Displaced by dams
An important point was missed in your interview with Dai Qing
about the Three Gorges dam in China
(7 April, p 42).
Those 1.5 million people displaced are
mostly farmers. As all the arable land in China is already taken and under
cultivation by others, where will they be relocated? At best they will get
marginal land and at worst they will become Wai Lai Ren鈥攐utsiders in the
cities doing menial jobs without residential permits and therefore with no legal
right to be there.
Evidence of the teeth
I read with interest the article relating to dentistry existing 7000 years ago
(14 April, p 19).
I would like to contribute a thought. By studying the
tooth in question further, one might actually be able to tell whether the tooth
was a live or dead when the drilling was performed. If the tooth was prepared
when the pulp was vital, there will be evidence of dentine deposition right
below the drilled area, on the pulpal side.
Case for culling?
So, humans suspected of contracting foot and mouth have tested negative
(5 May, p 5).
Just as well. Had they been infected, then in keeping with the government
regulations, the unfortunate victims should be slaughtered and the carcasses
incinerated immediately. All susceptible animals within a five-mile radius
should also be culled, including humans, ducks, geese and cockroaches, and the
entire country should be subject to restrictions on movement, even if this means
we are forced to slowly starve to death.
Or maybe not. We are, after all, human, aren’t we?
Initial doubts
Feedback obviously doesn’t know acronyms from abbreviations
(Feedback, 21 April).
ATM, ISBN, ITN and PCR are not acronyms because you don’t say the
abbreviation as a word. Instead you pronounce each letter. This makes it just an
abbreviation or initialism.
An acronym is an abbreviation that makes a word when you say it out loud,
like NATO, UNICEF, FIAT and scuba. So “RAS” could be an acronym if you pronounce
it as a word鈥�”rass”. If you pronounce each letter (R-A-S), then it
isn’t.
You shall inherit nothing
The snippet about genes for sperm lying on the female X chromosome
(7 April, p 25)
ends with the statement: “This suggests male infertility can be inherited
from mothers.”
There are, of course, difficulties involved with inheriting anything very
much at all from an infertile father.
Letter
I get the impression Flynn and Dickens think that knowing how modest initial
differences in abilities lead to large differences in outcome will somehow
prevent it happening. But this is not at all obvious.
This effect is actually maximised in open, liberal and competitive societies
such as ours. Thinkers on both the right and left are gradually acknowledging
that religious and moral rules such as those we discarded during the social
revolution of the sixties had a moderating influence on the universal human
lusts for wealth, power and sex.
To quote from Atomised by Michel Houellebecq: “In a totally liberal
economic system, certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others
stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system, certain
people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to
masturbation and misery.”
The thing to remember is that this drama is not played out in a vacuum.
Society, like the rest of the Universe, is relative. What matters is not the
actual level of ability, but the level relative to others. In other words,
unless moderated by strong social mechanisms, a community rapidly stratifies
into winners and losers and the differences between the two become ever wider.
Add Flynn and Dickens’s theory to our current social model and the implications
are alarming rather than hopeful.
Drunken bugs
For the past 10 years, a zinc smelter in the Netherlands has been operating a
biotreatment plant for the removal of metals such as zinc and cadmium from
effluent鈥攁 step up from the beer bugs Tom Harris was working with
(14 April, p 22).
Until recently, these sulphate-reducing bacteria were being fed straight
ethanol in what was nicknamed the “drunken bugs process”. Now the same culture
has been adapted to run on hydrogen gas, which is cheaper. Overproof vodka may
be called rocket fuel but these bugs are consuming the real thing.
Nuclear risks
Your article on the risks of exposure to radiation in the future raised a
difficult question
(24 March, p 17).
How far ahead does one project the risks from one’s actions? We need to make
rational decisions on such matters, as our futures depend on them.
It’s always hard to know where to draw the line. You could argue that 500
years (as used in the British Nuclear Fuels submission) was a bit short, but
1000 years would still produce only a 20 per cent chance of one death. To
project the risk to complete decay, as suggested by Ian Fairlie and David Sumner
is, we suspect, an attempt to create diversion rather than a rational
proposition. Though your article did not spell it out, we believe the
calculation yields 200 deaths over 2 million years (10 half-lives). Surely, it
is quite certain that by then the human race will have either died out or found
a cure for cancer; in fact, 500 years seems quite a good conservative timescale
for these two possibilities.
We think that Fairlie is wrong to say that “500 years just doesn’t make sense
for technetium-99″.
Does God live in the human brain?
To suggest there is a God out there and our brains have been designed to
interact with “Him” plays into the hands of creationists and other enemies of
real science. I would prefer a rational explanation.
I suggest that as our brains evolved, the parietal lobes developed in tandem
with our increasing sense of self and body awareness. Some individuals
discovered by accident, and then by deliberate training and practice, that they
could undergo sensory deprivation to the extent of isolating their parietal
lobes from external input, and so induce in them random hallucinatory activity,
thus producing the subjective mystical experience. To account for this, they
invented “God”.
