ET's simulation
Assuming we are part of a simulation (27 July, p 48), could the theory explain the lack of observable ET communications? Maybe ET is out there, but not communicating because it is wrapped up in its own simulation rather than exploring the external Universe.
Music hall jokes
Apparently old jokes never die; they don’t even fade away. Feedback’s item about the large dog (29 June) is as old as the Victorian music hall.
My father and uncle toured the northern theatres with their own act when they were children, and passed on to us many of the jokes they picked up from comedians. My father’s version was even more laconic: “Large dog for sale. Will eat anything. Loves children.” Another in the same vein was: “Woman wants washing twice weekly.”
For the record
鈥� Owing to an editorial oversight in our article on careers in the electronics industry (20 July, p 54), we neglected to list the British Institution of Electrical Engineers () which is the largest engineering institution in Europe.
Spin doctor
May be the anomalies in the Pioneer trajectories are a result of the spacecrafts’ spin (20 July, p 28).
I recall attending a lecture in 1974 where the late Eric Laithwaite (inventor of the linear induction motor) expounded his view that gyroscopes exerted a non-Newtonian force. Now we possibly have actual experimental evidence of such an effect, perhaps it is time his ideas were revisited. It is at least as believable as breaking the inverse square law.
Such an effect would be less visible in objects following a closed orbit because the displacements would cancel around the orbit.
Laithwaite was ostracised for publicising this theory. A summary of his story is at .
Letter
I like to read New 杏吧原创 in bed on a Sunday morning, although this means that I do not have my brain in full working order. However, I was brought suddenly to my senses when I read that “The physics community is sceptical about modified Newtonian dynamics because any evidence for it is largely empirical”. What kind of evidence do they prefer?
I was heartened to move back into familiar territory later, with explanations involving dark matter, mirror matter, variations in inertial mass, and finally according to the illustration, a giant space spider.
Ethics and pluralism
Daniel Greenberg has a grouse against bioethicists for “pontificating and hand-wringing” over the rights and wrongs of therapeutic and reproductive cloning (20 July, p 25).
What he offers in its place is pontification without the hand-wringing. But he is sadly misinformed about who is responsible for the dawdling he so deprecates. There are not many bioethicists 鈥� even in the US 鈥� and their influence is small. The President’s Council on Bioethics has no members with chairs in bioethics, although it has several lawyers and theologians and distinguished scientists. The council was split on the moratorium: 7 against, 10 in favour.
However, presidents do find it useful to convene committees as instruments of policy making, particularly where the public mood is unpredictable. So Greenberg has what he wants: leadership and timely decision-making. Except that it went against what he wanted: therapeutic stem cell research. So much easier to blame the bioethicists, and to talk about dithering, than to face up to the realities of political pluralism.
Saxon apartheid
Interestingly enough, the genetic evidence for a large scale displacement of Celtic people following the Roman withdrawal from Britain is supported by linguistic evidence (6 July, p 20). Apart from place names, fewer than twenty Old English words can reliably be traced to a Celtic source.
Similarly, even though the Celts appear to have adopted at least 600 words from the period of the Roman occupation, almost none of these (again, other than place names) were passed on to Old English. And the words in our language that come from Latin were mostly acquired at later periods through other sources.
This of course suggests a surprisingly low level of interaction between Germanic invaders and the indigenous Celts. By way of contrast, the Norman Conquest led to an enormous influx of French words, but did not alter the fundamentally Germanic nature of English.
Ending animal tests
Thank you for shedding light on the real reason behind the continued use of outdated and unreliable animal tests: government inertia and indifference (20 July, p 14). We agree that the US government, represented by the Environmental Protection Agency, is the most flagrant violator of the “three Rs.” It not only spent years blocking the international consensus to abandon the notorious LD50, as you mention, but more recently threatened to block international acceptance of a fully validated non-animal test for skin corrosion, indicating that it would require “confirmatory” testing using non-validated animal studies.
The EPA’s Dick Hill states in your article that “the science is not there” to replace the Draize rabbit test for eye irritancy. The fact is that non-animal test methods “fail to measure up” because they can’t possibly be as bad as the Draize, which has a demonstrated concordance to human responses equal to flipping a coin. How does one validate a sophisticated non-animal test against garbage like the Draize, and why does the government still insist on this?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently lobbied successfully for $4 million for the EPA to develop non-animal tests. Earmarking these funds has set a Congressional precedent that recognises the EPA has virtually ignored research and development into non-animal test methods.
The US should be leading in good science. Instead it is lagging.
