We're animal-like
We enjoyed your recent series of articles on animal minds (12 June, p 41). The research programmes on animal cognition that these articles summarised are an exciting component of modern evolutionary biology and psychology. The findings that demonstrate similarities between the problem-solving performance of various animal species and that of humans are debunking the old but stubbornly persistent view that there is a yawning gap between animal and human minds. This view flies in the face of now entrenched ideas about the fundamental continuity inherent in the evolutionary process.
However, we were disappointed to see that your authors all stuck to only one of the possible interpretations that follow from these results, namely that animals are far more like humans than previously realised. None considered the obvious alternative: that humans are far more like other animals than previously realised.
The two may seem indistinguishable, but in fact there is a subtle difference that leads to two critically different conclusions: either that the psychological processes subserving these abilities in animals are far more sophisticated than ever before imagined, as your authors concluded, or that the psychological processes subserving the same phenomena in humans are somewhat simpler than previously assumed, though no less interesting for it.
The first interpretation leads to the position that animals and humans can be said to be similar only if animals are found to be doing amazing things, rather than when humans are found to be doing surprisingly mundane things. This betrays an anthropocentrism eerily reminiscent of that which justified the original, simplistic theories of psychological dualism that your authors are at pains to challenge.
More troubling is the implication that our respect for other species should be measured in proportion to how amazingly human-like their abilities are.
Spotting spyware
Your article on spyware was timely (26 June, p 24). I immediately downloaded Spybot Search-and-Destroy and found 38 of the damn things on my machine, now eradicated. Not only does my computer now run faster, but the number of spam emails I receive has dropped from around 25 a day to one or two.
Telecoms, not cars
Justin Mullins’s article creates the impression that sophisticated modelling of traffic flows and driver behaviour can lead to less traffic congestion and more efficient flows (3 July, p 21). However, in industrialised countries the ratio of vehicles to the number of kilometres of road in urban areas is increasing at an alarming rate. This must mean that any improvements in traffic flow from modelling driver behaviour will quickly be negated by the increasing numbers of vehicles per road kilometre.
We need to realise that moving people in order to move information is inherently inefficient, and insist that the telecommunications infrastructure be used instead when that is economically feasible 鈥� which it increasingly is in an information-based economy.
Cool energy
Chris Seline makes a common mistake in saying, “Isn’t the temperature of a material defined by the kinetic energy of the particles in it?” (3 July, p 31). No, it isn’t. The temperature depends on the average random kinetic energy of the particles. An electric current in a perfect conductor is ordered, not random, so the kinetic energy of the electrons does not contribute to the temperature.
Sir, it's snowing
Ian Clark’s mention of metaldehyde evokes memories of the golden age of British ironmongery, when the local store would happily sell not merely all the ingredients necessary for the preparation of explosives in the comfort of one’s garden shed, but all kinds of other exciting (and now banned) substances (The Last Word, 10 July).
The metaldehyde bar was, in fact, dual-purpose, functioning as both firelighter and rat poison. It also had a third and little-known property: applied to hot metal, such as a heated poker, it would give off immense quantities of what looked like snowflakes which, being considerably lighter than the real thing, would float around in air currents for many minutes before finally settling.
The most spectacular demonstration I can recall was when, with judicious timing and the super-heating of the coke-fired stove which served the sixth-form block, we managed to create a magnificent and near-impenetrable indoor blizzard in time for the last history lesson before Christmas 鈥� though God knows what we inhaled in the process.
The editor writes:
鈥� While metaldehyde clearly has a number of entertaining uses, it is also the active ingredient of slug pellets and is a very toxic chemical. It should only be used in controlled environments and certainly not while there is any danger that children will be exposed to it.
Africa's agony
Your editorial about the need for a “rainbow” revolution in African agriculture misses the root cause of Africa’s inability to feed itself (3 July, p 3).
As your editorial and the brief article (p 5) point out, African agriculture is extremely diverse and African farmers are skilled at exploiting their environment. Africa has a generally low population density, but even in highly populated Rwanda and Burundi extremely efficient methods of agriculture have evolved, which can adequately feed their populations.
The main, perhaps even the only, reason Africa cannot feed itself is political mismanagement. Zimbabwe is a case in point. It was once a major regional food exporter, but deliberate mismanagement of the economy and cynical government manipulation of food supplies have created famine and food shortages in the last three seasons, despite higher than usual rainfall.
