For the record
鈥� Our Soundbite on recreating the first powered flight called the aircraft a replica “Kitty Hawk” (27 September, p 12). In fact, Kittyhawk, North Carolina, is where the Wright brothers’ first flight took place. The aircraft was called the “Flyer” or later “Wright Flyer 1”.
Metaphors sell
It’s good to see George Lakoff’s work on metaphor receiving the attention it deserves (27 September, p 38). All knowledge evolves by metaphorical extension, and mathematics is no exception. Where would we be without “particles” and “waves”, or our technique of metaphorising physical relationships onto spatial relationships? We need metaphors, even if they do sometimes lead us astray.
In line with classical information theory, the function of metaphor is to narrow down a “space” of possible configurations, in this case “ways to think about something”. In acting as constraints to a “wandering mind”, models and metaphors help to “orient” our ideas, “navigating” us across novel or difficult “conceptual terrain”. They are thus also a method of thought control.
Anyone who wishes to “sell” a contentious idea will use metaphors to “steer” their audience’s opinion. Evidently, I am no exception. But with a wider appreciation of how such language works, I hope we might be less at its mercy.
If Tony Blair had vowed to “fight inflation” by sending troops to invade the stock exchange, we’d have been howling with laughter. We would have clearly seen it as a metaphor taken too far. Yet our government somehow managed to pass off a literal reading of the equally metaphorical “war on terror”. No one in their right mind would seek the “solution” to a crossword puzzle by putting it in warm water. So how did we end up conned into “fighting terrorism” with a military occupation of the Middle East?
George Orwell warned us about all this half a century ago. Lakoff’s work raises the issue again. It’s time we took it eriously.
Whaling culture
As a new participant in the rhetoric on whaling, Geoffrey Palmer can be excused the “woeful lack of understanding” he attributes to your editorial (20 September, p 26).
In fact, resumed commercial whaling will use the procedure for setting quotas developed by the International Whaling Commission’s scientific committee and agreed to (but not yet implemented) by the commission. Since this will ensure that only sustainable whaling on abundant stocks will be permitted, there is no scientific or conservation concern.
Palmer’s “moral and ethical” arguments against whaling and his statement that “none of the established whaling countries need whale meat as a source of food” are examples of the cultural imperialism and hypocritical political rhetoric that, together with a lack of good faith in negotiations, have made the IWC dysfunctional.
No one will force New Zealanders to go whaling again but neither should they continue to deny the right to whale sustainably to those for whom whaling is culturally significant.
Freud's fantasies
There are numerous errors in Thomas Henretta’s letter about Freud and false memories (27 September, p 26). Freud was not using direct hypnosis at the time of the seduction theory episode in the mid-1890s. More important, as several scholars have now shown, his later accounts of the episode were grossly misleading.
At the time, he did not report that his female patients had been sexually abused by their fathers. Moreover, there were no “stories” of early childhood sexual abuse from the patients in question (one-third of whom were men). Freud analytically reconstructed preconceived childhood “sexual scenes” for every one of his current patients, largely on the basis of the symbolic interpretation of their symptoms.
Nor did he “question his patients further” and so discover that the supposed sexual abuse had been fantasised. It was some nine years later that he came up with his unconscious fantasy theory story to explain away his highly improbable claim of 100 per cent childhood sexual abuse of the patients in question, and not until 1914 that he first claimed that the women among these patients had fantasised abuse by their fathers.
Cellphone damage
The debate over the safety of GSM phones rumbles on (13 September, p 12 and p 46, and 4 October, p 34), and I recently came across a news report of a study suggesting that the new higher-frequency 3G phones may cause nausea and other effects.
As a sometime electromagnetics engineer, I have like many others struggled to come up with any non-thermal mechanism by which the low-energy microwave quanta emitted by a mobile phone could possibly affect human tissue. Then, not long ago, my biologist daughter and I were discussing photosynthesis. Since then, it has occurred to me that we have here a similar phenomenon.
For many years biologists struggled to discover the mechanism by which low-energy light quanta could possibly prime the high-energy chemical reactions they were seeing. It turns out to be a kind of cascading pump, with each photon bumping up the energy of the system bit by bit, until enough has been collected.
