Of humans and chimps
Your reviewer Adrian Barnett is quite reasonably concerned for the conservation of living primates (8 June, p 50). A central theme of the book he reviewed was to introduce more rigour than one commonly encounters in the ostensibly scientific discussions of the relation between chimpanzees and humans.
One unfortunately finds, however, that some well-intentioned scholars have become so preoccupied with chimpanzees that they seem to have lost the ability to distinguish them readily from people. Such confusion may be evident when your reviewer calls my book What it Means to be 98 per cent Human in the text of his review. I feel obliged to point out that the book’s title is actually What it Means to be 98 per cent Chimpanzee.
We got there first
I was very excited to read Justin Mullins’s article on the possibility that the Universe is a quantum computer programmed to create living things (1 June, p 15). This idea appears in the opening chapter of Echoes of Earth, a novel I co-wrote with Shane Dix published by Ace Books in the US in January.
I look forward to reading in due course about the second half of the idea: that quantum computations cease once an intelligent observer evolves, leaving a prevalence of pre-conscious life forms in the Universe and us, wondering where everyone else went.
Letter
So Temco of Tokyo has taken out a patent for a radio and loudspeaker assembly harnessed to the back of a dog’s head that allows commands to be transmitted from a distance (1 June, p 23). This device is remarkably like the “Electronic Dog Anchor” idea that I sent in to Dilbert’s Lazy Entrepreneur website (now sadly defunct) about 18 months ago.
For the record
鈥� In Feedback (15 June), we highlighted the idea of adding nicotine to bottled water, reporting that the US Food and Drug Administration had made a judgement about a company called Quick Test Five, which markets a product called Nico Water. We now realise that these communications were not with Quick Test Five, but with a firm called NICO International LLC concerning its product Nico Sparkling Water. We would like to apologise to Quick Test Five for any embarrassment caused by this oversight.
鈥� A Feedback item on 8 June said the maximum data rate of the British public telephone network was 38 Mbps. That was a slip of the finger. It should have read “about 38 Kbps” (and for precision might have said that was the speed for incompressible data).
Save the dolphins
Your article on tuna and dolphins does your readers a disservice in trying to simplify a very complicated situation (25 May, p 15). Depleted dolphin populations in the tuna fishery of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP), despite low levels of reported mortality, are still not recovering and may in fact be declining in numbers. Physiological stress, separation of mothers from dependent calves and false reporting by bribed or intimidated onboard observers are all contributing to unsustainable levels of “cryptic kill” of dolphins.
Carl Safina of the National Audubon Society is quoted in your article as advocating going back to a pole-and-line fishery for all tuna in the ETP. Another, less drastic approach would be to eliminate dolphin set nets (to protect depleted species of dolphins); reduce fleet capacity and institute time and area closures to obtain sustainable levels of yellowfin, skipjack and big eye tuna; and to develop new ways (or perhaps the old pole-and-line ways) of catching the larger yellowfin tuna without harm to dolphins.
However, the ETP tuna fishing nations, principally Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, with the dubious support of the US, continue to refuse to take action to reduce dolphin set nets, reduce bycatch, or reduce ETP tuna fleet capacity. The political will to take any meaningful action to protect the tuna fishery is lacking.
It is time to stop killing dolphins and develop alternatives to protect the marine environment.
Smile please
As I always smile when I first meet a person and repeat the procedure when meeting them again, I got to wondering if smiling developed to help humans recognise one another in the same way it helps today’s computer facial recognition algorithms match faces (1 June, p 20).
End farming subsidies
I read with interest your special report on the smart farming revolution (18 May, p 31). A major factor not dealt with is government policy, particularly as it relates to subsidies.
At the European Grain Legume Conference a couple of years ago in Spain, a German economist presenting the overview of pulse production in Europe suggested that the only way to increase the diminishing amount of pulses grown was to subsidise them. I suggested that a better option would be to remove the subsidy on cereals. In this way, farmers would not be encouraged to substitute inputs (high fertiliser and pesticide levels) for good farming practice, nor use poor rotations (continuous cereal cultivation).
I was told that this was not possible. Basically the Europeans lack the political will for such an approach.
In Western Australia, our wheat growers are not heavily subsidised. They are still mainly mixed farmers who have around 25 per cent of their land under pastures involving legumes and 7 per cent under pulses. Also, by European or US standards, their levels of fertiliser and chemical use are much lower.
The major impacts of subsidies are that European and US farmers are not responsive to market signals and the prices of agricultural commodities in the world markets are pushed down. The effect of this on the agriculture of developing countries is particularly severe as it keeps these farmers poor and unable to improve their farming systems, and limit their marketing and wealth-generating opportunities.
Just reward
Your article and related editorial correctly report that our company, Genetic Technologies (GTG) now holds certain patents relating to the use of non-coding DNA sequences in genetic diagnostics and genomics (18 May, p 3 and p4).
