Letter
What on earth is Dawkins talking about? When asked the question “Are we a part of nature or aren’t we?”, he says there’s a “quantitative continuum” which yet manages to produce “qualitative distinctions”. I thought he didn’t believe in miracles.
Hands off
Roland Matthews interprets his results, which showed that drivers using hands-free car phones fared worst in an oral word game, as evidence that they were most at risk of an accident (4 May, p 27). Surely it is equally logical to argue that they performed badly because they were paying more attention to their driving than those using other types of phone.
From my own experience with hands-free phones, I often asked callers to hold fire while I negotiated demanding sections of road. I believe that this was at least partly because the conversation was taking up only a minor part of my attention.
Letter
It is disheartening to see New 杏吧原创 present an issue on globalisation that does not mention the possibility that unregulated economic growth may be unable to achieve its most important boast: eliminating poverty. A simple calculation suggests that there are not enough natural resources for this mad idea to work. If you need convincing, read chapter 7 of Beyond Growth by Herman Daly (Beacon Press, 1996).
Impacts and eruptions
Your article refers to the controversy over whether it was an asteroid impact in Mexico or volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (4 May, p 28). The impact site is about 21掳 North and 89掳 West, while the Deccan is about 18掳 North and 78掳 East, 167掳 away鈥攑retty much on opposite sides of the globe. Is it possible the seismic waves from the impact of the asteroid were diffracted and focused around the Earth’s core and triggered the eruptions in the Deccan? Are both factors responsible?
Influence of TV
Vincent Campbell seems certain that studies have refuted the suggested effects of mass media on human behaviour (4 May, p 60). So presumably he thinks that advertisers are wasting the millions that they spend on trying to influence us.
Letter
Some scientists certainly think that the Chicxulub impact may have intensified the activity of the Deccan Traps, which had already been active for hundreds of thousands of years. The impact would have been equivalent to an earthquake of magnitude 11 or 12 on the Richter scale, sending shock waves around the world. This could have weakened the crust above the magma chambers and greatly increased the eruption rate.
Unfortunately, the drilling project won’t shed any light on this. But it does promise to answer the question of whether the impact alone was large enough to cause a global mass extinction. If so, the argument over the Deccan Traps becomes academic鈥擡d
Repeated speech
The artifical voice system developed by Hideyuki Sawada appears to be a modern version of the kind of speaking machines developed about two hundred years ago by Abb茅 Mical, Wolfgang von Kempelen and Joseph Faber (4 May, p 24). Von Kempelen also had problems making a “tongue”, but Faber’s “Euphonia” was clearly more versatile than Sawada’s machine, even if it had to be controlled manually. For more on the history of speech synthesis see .
In contrast with Sawada’s machine, which could be considered a delightful product of art rather than of science, modern systems for “articulatory synthesis” that have emerged from speech research are all entirely computer based. Some of them produce not just audible speech but also a talking face on a screen.
American example
I note with some concern that Michael Williams, a Republican in Huntsville, Alabama running for Congress, believes that “everyone on Earth should have the same basic rights that Americans are afforded by the US Constitution” (4 May, p 21).
One assumes, without much hope, that democracy would prevail and those of us who far prefer to live under, say, the rights enshrined in the Treaty on European Union, the United Nations charter, or, indeed, the rights enshrined in the constitution of any other nation, would be allowed to do so.
In particular, women should be especially concerned by Williams’s proposal. Female suffrage is not enshrined in the US Constitution and women are only allowed to vote in elections because individual US states have passed their own laws permitting it.
I trust I will be allowed to opt out of having to live under the US Constitution.
Spin test
Chris Bond asks if the Universe is spinning and suggests that if it were, this would explain the way galaxies are moving apart (11 May, p 57). This hypothesis can be easily tested. If the Universe is spinning then those galaxies furthest away from the axis of spin will be moving apart faster than those near it. It should be possible to check this by measurement.
Rethinking everything
Your excellent article on the important subject of globalisation is very welcome (27 April, p 30). However, it is suffused with Western thinking on money, trade and economy, despite obvious efforts to bring in other opinions. This thinking is understandable, as we are all indoctrinated by money: witness the bulletins issued several times daily about the state of the world’s financial markets.
The introduction (p 29) mentions that “life is good” in the West and that we are richer than ever before. By this, we mean that we have a high standard of living鈥攖hat is, material consumption. But we also know that this good life is superficial and something is wrong. We have high crime levels, we are polluting ourselves and the planet, and we are suffering social disintegration in our inner cities, and stress and congestion on our roads. We ought to admit to the rest of the world, especially to poor countries, that we have got it wrong by using money and standards of living as our measure of progress.
The measure of progress that is the real end of our human endeavours is quality of life, based on meeting basic needs and achieving low crime rates, a clean environment and social cohesion. So why isn’t our behaviour governed by our quality of life rather than our financial interests? The answer is that we don’t measure quality of life because economists refute the idea. If we did so we would find that some very poor countries have a higher quality of life than we do in the West.
