Spooky spin?
If only quantum entanglement were as straightforward as Bob Millar says (30 October, p 30). However, what most quantum theorists claim is that if the spin of one entangled particle changes after the two have gone their separate ways to the opposite ends of the universe, the spin of the other particle is immediately “known” to have a value opposite to the first one’s revised spin.
If it were merely a matter of B’s spin being opposite to A’s unrevised, original spin, then all we would have is Estling’s Partitioned Trousers (EPT) non-paradox: the right leg of a pair of trousers is sent to me by an inhabitant of a galaxy 10 billion light years away. At the moment I receive it I know with absolute certainty that he has retained the left leg of the trousers.
There is nothing very remarkable in this, and I don’t think my instantaneous awareness of information about an object 10 billion light years distant would have caused so much concern for Einstein. There is no spooky action at a distance with this scenario, just reasoned inference from observed facts to an unobserved but ineluctable conclusion.
What so troubled Einstein (and others) is that the particle at one end of the universe has acquired, instantaneously, the opposite spin because of an action done to its sister particle at the other end. Bohr and his disciples maintain that particle B has no intrinsic spin until particle A’s is measured and at that point, and that point only, B is known by the measurer of A to have the opposite spin, by virtue of what Einstein described as spooky action at a distance. Therefore, say quantum theorists, we are compelled to abandon either “naive reality” or locality. What could be simpler?
Organic abundance
Andrew Page wonders whether a move to organic farming would be good for biodiversity overall (30 October, p 30). He is concerned that while the evidence shows that organically farmed land supports more wildlife than intensively farmed land, the yields are lower. The answer must nevertheless be yes.
The wildlife group shown by the research to be more abundant on organically farmed land is “farmland wildlife”, which has suffered severe declines. These species evolved alongside agriculture in Europe and depend on many key aspects of traditional and organic systems which have been largely abandoned by intensive farming. These include mixed crop and livestock enterprises, not using agrochemicals, more supportive habitats such as field margins and hedgerows, and relatively low livestock grazing levels.
It would be very expensive to manage land artificially in this way just for wildlife, and only a limited area would be available. Wildlife-friendly farming on all of the 75 per cent of UK land that is used for agriculture, as we have had through most of our history, would be far more efficient, and more wildlife could be supported.
There are other environmental benefits. As organic farming does not generally rely on agrochemicals, it means less pollution and less waste. Moreover, as organic farming is based on organic matter rather than synthetic inorganic fertilisers, it is far more energy-efficient, and it maintains and builds up soil carbon. In fact, research shows that organic farming requires only about half as much fossil fuel energy as non-organic farming to produce the same quantity of food, mainly because it cuts out the energy used to make fertiliser.
All this benefit is obtained with only a limited reduction in yield in Europe (of the order of 20 per cent overall, not half as Page believes), little or no yield reduction in North America (conventional yields there are lower than in Europe), and substantial increases in yield in the developing world.
False economies
Of course it is true that we must prioritise our global concerns. But it is quite wild of Bj酶rn Lomborg to suggest that economists are the people to do the calculating for us (30 October, p 23). Economists have nothing to say about background, non-economic goods and they necessarily think in the short term 鈥� not beyond the next five years 鈥� because commercial considerations change so quickly. But the world has to go on longer than this. The health and comfort of passengers on a sinking ship still matters, but if the ship goes down they’ll be dead anyway.
False economies
When he talks of the world, Lomborg seems only to be concerned with its human inhabitants, and then only with their short-term health and economic well-being. The problem with environmental destruction and climate change is that our current economic models do not account for it properly.
I wonder how much Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was deemed to be worth, or the vast ice sheets of the Arctic. Did these economists attempt to put a monetary value on all the disappearing species, not just pandas and tigers, but fish and plankton and species we haven’t even discovered yet? I would like to see their cost/benefit analysis of changes in ocean currents and the resulting effects on global weather patterns.