Letter
Everyone is in favour of alternatives to using animals in scientific research. But let’s not get carried away with what they can achieve or we risk raising false expectations.
Andy Coghlan is right to point out that most progress can be made in toxicology testing, where there are defined end points. But this alone is unlikely to end all research using animals. Toxicology testing accounts for just 17 per cent of animal use.
In fundamental research it is harder to develop alternatives. The answer to the scientific questions being asked is unknown, and so there might be no way of knowing if an alternative technique will produce the right answer.
Moral animals
Marc Bekoff’s article on the existence of morality in animals makes some questionable assumptions (13 July, p 34). Specifically, his claim that “empathy and feelings” underlie morality fails to take into account the full range of theories about morality.
For example, part of Kant’s theory states that all moral acts must be caused by a sense of duty and not any emotional feelings 鈥� which makes morality a purely human domain.
The mind's a stage
Susan Blackmore’s article on consciousness misinterprets my work (22 June, p 26). Global workspace theory is not the same as working memory.
Nor is global workspace only a kind of memory. A memory is a place to store things. But a global workspace is more like the stage of a theatre. You could just store things on a stage, but the whole point of a theatre stage is to distribute information to a vast audience of active listeners. In a less obvious way, a stage is also a place for integration of many converging ideas, from the playwright, the dress designer, voice coach and director, in one unitary display. That is the role of the global workspace, to enable the integration and distribution of essential information. This is apparently also a major function of consciousness in the brain.
In contrast, Alan Baddeley’s working memory is a domain of verbal rehearsal and visual planning 鈥� to remember a telephone number, for example, or where you parked your car. It has conscious components, but at any time most information in working memory is unconscious.
Letter
Why did Pearce couch his article in terms of gloom and doom? Given the increasingly “polluted and paved” nature of the planet, 3.2 billion by 2150 sounds just fine thanks, even too many.
A study by Wackernagel et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month reports that we are living off natural resource capital. We have shot past our maximum carrying capacity by 20 per cent, putting natural resources at risk, such as fisheries, which may go into irreversible decline.
David Pimentel of Cornell University, New York, argues that a sustainable population for the Earth, where everyone’s standard of living is comparable to Europeans, is only two billion. He advocates a fertility rate of 1.5 for a century. Provided this does not distort the age structure excessively, surely this is what all nations should be striving towards. Next century we can get it back up to replacement levels again, assuming ecological sustainability has been reached.
Funding British science
The latest increase in government investment in the British science base is most welcome (27 July, p 25). But the science base only relates to research council and Higher Education Funding Council spending. It does not include the R&D spend by government departments relating to health, the environment, agriculture and so forth.
In 2000 an all-party select committee report (“Governmental Expenditure on R&D”) concluded that the year-on-year real-term decline in departmental R&D had completely undermined increases in the science base for one and a half decades. Overall, science was in decline. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” was the phrase used. Since then much of the rot has stopped but we have a lot of catching up to do. And despite a series of high-profile issues such as bovine TB, Cryptosporidium in the water supply, BSE, E. coli, genetically modified crops and foot and mouth, we are still seeing annual cuts in agricultural research.
Long lives ahead
On what grounds does Fred Pearce assume that the size of the current human population is optimal (20 July, p 38)?
Throughout history the human race has survived and prospered at population levels lower than those of the 20th century. And this despite the fact that, in the pre-industrial past, far more labour was required to produce the bare necessities.
Pearce fears that the labour force will shrink as fertility declines. So what? The essence of industrialisation is the declining need for labour. Currently, many developed economies are finding it difficult to provide jobs for all their eligible workers.
As for the cost of social programmes for the elderly, Pearce overlooks the obvious trade-off. A smaller population means fewer children and so lower costs for their education and care. Baby booms are expensive because children are total dependents. Older people are not.
Add to this the long-term benefits that come from saving resources and decreasing pollution, and the case environmentalists make for zero-growth population looks pretty convincing. There isn’t a single ecological problem that won’t be ameliorated by a smaller population.
Finally, Pearce’s fear that older people are boringly “conservative” is simply a stereotype based on what the elderly have been in the past: powerless, marginal and insecure. Thanks to their numbers, wealth and education, the old will bear an unprecedented responsibility for political leadership. Rather than resisting that fact by hasty pro-natalist policies, we ought to begin recognising longevity as the greatest collective benefit yet to emerge from the Industrial Revolution. It is indeed the true wealth of nations. If this is a “population crash,” let’s make the most of it.