Perhaps there may be some similar mechanism by which electrons or other charged structures within the brain can be pumped up step by step to damaging energy levels, using microwave quanta. Nobody to my knowledge has ever looked for such a mechanism. Indeed, do we even know how to?
Resisting the Nazis
I agreed absolutely with John Cornwell’s comments on the relationship between science and conscience, and his view that the widely accepted apolitical nature of science made it easier for the Nazi regime to make use of thousands of scientists (27 September, p 25).
He is right to point out how hard it was to resist, but some in the wider scientific community did. Individual scientists risked their careers and worse, by attempting to protect Jewish colleagues who were being hounded out of their positions.
Within the medical community, there was organised resistance from the Association of Socialist Physicians. In the late 1930s they agitated against the regime, and published a journal which attempted to refute the Nazis’ medicalised propaganda. Readers can find out more in Robert Proctor’s excellent book Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Harvard, 1988).
I appreciate the difficulties of summarising a complex situation in a short article, but I think it is important that we acknowledge the tradition of resistance to the attempts to undermine the integrity of science. This is particularly important today when the practice of science is so often dominated by commercial concerns.
Puny medical budget
Sylvia Pag谩n Westphal notes that the $27 billion annual budget of the US National Institutes of Health is “larger than many small countries” (4 October, p 54). It is certainly much larger than the $0.6 billion of the UK Medical Research Council.
The difference is not accounted for by the size of the economy. US GDP is about seven times the British. So the US, with its supposed hostility to public spending gives proportionately about five or six times as much money to medical research.
Nor should we suppose that charities make up the difference in the UK. The US is well supplied with them as well. In fact, one American charity spends as much on diabetes research in the UK as “Diabetes UK”.
How long are British scientists and the public, who will ultimately benefit, going to put up with this situation? Do they feel that a serious campaign to increase spending would be “too political” and might get their lab coats dirty? If it succeeded they could afford new ones!
Knotty conversations
Ian Stewart’s description of knots and anti-knots puts me in mind of a certain class of difficult conversation, where one feels that if meaningful ommunication is ever to take place between me and another, I will first have to untangle a web of misunderstandings with which the other person is festooned (27 September, p 29).
In general, these conversations are fruitless for both parties. A better approach might be to confess at the beginning: “I’m sorry, there is no knot I can tie at my end of the rope, that will undo the one you have tied at your end.”
Tough assignment
Feedback includes an item on an advertisement from the zoology department of the University of Oxford (27 September). Students of exploration history will know, as I did, that the advert that caught your attention is a direct derivation of the famous advert placed by Ernest Shackleton early last century, when trying to recruit a team for his first expedition to Antarctica.
Shackleton’s ad read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
Curiously, Shackleton was swamped by applicants. Perhaps Oxford hopes the same reverse psychology will work for them.
Dignity in life and death
Philip Nitschke champions individual rights to access to information and to the means to end life (4 October, p 48). But focusing exclusively on individual decision-making omits the social context within which these decisions are made, and which can place heavy constraints on people.
Pressures to make decisions do not simply come from other interfering individuals, nor are they always immediately obvious. In the case of end-of-life decisions, relevant context includes access to services and social power and the extent to which a society values and gives opportunities to different groups.
The average age of those attending Nitschke’s seminars is 75. To put a complex point briefly, the elderly are not highly valued in Australia, a materialistic western society where communities are often fragmented by family movement and the “tyranny of distance”. Such factors, among others, will shape “freely” made decisions to opt to end life.
In addition, Nitschke talks with a degree of disingenuousness of “the clear wishes of the people 鈥� who were strongly behind” voluntary euthanasia legislation. True, there was widespread support for this, but the support was far from universal.
Living in Australia at the time of the Northern Territory right-to-die legislation, I was informed that many Aboriginal people in particular were vehemently opposed to the legislation and feared the pressures it might put on them. It is no coincidence that these people are stigmatised, highly marginalised and have very poor access to services, including medical services.
Providing the means to choose to die with dignity must be matched with, if not exceeded by, providing the means to live with dignity.