Do they understand that climate change could potentially lead to the end of human life on this planet? I wonder what value the experts at the Copenhagen Consensus came up with for that.
Inbred for success
Your article reports on the damaging effect of inbreeding on declining populations of threatened species (30 October, p 16). This, however, will depend on the usual breeding habits of the particular species.
For example, timber wolves typically find mates within their home pack, and they are likely to be related. This species shows no inbreeding problems. In fact, this system of breeding probably helps to explain the rapid evolution and success of wolves. Coyotes, on the other hand, are “outbreeders”, and suffer considerable ill effects from inbreeding.
There is nothing intrinsically bad about inbreeding, it is just that creating new, “untested” homozygotes, is likely to result in ill effects.
Doctors in court
Geoff Watts’s piece on medical litigation was somewhat cavalier in the way it melded US and UK legal experience (23 October, p 38). Negligence payouts in England and Wales are not the result of overgenerous juries, because there is no jury in negligence cases. The British costs rule, under which the loser pays the winner’s costs, makes nuisance suits less attractive than the US “pay your own lawyer” rule. And the very existence of the National Health Service, which treats victims of medical negligence at no further cost to themselves or to their insurers, means that damages awards are lower and the need to sue less insistent.
Economics suggests that the possibility of courts making errors in the standards they apply can cause potential defendants to take excessive care. But it also suggests that a regime of no liability will cause potential defendants to take insufficient care. A small amount of defensiveness might be worthwhile if it is simply an unwanted side effect of treatment that is better for patients overall.
Robots vs footballers
You sometimes carry features about the narrowing gap between the abilities of people and machines, and epitomise this by the clashes between the Deep Blue supercomputer and human chess grand masters. This is the wrong comparison. You should have chosen football.
A famous Japanese firm has recently produced a bipedal robot that is capable of walking. It can even negotiate a flight of stairs. Big deal. Let’s think about the level of achievement of a top-class soccer player, for example John Hartson of Glasgow Celtic. Here we have someone who can simultaneously:
All of these require the simultaneous adjustment of electrical impulses to thousands of muscle fibres, acute vision, a sense of balance and an unquantifiable degree of intuition about the possible actions of opponents. Incidentally, Hartson can also negotiate a flight of stairs with ease.
So if you want a true test of man versus machine, just stick the marvellous walking robot on a football field and let’s see how it gets on. When 11 of them can beat Celtic I’ll start worrying about computers taking over the world.
Eggs not so easy
James Randerson described the claims of IVF success following autotransplantation of granulosa cell mitochondria into presumably dysfunctional ova (23 October, p 12). One point made in the article was that mitochondria do not replicate in eggs and early embryos. This is not so. A recent study published in Reproductive Biomedicine Online (vol 9, p 418) by J. M. L. McConnell and L. Petrie showed that, at least in mice, there is a transient phase of mitochondrial DNA replication in the first 24 hours after fertilisation which can be affected by environmental toxins.
As altered levels of mitochondrial DNA at this stage can have profound knock-on effects on later developmental health, including an increased risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, there is all the more reason to be careful before applying these methods to humans without very thorough animal experimentation first.
Heads and tales
In the feature on different body shapes (30 October p 42), you show a picture of a woman of the Paduang tribe of Burma. You assert that these woman have long necks.
This is incorrect. They may look as if the neck is elongated, but in fact their ribs are depressed by the copper coils. The first three or four ribs in these women assume the shape of cow horns, thereby reducing the upper chest and lung volume.
Heads and tales
Your article on the recently found 1-metre-tall Homo floresiensis raises the question of how the species coped with having a small brain (30 October, p 8). But how does it compare with the brain capacity of the modern “shortest mature man in medical history”, Gul Mohammed, who was 0.57 metres tall (30 October, p 42). Presumably he was capable of “sophisticated behaviour”. Perhaps his head was disproportionately large, but he was only 60 per cent of the height of the Flores people.