Don't fix it
Mark Glover’s thoughtful letter on maintaining biodiversity without harming alien species brings to mind a broader question (18 January, p 24). Introducing new species, for whatever perceived purpose, appears to have unforeseen deleterious consequences more often than not. The eventual reaction of agriculturalists and environmentalists is generally to advocate alien cleansing.
Those especially interested in animal welfare tend to accept this, and concentrate on either cleansing by “humane” methods or by transportation 鈥� as in the current debate about the fate of the hedgehogs on Hebridean islands that are eating the eggs of indigenous ground-nesting birds.
Surely ecological experience and evolutionary theory, not to mention history, tell us that the status quo ante cannot be thus restored. There will again be unforeseen and possibly deleterious consequences. God may be a blind watchmaker, but we are still clumsy and arrogant watch-repairers. Instead of more meddling could we not follow the engineers’ dictum: if it ain’t totally broke, don’t fix it.
Letter
When Glover says that “Here in Britain, mink became established not by deliberate release but by the irresponsibility of fur breeders”, he is ignoring history. I remember seeing reports in New 杏吧原创 of animal activists releasing mink in Scotland in the late 1970s. This activity is also summarised in the Report to Congress: Terrorism on animal enterprises (1993).
Exotic species deliberately released in island ecologies have historically done immense damage. The only ways of minimising the resulting ecological destruction are total eradication or at least continuous control by culling of the introduced species. Those who propose lesser remedies clearly do not understand the situation.
Yes, we have bananas
The possible demise of the banana in 10 years’ time as predicted in your article is absurd (18 January, p 26) According to statistics published online by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, global banana production has been rising steadily for the past 40 years. In fact there have never been so many bananas harvested as today, even in Uganda, which was highlighted as a country in crisis. This is anything but a terminal decline.
It’s true that bananas, especially export Cavendish, are threatened by a variety of serious diseases and research on their control is warranted. However, the situation is nowhere near as grave as you suggested. For instance, the form of Panama disease that attacks Cavendish in the tropics and endangers commercial production in the Latin America/Caribbean region is still only found in a few countries, notably Malaysia and Indonesia.
The assertion that without genomic research banana production worldwide will “head into a tailspin” is also hard to believe. Sterility of the domesticated banana has been used to advocate genomic research coupled with genetic transformation as the only way forward. This may be true for the Cavendish, but not for every one of the 400 to 500 genetically distinct clones thought to grow worldwide. A number are fertile and have been used successfully in conventional breeding programmes.
It may even be possible to breed a disease-resistant dessert banana to replace Cavendish using fertile, natural mutants of Gros Michel, the old banana of the trades. While I believe genomic research and transformation work to be worthwhile, let’s get the story straight.
Language symbiosis
It is doubtful whether we as a species could survive for very long without language (18 January, p 30). So instead of Ken Grimes’s comment “Although we don’t need the language bug”, it would be more precise to say that there is a strongly symbiotic relationship between humans and their language.
Terrence Deacon made this point very well in his book, The symbolic species (1997). “Modern humans need the language parasite to flourish and reproduce, just as much as it needs humans to reproduce.”
This quote also shows, incidentally, that the idea that language is a parasite is not as new as Grimes would have us believe. In fact, one of the strongest and clearest statements of this view dates back to 1985, when the Leiden Indo-Europeanist Frits Kortlandt published his article “A parasitological view of non-constructible sets”.
Sheepdogs in space
I don’t think the sheepdog satellite scheme will work as shown (18 January, p 13). There is no return path for the electrons. Without one, the two ends will quickly develop a huge voltage difference, and be pulled together by electrostatic force.
Simply returning the current down a parallel wire will generate an equal and opposite force, resulting in zero net thrust. Beaming the electrons back through the vacuum won’t work either, since this is just the same as far as Newton’s third law is concerned.
Current flowing round a wide ring made rigid by rapid spin might work. The spin prevents the ring from doing what it would really like to do, which is simply to align itself with the Earth’s magnetic field like a compass 鈥� but the magnitude of the resultant force depends on the field gradient and will be disappointingly weak, and zero at the magnetic equator.
Justin Mullins writes:
鈥� If the tether were moving through a vacuum, Luce Gilmore would indeed be right. But space near to Earth is actually filled with a low-density plasma containing many electrons. The spacecraft collects these electrons, passes them through the tether in the form of a current to generate a force and then emits the electrons back into the plasma. The return path that completes this circuit is through the plasma. A conducting space tether was deployed from the space shuttle Atlantis in 1996 and operated for five hours before the tether broke.
