Letter
I remember reading an article by the literary critic Terry Eagleton in which
he recounts seeing a sign next to the escalators in a train station saying:
“Dogs must be carried”. He needed to get upstairs, so off he went in search of a
dog.
Letter
Some years ago I took my 6-year-old daughter to a local market. She was not
impressed by a stallholder’s sign that read: “Watch batteries fitted”.
“Won’t that be really boring, Daddy?” she wanted to know.
Sign language
Your correspondent on semiopathy鈥攖he tendency to read inappropriate
meanings into signs鈥攎entions sighting the sign “Humped Zebra
Crossing鈥�400 yards”
(24 November, p 55).
As children well know, this is simply a camel in his pyjamas.
Sound blasting
Ian Sample states that there is no reliable evidence for
infrasound causing nausea or vomiting
(17 November, p 24).
In fact, there is reliable evidence that infrasound does not cause these effects
(see my paper on acoustic weapons in Peace Studies Program,
Cornell University, 1999).
Also, I am quoted as warning that this device could cause temporary hearing
loss in other passengers, should it be used on a plane. I actually warned about
permanent hearing loss, since I fear that within an aircraft, a sound pulse at
levels of 140 decibels would not only hit the ear of the terrorist. The beam
could reflect, creating hot spots elsewhere in the plane where the full strength
of the beam would also be heard.
Even taking this into account, you cannot dismiss the weapon out of hand.
Loss of hearing is preferable to death by explosion or crash. Detailed
independent study is needed.
Friends, not enemies
Our society agrees with most of John Wamsley’s opinion and admires his courage
(17 November, p 48).
However, as the oldest conservation group in
Australia, we have always kept good relations with national park and wildlife
services, who work very hard and are often frustrated by government
departments.
Wamsley does not tell the whole story. The Department of Conservation and
Land Management in Western Australia had earlier created a fence to conserve an
endangered reptile, the short-necked swamp tortoise. It also created “biological
fences” with its Western Shield programme. These covered much of the state,
reducing the numbers of foxes and cats.
As a result, marsupials such as the numbat and woylie increased, being able
to supply Wamsley’s needs. We agree that Australia needs more folk of his
calibre. Our only complaint is that he should not attack conservationists, who
are his friends.
Just think it
You report that “imagining yourself exercising can increase the strength of
even your large muscles”
(24 November, p 17).
The “crossover” effect of training
has been known for some considerable time. If you strength-train one limb, there
will be a measurable change in the other limb even though this has not had any
training stimuli. An adaptation in the other limb takes place that stems from
within the neuromuscular system rather than any change in muscle size.
This is, I presume, similar to the phenomenon reported by the Cleveland
Clinic Foundation.
Come back, aspirin
Your article wondering whether doctors will now be dolling out cholesterol
pills like sweets has a most unfortunate opening: “Step aside aspirin鈥攈ere
come statins”
(24 November, p 7)
Aspirin has a totally different action to statins and in no way are they
rivals. Aspirin affects blood platelets, reducing their ability to aggregate,
form a plug and block a coronary or a cerebral blood vessel. Over 150 randomised
controlled trials have established the efficacy of aspirin in reducing the risk
of a heart attack or stroke by about 30 per cent. In this context it is probably
the most thoroughly investigated drug used in clinical practice and at about
拢100 per heart attack prevented, it is undoubtedly the most inexpensive
drug available for reducing cardiac risk.
To suggest that aspirin is a rival to a drug that lowers blood cholesterol,
and that aspirin should therefore “step aside” in favour of statins is quite
inappropriate. Although there is as yet no evidence from trials, it is
reasonable to expect that people might want to take both a low-dose aspirin and
a statin.
Andy Coghlan writes: Elwood is absolutely right. In fact, two-thirds of the
patients who benefited from statins in the trial we reported were also taking
aspirin because, as Elwood points out, the two drugs have different but
complementary effects. This did appear in my original text but had to be cut for
space reasons.
No plague in Poland
The map attached to your fascinating article about the spread of the Black
Death
(24 November, p 34)
shows that the disease seems to have missed Poland
altogether, even though it spread to north-east Europe from Western Europe.
Philip Ziegler’s book The Black Death also comments on the disease
missing Poland, with the strange result that, later on, there were so many Jews
in that country. They were blamed for the spread of the disease elsewhere,
because their higher standards of cleanliness took them further out of town to
find washing wells and so they came into contact with people further away. After
the disease they were persecuted for this, so they migrated to the one area of
Europe that had not had the disease, Poland, where they would not be blamed for
it.