Letter
I would like to suggest a further stage in the search for God. Oneness with
“life, the Universe and everything” is not only reached by religious meditation.
I know quite a few people who get that feeling after eight pints or so.
This has various similarities with the religious oneness described in the
article. For example, people who have experienced alcohol-assisted oneness also
report that “sights and sounds don’t disturb them any more” when under the
influence. They also experience a sense of awe at things that seemed trivial
before. Finally, they also find their experiences difficult to explain
afterwards.
I think researchers should monitor the brain activity of drinkers reaching
the state of oneness with humanity. Those are the people slurring “I really love
you” to anyone who happens to be near them.
Nature or nurture?
Mentioning IQ and genes in the same breath is taboo in the US, so William
Dickens and James Flynn’s article is welcome
(21 April, p 45).
But there are other taboos, and there seems to be little hope that any systematic
assault on test-score differences among cultures will be politically palatable in the
foreseeable future.
If talk of genes is the first taboo, then the second is the performance gap
itself. America’s blacks deny that there are testable differences in cognitive
performance between blacks and other groups. In fact, it is a staple of American
civil rights litigation that any test on which racial minorities do poorly is
presumptively discriminatory.
Two American publications, The New York Times and The Washington
Post, set the tone for the mainstream media. The New York Times
does not accept that ethnic cognitive differences are real, and The
Washington Post only occasionally approaches the issue with a very long
spoon. America’s media and political leaders are nowhere near to acknowledging
that the cognitive skills of America’s blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans
are different from those of whites and Asian-Americans.
A third taboo is about biology, not genes. There is an ever-growing body of
evidence that every individual’s post-natal interaction with his or her
environment has physiological effects on cognitive structures, shaping mental
processes that will change very little over time. While all healthy brains
remain adaptable throughout life, it seems that the first year’s development is
more important than the next few years, and the first 5 years’ development more
so than the next 10 years. By puberty the brain’s connections for methods and
speed of verbal and non-verbal processes are pretty much set.
If this is true, it means that huge cultural changes in parenting practices
are required if testable differences between cultural groups are to be reduced
or eliminated. That’s difficult in any circumstances. When political leaders
cry, “You’re blaming the victim”, as many do in the US, advocacy of cultural
change becomes impossible. This is not surprising鈥攚hy would anyone want to
acknowledge that their IQ, such as it is, is hard-wired and can never change by
more than a few points?
These taboos are still powerful in the US. In 1998, the respected Brookings
Institution published a serious, thoughtful book on the subject. The
Black-White Test Score Gap鈥攚hich one of your essayists contributed
to鈥攕ank without a trace. The first step in solving a problem is
acknowledging that it exists. Until American minority-group leaders accept that
the test-score differences are measuring something real, we will continue to
muddle along, slowly鈥攖oo slowly鈥攏arrowing testable cultural
differences in cognitive performance.
Letter
Bob Holmes reports Michael Persinger’s claim that “almost anyone can meet
God, just by wearing his special helmet”. This hardly qualifies as cutting-edge
research. For the past 2000 years studies have followed up on St Paul’s
suggestion to the Ephesians (6:17) that they “take the helmet of
salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”. In follow-up
studies, large numbers of research subjects report meeting God using this
helmet.
Letter
In spite of the title of your article, “In search of God”, I would suggest
that your reporters sought religious experience, not God
(21 April, p 24).
St Paul, whose religious experience on the road to Damascus is one of the
best known, had much to say about the truth of God and the resurrection of Jesus
Christ but was rather scathing about religious experiences, in spite of his own.
His first letter to the new Christians in Corinth aimed to shift their focus
from “religious experience” to the truth of God’s love. The problem with
“religious experience” is that it can be very self-centred, the very antithesis
of Judaeo-Christian teaching.
The core of teaching in the scriptures is the character of God and man’s
need. This is something you won’t understand from an out-of-body experience.
Letter
I once had a religious experience that cured me of years of severe depression
and turned my life around. Years later, amid intense troubles and more
depression in my life, two saints鈥擲t Leonard (the Frank) and Hesiod (the
Greek poet)鈥攂egan communicating telepathically with me, advising me how to
put my life in order. As a result of listening to the (disturbing) things they
said and having another religious experience as a consequence, my life and
depression became intensely worse, so much so that I contemplated suicide.
I have since come to the conclusion that possibly all positive and negative
religious experiences are indeed illusory brain phenomena. The type of illusion
created simply depends on the individual’s beliefs, desires, fears and guilt
complexes. If you have a strong desire to escape from mundane reality and
problems, and perhaps practise meditation as well (which in some ways mimics
sleep), you are more likely to have such experiences.