Rattled by rain
You report that rainstorms could be the trigger for volcanic eruptions (7 September, p 4). Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle that “the connection between earthquakes and the weather has been often disputed: it appears to me to be a point of great interest”, and reports that the inhabitants of northern Chile and Peru are “most firmly convinced of some connection between the state of the atmosphere and the trembling of the ground” and that “to their minds an earthquake foretold rain”.
Darwin writes that “there appears much probability in the view鈥hat when the barometer is low, and when rain might naturally be expected to fall, the diminished pressure of the atmosphere over a wide extent of the country might well determine the precise day on which the earth鈥hould yield”. Perhaps watching the barometer could also help save lives.
For the record
鈥� In our item linking the return of bedbug infestations with sales of second-hand goods (5 October, p 10), we incorrectly described Ian Burgess as the director of the Medical Entomology Centre of the University of Cambridge. In fact, he is director of a Cambridge-based company called Insect Research & Development Ltd, which originated in the now-defunct entomology centre. He also points out that bedbugs usually take up to a fortnight to digest their meals, not the six months mentioned.
鈥� The photograph of “the cactus that kills hunger pangs for Kalahari hunters” (21 September, p8) is not a cactus but a cactiform.
Ultrafine point
John Merefield praises as “ambitious” Britain’s National Air Quality Strategy, which focuses on PM10s, particles less than 10 micrometres across (New 杏吧原创, Inside Science, 21 September).
The truth is that much smaller, “ultrafine” particulates less than 0.1 micrometres across are the real danger to health. Worryingly, an article by Erich Wickmann and Annette Peters (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, vol 358, p 2751) reports that while PM10 levels decreased in an urban environment over the 1990s, levels of ultrafine particle rose.
Britain has been instrumental in weakening and deferring European action on these particles. The Danish government, by contrast, is talking about introducing tougher regulations of its own after a two-year government-backed trial in Odense that showed traps fitted to vehicles to be effective in taking out 80 per cent of the ultrafines ().
This would tackle emissions not only from smaller trucks and diesel cars, which would escape current European legislation, but also from petrol-engined cars.
Hot on Earth
While the possibility that a bacterium or prokaryote survived transport from Mars is indeed intriguing, another possible explanation for the existence of radiation-resistant organisms occurred to me. Strong, naturally occurring sources of radiation on Earth could be responsible for encouraging them to evolve (28 September, p 16).
It is my understanding that natural reactors have formed several times(see, for example, ). These reactors would have provided an elevated local level of radiation both while they were active and during the decay of their by-products.
If an ancestor of Deinococcus was close to such a reactor, it would have been exposed to higher levels of radiation and thus experienced a positive selection pressure for radiation resistance.
Additionally, once it had evolved some resistance, it would experience the additional advantage of less competition, provided that other microbes did not develop similar resistance, and assuming that there was a sufficient food source. And once the Deinococcus filled the environmental niche, it should be more difficult for additional species to replace them, as they would have to both evolve the resistance and become more efficient than Deinococcus.
M is the answer
Paul Davies is no doubt right when he says that there is a lot we don’t know about the Universe (21 September, p 28). But in listing his seven unanswered questions, he starts out by belittling what is currently the most promising route to finding answers to them, namely M theory.
He goes on to itemise what he finds to be some of the ideas for resolving these problems: a consistent quantum gravity, extra space dimensions, subatomic membranes, matter inhabiting a shadow universe, a variable cosmological constant, our Universe as a three-membrane, colliding membrane cosmology, wormholes in space and the resolution of space-time singularities.
What unified theory could possibly be rich enough to accommodate these phenomena? Well, Paul, they’re all in M theory! One thing M theory makes no attempt to do, though, is to link human consciousness to quantum mechanics. I, for one, think that is another point in its favour.
Bye-bye us
In his article suggesting that booming populations can prefigure extinction, Bob Holmes stated that “When Abrams worked through the mathematics in detail, he found that a species’ numbers can remain high even as environmental conditions get steadily worse” (21 September, p 18). A species’ march to extinction might be marked in this way.
Perhaps the first species to be examined using the methods developed by Abrams should be Homo sapiens.
The speedy sex
Your feature on determining the sex of babies seems to ignore a plausible theory that was current some 30 years ago (14 September, p 42). This held that “male” sperm carrying 22 full chromosomes plus a half-size Y, as opposed to the female load of 23 full-size chromosomes, would have a lighter load and therefore would travel fractionally faster and further.