However, your implication that our success came “out of the blue” ignores our past 13 years of research, innovation, sacrifice and risk, the expenditure of millions of dollars on our research programme, our publications, our presence at international conferences and the mandatory widespread publication of our patent applications during the 1990s.
Like all other inventors, GTG was subjected to detailed scrutiny by numerous patent examiners in many jurisdictions, including the European Patent Office with its mandatory provisions for others to object. We also paid out some half a million dollars in patenting expenses.
Our company had the vision, the daring and the will in the late 1980s to pursue research in an area that others largely dismissed at that time 鈥� and we now deserve whatever success we achieved. Your comments imply it is wrong to be so successful. Surely well-established international patent conventions encourage precisely what we achieved. You also suggest that broad patents are intrinsically wrong. But with respect, how else do you reward broad inventions?
It is true that GTG is “now demanding licensing fees” in relation to commercial applications of its various patented inventions. Surely this is the usual and customary way that small research companies everywhere attempt to generate revenues from past inventions. However, to suggest our patents might hinder research is incorrect. GTG is itself a research group, and we have a proud record of actively encouraging research by others.
Letter
I note that the timeline used in your article to summarise life’s movement onto land jumps straight from trigonotarbids, primitive spiders, to four-legged vertebrates 375 million years ago.
I would draw your attention to a set of footprints in Valentia, Ireland, which were made 385 million years ago by a four-legged vertebrate similar to salamanders or lungfish. Although not fully adapted to land, it certainly represents a “missing link” in the transition of some vertebrates from an aquatic to an amphibious lifestyle, and finally a fully terrestrial form.
These footprints are the oldest in the northern hemisphere, beaten only by a set in Australia that are 400 million years old. The Valentia footprints can easily be viewed, albeit after a trek through a field to get to a rocky outcrop on the coast.
Those who wish to do so, however, should do so quickly. A “visitors’ centre” will soon be constructed and is sure to reduce the thrill of seeing these marvellous prints close-up and personal.
Life came from rivers
Myles McLeod and Simon Braddy’s article on the first settlement of the land by invertebrates perpetuates the assumption that life moved onto the land from the sea (8 June, p 38).
The seashore is a highly unlikely jumping-off point compared with river banks and freshwater marshes. The total available freshwater boundary is far greater, perhaps by two orders of magnitude: look at a map of the Mississippi or Amazon basin. Similar relationships must surely hold regardless of the exact form of continents at the time.
River banks are also subject to greater random, short-term and seasonal variation, creating stronger selective pressures. Unmanaged, the great rivers create flood plains of thousands of square kilometres, each of which breaks up into myriad microhabitats as it dries out. The variation would have been even stronger in Cambrian times, without the dampening down effect of forests.
Freshwater species are pre-adapted for fresh water. How many species seek out salt water to drink?
Humans are animals
Richard Fitchett implies in his letter that humans rose above the animal kingdom when they gained the ability to make rational choices, while animals remain “subservient to their instincts” (8 June, p 52). I have two problems with this.
First, the assumption that humans are different to animals because they have evolved higher intelligence is akin to saying vertebrates aren’t animals because they have backbones. Both are adaptations which have proved highly successful for those animals involved, but that is all.
Unfortunately, due to its very nature, human intelligence is thought to be more significant than other adaptations seen in other species. But it’s still only an adaptation 鈥� one of many seen in the animal kingdom.
Secondly, there are several species of animal that also show a relatively high level of mental ability, for example, dolphins and chimps. Many animals have shown that they can learn and modify their behaviour according to past experience. Humans have simply developed this further.
If thought and behaviour are just a series of neural impulses coded for by an animal’s genes, then humans do not differ from any other animal except in neural complexity, and we are just as enslaved to our instincts.
This becomes even more clear when you think that despite our supposed ability for abstract thought and forward planning, we are still causing massive deforestation, desertification, global warming and the extinction of many species upon which we depend for survival, purely for short-term gain.
We are no different from any other animal. We have simply developed a successful adaptation which we are using for our own immediate benefit.
Who sues who?
I was fascinated by the business implications of your report on the accidental transfer of DNA from genetically modified maize to native varieties (15 June, p 14).
I was particularly interested in the problems this presents for the owner of the patent rights. Would the courts enforce the payment of royalties once the principle of widespread accidental contamination had been established? The holder of the genetic patent could be sued by people who did not want the gene, while being unable to claim income from users who, despite not wanting it in the first place, will happily make use of it if it turns up by accident in their crops.
It is also interesting to speculate what the legal fireworks would be like if one GM company’s patented genes turned up in another company’s seed stock. The business implications seem to be endless.
What would happen if a patented gene for, say, resistance to a specific weedkiller, escaped and became widespread within a crop? Given the implications for the sales of that weedkiller, what would be the attitude of other weedkiller manufacturers? Would they even believe that the escape had been accidental?