Out of guilt, we in the developed world feel that since we have a high standard of living ourselves, we must not deny this to poor countries, even though we know about its polluting effect on the environment and society. However, some poor countries have grasped the problem themselves and reject Western culture. What we need to do in the West is to stop imposing our economic views and allow poor countries to put their views to us. In fact they are doing so: 11 September was probably a warning shot.
We need to put some measure of quality of life at the leading edge of project and policy decisions at all levels of world organisation (not just the World Trade Organization). This is not to dismiss money, but to discipline it as a means to an end and not, as currently in the West, an end in itself. Market forces operating under this discipline would distribute wealth wherever it was wanted, but that might not mean everywhere.
Letter
Correction: In Feedback’s story about the Australian Toilet Map, commentator Simon Upton was described as a former Australian environment minister (11 May). He is in fact a former New Zealand Minister for the Environment.
Also in Feedback (11 May) we wrongly claimed 192.com spammed users. In fact, 192.com users consent to receive monthly newsletters at registration, can opt out at any time, and all newsletters have links for users to unsubscribe. We apologise to 192.com for not making this clear.
Rebelling against the tyranny of the genes
You quote Richard Dawkins as saying in your debate on “What is ‘natural’?” that “Homo sapiens is the only species that can rebel against the otherwise universally selfish Darwinian impulse” 27 April, p 56). Am I alone in feeling puzzled? After all, Dawkins has worked hard to convince us that life on Earth is merely a gene’s way of making more genes.
When Dawkins first proposed this idea, there was a widely shared understanding about the relationship between nature and culture. The evolution of intelligence opened up an area of free choice within which humans could create ideas to guide their behaviour, including the teachings of charity and compassion. Given the choice of caring for those who might otherwise perish in the struggle for existence, societies have made the ethical choice to do so.
More to the point, now that we can redesign our DNA, Dawkins’s formulation can be stood on its head. Rather than our culture being gene-dominated, our genes are becoming culture-dominated.
Long before Dawkins told us that people are “robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (The Selfish Gene, 1976), there was a cultural consensus on our moral responsibilities. Now Dawkins declares himself “a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to human social and political affairs”. But if there is anybody who would take issue with such a declaration, it would have to be one of his disciples. If I were one, I’d wonder with whom Dawkins has been arguing all this time.
Far too shy
In a recent Feedback item, the managing director of Roche Australia is quoted as saying that social phobia can’t be that common (27 April), on the basis that when Roche tried to recruit people for clinical trials, he says “we just weren’t able to”. Surely there could have been millions, all hiding behind the couch.
Hot labour
Years ago, the British National Childbirth Trust recommended sex, hot curry and a bumpy car ride to induce overdue labour (11 May, p 57). We tried it. It worked. She’s now 18 and won’t eat hot curry.
Prescient king
Could France’s nuclear fallout from Chernobyl and the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Feedback, 11 May) both have been influenced by King Henry II of England? Compare a map of the French lands held by England’s most European monarch (he spent most of his time in France) in 1154 and you have a good match with the areas that didn’t vote heavily for Le Pen in the first round, and an even better match in the second. Go back to the French NF vote in the 1970s and the 1980s and the relationship is still valid.
Beats me how good King Henry (who spoke French and very little English), and certainly knew no radiochemistry, managed to produce the caesium fallout map. See The Times Atlas of World History (Times Books, 1979, p 125).
Letter
Highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide is extremely unstable. It has been used in torpedoes by Britain’s Royal Navy and the Russian Navy with catastrophic results. The idea of a robot walking around my house loaded with the stuff is not something that I would relish.
Paranoid androids
Michael Goldfarb of Vanderbilt University has established that steam power is the most efficient way to power humanoid robots, with the steam being generated by the palladium-catalysed decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (27 April, p 19). This avoids heavy batteries or the complexities of an internal combustion engine. The only noise comes from the occasional hiss as spent steam is expelled.
So now we know why Marvin, the paranoid android in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although endowed with “a brain the size of a planet”, produced a hissing sound with every step he took.
Public and free
To the detriment of publicly funded science, your editorial on Craig Venter’s genome failed to differentiate between the “universal blueprint” that is the genome data produced by the public Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and the proprietary database produced by the privately funded Celera (4 May, p 5).
The public data owes nothing to that produced by Celera, and is unaffected by the recent much-hyped “revelation” about the source of Celera’s DNA. The publicly produced genome data, which, unlike the Celera product, is freely available, used worldwide and continuously updated, will remain anonymous.
Drug drawbacks
In response to your note about treating malaria in Mozambique, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) is an old drug to which there is extensive resistance (20 April, p 15). In the KwaZulu/Natal province of South Africa, which borders Mozambique, levels of parasitological resistance to SP exceed 62 per cent.
The WHO endorses the use of combination therapy to treat and control malaria. But malaria experts do not consider the two constituents of SP as combination therapy, since both have very similar actions and can be rendered useless by single-point mutations in the malaria parasite.
SP has another drawback: it raises blood gametocyte levels, which can increase the transmission rate of the disease. And while I accept that few other antimalarials have proven safe for pregnant women, I would question the wisdom of giving sulphonamide drugs to infants en masse, as these drugs show definite toxicity.
Finally, there is another niggling concern: the US Food and Drug Administration has described pyrimethamine as carcinogenic.