In a stable situation, most male sperm would be at the ends of the Fallopian tube waiting for the ovum, with female sperm left behind in the body and isthmus of the tube. This deployment would be best exploited via frequent intercourse 鈥� hence more boys early in marriage, in warm climates and during post-war excitement.
High-heeled hell
I suggest that differences in footwear are much more likely to provide a reason for a greater number of “slips, trips and twisted ankles” in women than men, rather than the carrying of heavy shopping (5 October, p 24). We see very few men in spiky stilettos, pointy-toed high heels, elevated platforms or treadless soles with no grip.
Camera consciousness
Your review of Rita Carter’s Consciousness refers to our blindness to changes, and, conversely, to our ability to “fill in” features we don’t actually see (14 September, p 52). Her observations should strike a chord with many professional photographers.
When amateurs are snapping away, they often fail to notice the top half of a lamp post growing out of granny’s head. They only see granny 鈥� possibly only her teeth, if they are waiting for her to smile.
A good photographer not only has to take note of the lamp post and similar distractions close to the subject, but also to swiftly take into account all objects that fall within as much as a 75-degree angle of camera vision. To do this it is necessary to overcome both the instinctive blindness to all but the subject and the instinctive “filling in”, by actually observing the shapes, highlights and shadows of background and foreground areas of the picture.
A professional can make decisions about all these factors within seconds. It is an exhausting exercise in overcoming subconscious assumptions and paying attention to what the subconscious wrongly assumes to be irrelevant.
Lamp power
The small thermocouple-powered generator described by Duncan Graham-Rowe is not all that new (21 September, p 21). In the 1930s and 1940s, the Russians used a simple thermoelectric device to power valve radios in areas where there was no electricity supply. It consisted of a zigzag array of thermocouples arranged in a circle around the flame of a paraffin lamp, making the inner junctions hotter than the outer ones.
The attached picture, from a magazine I edited, is a redrawing of an old Soviet press agency picture that was too blurred to print. The press release did not mention which two metals were used in the thermocouples.
Of God and Gaps
It is possible to accept the scientific theories of the big bang and evolution and also to believe in a creative God (28 September, p 3). Many people are happy to believe God used the big bang and evolution to get to where we are now.
This is not a “God of the Gaps” theory. Whatever science may discover could be like that because God created it like that in the first place. Genesis was never meant to be a scientific account. It is a book telling us about God written by people without any of our scientific knowledge. In other words, it is theology, not science. Science, on the other hand, is about the physical Universe and cannot comment on theology.
杏吧原创s and non-scientists either believe or don’t believe in God for reasons other than scientific ones, and either see God or don’t see God in scientific discoveries. Science itself cannot prove or disprove the existence of a creator God.
Your editorial rightly stated that science and religion should complement, not oppose, each other.
Letter
Many scientists, including many of the people who founded modern science, would hotly disagree with your separation of scientific and religious knowledge. However, the two dominant theories of the origins of life 鈥� macro-evolution and intelligent design 鈥� are not testable, observable or falsifiable. Thus, neither lies in the realm of science.
With regard to hsp90 and similar proteins (28 September, p 28), a mechanism that allows buffering of mutations is only of value if the ratio of beneficial to harmful mutations is weighted in favour of the beneficial when the “hopeful monster” is conceived. Surely the evidence offered by countless generations of deformed drosophilae would suggest that this is not the case.
You highlight the problem of how such a protein might arise by chance. This is, of course, not a problem to somebody who believes in intelligent design.
Finally, it is important to be clear about the difference between a “gap” in scientific knowledge that research can fill and a “gap” that exists due to logical impossibility. The argument for intelligent design is based on the latter.
Science has failed to produce a single “blow-by-blow description” of the “random molecular changes” that led to any significant biological process. It is this silence that is leading some people to reject the Darwinian paradigm.
Letter
So, intelligent design and supernatural intervention are (at best) misinformed, but a belief in God is OK as long as it doesn’t trespass on scientific fields of enquiry.
This Gouldian view of non-overlapping areas of interest is, in itself, a “God of the Gaps” postulation and, as such, actually encourages these other theories.
Surely it’s time to come off the fence and unequivocally state that a theory of God is simply not needed now in order to explain the Universe and our existence in it.