Ethiopia today is synonymous with starvation, but until Mengistu’s Derg government nationalised 97 per cent of the farmland there was no widespread famine in that country. After nationalisation, that 97 per cent of the land was producing only about 4 per cent of the country’s food. Unsurprisingly, starvation ensued.
At the other end of the spectrum is Botswana, a country which is almost entirely desert but where, thanks to a stable, sensible system of governance, famine does not occur.
Rather than squandering money on trying to improve systems of agriculture, organisations wanting to help would be better advised to spend their money trying to improve the governance of African countries. There are many ways to do this but the most important is improving Africans’ access to information about what is happening in their country. Helping to fund independent newspapers and especially radio stations would have a huge impact on some of the appalling governments in Africa by throwing a spotlight on their nefarious activities.
Until the real cause of Africa’s problems is acknowledged, they cannot be addressed.
Letter
We have been here before, many times. Specifically, Africa’s green revolution has come 鈥� and gone. High-yielding maize varieties were developed in the 1950s in Kenya and in what was then Rhodesia. Similarly with groundnuts, and then with cassava and rice in west Africa.
Poverty in Africa 鈥� indeed, poverty everywhere 鈥� is not a function of technology. It is a political and cultural problem. Otherwise the $15 to $20 billion a year that have gone into Africa as “development assistance” for the last 40 years or so would have had some detectable effect.
Greenhouse action
Chris Freeman observes that, due directly to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, the world’s peat bogs “are going into solution” and releasing rising volumes of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) into watercourses, which in turn emit increased CO2 to the atmosphere (10 July, p 9). With this phenomenon evidently having begun about 40 years ago, and if it is true that global river-borne DOC has been rising exponentially by about 6 per cent per year, the prognosis on this trend is of “ex-peat” emissions reaching 7 gigatonnes per year by 2060 鈥� equal to society’s present global carbon emissions.
Freeman’s findings strengthen the case for multilateral action on carbon emissions and set a new goal for the stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 at perhaps 320 parts per million by volume.
Secondly, the urgency is changed: on this evidence we appear to have less than three decades to displace the use of fossil fuels if we are to avoid positive feedback from increased atmospheric carbon swamping the carbon sinks and committing us to a global climatic destabilisation and consequent catastrophic crop failure, geo-economic collapse, contested mass-migration and so on.
Thirdly, the urgency dictates that policies for cutting carbon emissions must be complemented by the recovery of gigatonnes per year of carbon from the atmosphere. Numerous techno-fixes have been proposed to achieve a fraction of this recovery, none of which are self-funding.
An obvious, long-proven and long-ignored option is for a global effort to develop coppice woodland to produce methanol. This would entail widespread deciduous reforestation, particularly of upland regions, with plots of woodland being felled and regrown from the stump in cycles ranging from 7 to 20 years, and their produce being used as feedstock in village-scale methanol refineries.
This option could recover airborne carbon both during coppice development and in their root growth thereafter. It could displace fossil fuels in internal combustion engines, fuel cells and gas turbines. It could, if applied sustainably, help communities and ecosystems adapt to climate change by helping to mitigate flooding, supplying rural jobs, stabilising hill soils, buffering old forests, reconnecting forest that is now fragmented and so on.
I suggest that the uplands of the UK are as much in need of it as anywhere.
Pesticide suicides
The evidence for self-destructive behaviour triggered by psychotropic drugs is well documented (3 July, p 36). Moreover, the interaction of these compounds with additional “environmental insults” is poorly, if at all, understood.
My programme Green Blood Red Tears broadcast by Kentucky Educational Television in 2000 documents the pandemic of farmer suicides and the unrecognised dangers of the prescribing by American rural doctors of the antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to stressed-out and overworked farmers, especially those whose neurotransmitter mechanism has been compromised by pesticide absorption.
Studies in the UK by Robert Davies and Ghouse Ahmed at Rydon House, Taunton, Somerset, reveal the perils of overprescribing SSRIs to individuals exposed to sheep dip.
Separately, David Overstreet of the North Carolina School of Medicine and Hermona Soreq of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown how organophosphate exposure causes depression and changes cholinergic gene expression in the brain. In the 1980s, Martin Teicher and colleagues at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Lorann Stallones, now at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, documented suicide impulses following the administration of psychotropic drugs and increases in successful suicides in communities growing pesticide-intensive cash crops.
Thankfully, organophosphates are beginning to be regulated in the US, but the fundamental scientific research and epidemiological studies necessary to explain how these deadly reactions happen are stymied. For more information on my film, visit