Darwin knew
David Tilman finds that a plot sown with many types of grass produces more
hay than a plot sown with one
(3 November, p 16).
This is scarcely pioneering stuff, as it’s noted in chapter 4 of
On the Origin of Species(6th edition, p 137),
though I’m sure Darwin would approve of Tilman’s quantitative
precision.
Tilman is unsure how “the findings will scale up to real-world ecosystems”.
The eccentric “Squire of Down” had some thoughts on this too.
Danger in a caterpillar's gut
It is difficult to avoid genetic contamination from genetically modified
oilseed rape
(24 November, p 14).
Is this a surprise? Three years ago, you printed my letter warning of the
danger of transferring herbicide tolerance from GM rape into the closely related
weed, charlock (29 August 1998, p 49). I also mentioned that oilseed rape was,
by then, one of the commonest feral plants in Britain.
The greatest problem is seed spillage at harvest, plus the long life of seed
in soil. Here in west Wales virtually no roadside verge or previously cultivated
land is free of viable seed and once GM rape is widely sown it will behave
similarly.
Our neighbouring farmer neglected the seedlings from a previous rape crop and
by mid-summer almost every plant was seriously infested with cabbage white
butterfly caterpillars, which formed a larder for the local insectivorous birds
while the flowers were a magnet for hoverflies, honey bees and other
insects.
During gales these pollinators can be driven many tens of kilometres. A
caterpillar’s gut, being a seething microbiological morass, is an ideal
incubator for genes that can pass from plant tissue into bacterial species, and
foraging finches and chats then pick up the caterpillars.
The transfer scenario was completed as we watched a feeding finch explode
into a cloud of feathers as it was taken by a peregrine falcon鈥攚hich no
doubt discarded the bird guts and dead caterpillars elsewhere. There is no
practicable separation distance that will prevent the genes from GM oilseed rape
mixing with the conventional crop.
Need for names
Your remarks about the increase of “mental and neurological conditions” were
inappropriate for the editorial of a science magazine
(17 November, p 3).
We all work for pay, some by trying to increase the circulation of a magazine. It is as
bad a lapse of logic to suppose that defining more mental and neurological
conditions is designed to increase the numbers of patients for greedy
therapists, as to suppose that Carolus Linnaeus increased the number of birds by
devising the classification system鈥攖he birds were already there.
Also, bracketing Samson and Ezekiel with this recent increase of
money-spinners is misinformed, as antisocial disorders are not new but were
described by practitioners such as James Prichard in 1833. Nor is temporal lobe
epilepsy new, but was noted by practitioners such as J. Falret in 1860 and
Hughling Jackson in 1875. It has been studied intensively since.
Linnaeus and many naturalists after him described large numbers of species,
the detailed variations of which probably contributed to the development of the
evolutionary theory. What about the numerous new particles and forces of
sub-atomic physics? A genetic biologist was recently describing on the radio the
identification of over one hundred sub-species of blackberry鈥攚hich might
lead to improved cultivation.
If the editor of the leading science periodical for the general public
considers new psychiatric classification unscientific, he should say why.
Make your own vitamins
Colin Tudge’s article on the virtues of eating plants
(17 November, p 40)
gave us some good food for thought. It could be true that one or two vitamins
started life as toxins and that many other plant products not yet classified as
vitamins are beneficial. But when he generalises about toxins and vitamins, he
should know that biochemical ecology is much more complex than he implies.
Consider the small group of compounds fundamental to cell metabolism that
used to be called B vitamins. If they were originally plant toxins to which
animals became adapted and dependent, why do many bacteria have similar
requirements? Looking wider, it is indeed a mystery why so many of us non-plant
organisms cannot synthesise more of our chemical needs for ourselves.
It is not just vitamins. About half of the 18 amino acids needed by humans in
large quantities are “essential” and so, like a few bacteria, we need to eat
protein. Have we lost the knack of synthesising these necessary nutrients
because the food that gave our ancestors their energy always provided enough
vitamins and protein at the same time? Or is it that all of our ancestors, right
back to the original bacteria living in the primeval soup, simply failed to
evolve the necessary biosynthetic enzyme systems, despite the apparent selective
advantages of doing so, and despite the fact that plants and a vast range of
competent bacteria managed to do it?
Plants themselves have similar hang-ups. Many bacteria can get all their
nitrogen from the air, including many of the cyanobacteria that were the
presumed ancestors of all plant chloroplasts. But plants can only fix nitrogen
with the help of microbes, such as the root nodule bacteria of legumes. Why did
they lose such an apparently enormous nutritional advantage? Was Gaia looking
the other way?