly wrong
(8 July, p 50).
Julian Gold is confused about symmetric aerofoils. A “symmetric” aerofoil
section is indeed symmetric about its centreline, but if the centreline is
tilted a few degrees then the aerofoil becomes asymmetric to the airflow, and
behaves much as an asymmetric aerofoil would with a smaller angle of attack.
This effective asymmetry is aided by the movement of the stagnation point around
the nose of the aerofoil when it is angled to the flow.
Gold is also confused about the Coanda effect and high-mounted engines on
STOL airplanes. They are mounted there to make it easier for part of the efflux
to be used for flap-blowing. The Coanda effect could not redirect the jet
exhaust in the way he describes, although it is important to the flow of air
over the flaps. Neither does Coanda-induced mass transfer downwards cause any
significant addition to the lift of an aerofoil.
Gold does not think Bernoulli explains the lift of aerofoils. Gold is wrong,
and is at odds with over a century of painstaking research.
Stephen Hayes is awfully confused about Bernoulli, too. In contrast to what
he says, there is a causal connection between the speed of the airflow and the
pressure, and that connection is described by Bernoulli’s equation.
If the airstream’s total energy remains constant, then an increase in one
component of it must cause a consequent energy drop in another component. If the
kinetic energy of the airstream goes up鈥攁s it must do if forced around an
aerofoil’s humped top surface鈥攖hen the pressure must go down, reducing the
energy that is held in the airstream as potential expansion and thus balancing
the equation. How Hayes manages to think that “the faster air velocity is a
consequence of the reduced pressure” is beyond me.
Ethical drug testing
As a paediatrician and researcher who has worked in Malawi, Gambia and
Zimbabwe, I am sympathetic to the views expressed by Dirceu Greco about drugs
testing in Third World countries
(1 July, p 42).
However, there is another perspective on this issue.
The unconscionable disparity in health outcomes and healthcare services
between developed and developing countries is the real issue, rather than
unethical research. Trying to apply universal ethical guidelines to such
disparities is nonsense.
External research funding has allowed me to offer children better treatment
for malaria and malnutrition than would otherwise be available in poor
countries. These studies were approved by local ethics committees, and the
children’s guardians signed written informed consent.
There is a real danger of universalist ethical posturing stopping good
research which is relevant to developing countries’ health problems. Local
ethics committees such as the one chaired by Greco are surely adequate
safeguards against academic or commercial exploitation of developing countries
against their will.
Nearly all African countries have such ethics committees now, and surely it
is the ultimate paternalism to suggest that Africans cannot decide for
themselves what research should be allowed and would benefit them.
Wobble no more
I suppose there are some conventional engineering solutions to the problem of
the swaying Millennium Bridge
(8 July, p 14),
but here are two simpler ways:
Each pedestrian stepping on to the bridge will be given a small earphone that
will count cadence for the walker. Each earphone will deliver a slightly
different cadence timed to avoid accidental synchronicity.
This will create a new post of Royal Bridge Cadence Keeper, thus adding to
the rich English heritage.
Alternatively, pedestrians could be forbidden to lift their feet, thus
reducing the vertical loading. As a further reduction of live loading, they can
all be instructed to move at half speed. The effect of so many slowly shuffling
folks might be a little zombie-like, but the low cost of this solution is very
attractive.
I’m releasing both of these ideas at no charge in the interest of advancing
science.
Enter the bodywitness
Feedback was amused by “earwitness” reports of aircraft engine noise
(8 July).
While touchwitness, smellwitness and tastewitness reports would also be
fun, I’m personally looking forward to fingerwitness, nosewitness and
tonguewitness accounts. The latter would surely increase any readership.
Waifs of the world
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh found that about 1 per cent of
schoolgirls in rural Ghana are anorexic
(8 July, p 23).
The implication is that
this should excuse the fashion industry in the West, and especially in Britain,
since these Ghanaian girls have not been exposed to the Western media.
In fact, there was anorexia in Britain and the US in the 18th and 19th
centuries, long before the advent of the fashion industry. There are undoubted
physiological, and probably genetic, predispositions to anorexia in all
populations.
At Aberdeen University we have found that as many as 1 in 5 female
undergraduates get scores similar to those of true anorexia sufferers on the
sort of questionnaires used in Ghana鈥攁nd the same is true of other British
and American universities.
These young women are not diagnosed anorexics, but they have similar
attitudes to food as anorexics and, when estimating their body size, they show
the same errors of exaggeration of size seen in anorexic patients.
However, the fact that 20 times as many young women in the West as
schoolgirls in Ghana score like anorexics does raise questions about cultural
influence. I feel that this puts the problem back with our culture, and probably
with our media and the fashion industry.
Who knows best?
Those, like your correspondent Giovanni Carsaniga, who say there is no
knowledge but scientific knowledge
(8 July, p 50)
make the mistake of forgetting
that science is more than merely the knowledge it produces. There are the
institutions, the conventions, the training and enculturation required today to
pursue science. 杏吧原创s are not interested in these; they are only interested
in the knowledge, which makes them blind to the institutional structure which
supports it.
Carsaniga tellingly claims “public scrutiny” to be part of the methodology of
science. Peer review is not public, though, but restricted to an appropriately
qualified group. Why do you think anti-evolutionists are beginning to publish
their theories as “popular science” books? They have failed the scrutiny of
scientists and hope to pass the less demanding scrutiny of the public.
Carsaniga also overlooks the fact that most of a person’s scientific
knowledge is based on authority. I am neither a physicist nor a preacher. My
evidence for the existence of electrons and for that of the Christian God are of
exactly the same kind. Both are advocated by people in certain positions of
authority and both are claimed to be evidenced by the world I see around me.
Letter
Knowledge is not knowing any different until we do know different.
Put it this way: you find out you are wrong at the point when you discover
that a view you held turns out to be incorrect. But before that point, you were
certain you were right. Hence, your views on both occasions can be described as
“knowledge”.
For example, I believe that “Bob is in the office”. This is my current
knowledge of Bob’s whereabouts鈥攅ven if it later turns out that Bob is not
in the office.
So to say that emotions, beliefs, opinions, myths and intuitions are not
knowledge is to miss the point. Knowledge is a quality of certainty, not a
quantum of information.
Letter
How does one know when one is hot or cold or frightened or in pain or in
love? Direct experience is the closest thing we have to true knowledge. Also
very close to true knowledge, we have pure logic and mathematics.
Scientific knowledge is derived from the combination and application of these
more basic ways of knowing. It is a house of cards of approximation, theory and
guesswork. If anyone thinks scientific knowledge is true knowledge, I encourage
them to recall the Bohr model of the atom, Newton’s laws, and the science
preceding Newton’s laws (which precluded action at a distance). And, of course,
the one-time scientific knowledge of meteorites: that rocks cannot fall from the
sky because there are no rocks in the sky.