Divide them up
Bob Holmes tells us that, as family sizes get smaller, more dwellings are needed to house the same population and this threatens biodiversity (18 January, p 9). But the logic must also be that existing houses are too big for the new family sizes 鈥� so subdivide them. The London boroughs that have no green fields for expansion and in which Victorian and 1930s houses are now mostly divided into apartments prove this.
Obobified lingo
I read with interest about the new lingo that Hewlett-Packard suggests in its patent could help computers to recognise our speech better (11 January, p 15).
So in HP’s Computer Pidgin Language, printer becomes “crinter” and telephone becomes “teleter”, while “balka”, “coupo”, “obobify” and “okilimox” could be assigned any meaning you want.
I could only smile at the mental image of all the staff where I work talking to their computers in what sounds like the language coined by the comedian “Professor” Stanley Unwin. When is this software going to be released?
As Unwin would put it: Goodlee byelode.
Trusting the portly
You report that patients don’t trust overweight doctors (4 January, p 7).
So what’s new? Hippocrates, who lived to the age of 99 under his own treatment, told his students: “A doctor must be careful not to get too fat. Someone who can’t look after his own fitness shouldn’t be allowed to look after other people’s.”
Letter
Robert Hash says it is time for medical students to acknowledge that they need to look healthy in order to be believed by their patients.
Another piece of information we can glean from this study is that our prejudice against overweight people is so strong that we will ignore their medical advice, quite possibly to our detriment, because they are fat.
What does this mean for the rest of society? Fat teachers, fat executives, fat politicians, fat clergy 鈥� all will be ignored because, clearly, if they were smarter they wouldn’t be overweight. Scary.
Fair pay
There is nothing wrong with the arithmetic at the School of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales, which offers researchers a 3/4 research and 1/3 teaching job (Feedback, 18 January).
Feedback is obviously not an academic. The successful applicant should consider themselves lucky that they are only expected to work 8.3 per cent more time than they are paid for. Luxury!
For the record
鈥� In the article on cracking down on nuclear smuggling (11 January, p 17), we should have said that Los Alamos National Laboratory is helping with the project, not Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
鈥� In the article about paper displays (18 January, p 34) we mistakenly said that printable batteries can produce an electric current up to 1.5 volts. We should, of course, have said voltage.
Reef is in danger
We are disturbed that readers will come away with the impression that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is not facing serious environmental threats (4 January, p 8). This is patently not so.
Last year, a review of data led to agreement that some near-shore sections of the GBR are under threat from increasing amounts of sediments and nutrients from land run-off. All experts mentioned in your article, and 11 others, endorsed the statement, which concluded: “There is significant concern that coastal ecosystems in the GBR World Heritage Area are being adversely affected as a consequence of this increase” ().
To imply that these sections of the GBR are of little importance is nonsense. They include 209 reefs, or more than 135 square kilometres of coral reef, and hundreds of square kilometres of some of the most significant habitats on the GBR. We have seen the damage done by run-off to reefs around the world, including South-East Asia and the Caribbean. Is anyone seriously suggesting that we should not try to protect the GBR now from potential damage caused by predictable increases in run-off in future?
Other threats to the GBR, such as overfishing and pollution, are highlighted in last October’s consensus statement by 16 reef researchers drawn from three continents in the Townsville Declaration (media.jcu.edu.au/story.cfm?id=118). This 11-point summary applies to all reefs, including the GBR, concluding: “If these trends continue, coral reefs will decline further, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and economic value.” Again, we have seen the impacts of these activities on reefs in other parts of the world and there is clear and growing evidence that the GBR faces the same threats.
While more research may be needed into the intricacies of how coral bleaching takes place, the threat of global climate change to coral reefs is clear: rising sea temperatures will regularly reach between 1 and 2 掳C above critical thermal thresholds by 2050. This will lead to greater coral bleaching and mortality, which is already at worrying levels. This evidence has been published in peer-reviewed journals and accepted by the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, arguably the most heavily reviewed piece of science on the planet.
The fact that the GBR is among the least degraded of coral reef ecosystems should spur us to address the serious challenges that this critically important and beautiful treasure now faces. We must do so while it is relatively easy to make changes and prevent greater degradation.