Global genebanks
Your article on war-ravaged agriculture contained a very clear message on the importance of conserving crop diversity (22 January, p 34). However, such diversity is not only critical in restoring agriculture following natural or human-induced disasters but is the foundation of all sustainable agriculture.
The genetic diversity contained within thousands of traditional varieties, now being abandoned by farmers but conserved in gene banks around the world, represents one of humanity’s most valuable resources and gives hope that we will be able to feed ourselves in the future in the face of uncertain climates, new pests and diseases and changing market demands.
Yet many of the collections housed in gene banks throughout the world 鈥� facilities that are meant to be safe havens 鈥� are themselves under threat, not only through wars and other disasters but also through years of underfunding and neglect.
In October last year a new financing mechanism, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, came into being with the specific objective of salvaging the world’s most important collections and ensuring their continued availability. Initiated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the Trust seeks to spend approximately $13 million per year from an endowment of $260 million to ensure the survival of the world’s most important genetic resources in perpetuity.
Ethiopia may be one of the poorest countries in economic terms, but it is one of the richest in crop diversity. Ethiopia recognises the magnitude of its responsibility to the whole of humanity for conserving its immense agricultural biodiversity, and has pledged its financial support to the trust. Ethiopia calls on other governments, foundations, corporations and individuals to join it in this effort.
Selfish harmony
On the question of maintaining harmony on deep space missions, as raised by lone explorer Gilles Elkaim (8 January, p 44), readers may like to know how the three-man crews of remote lighthouses used to keep up their morale.
Each man had his own supplies, down to the last matchbox and packet of sugar, all marked with its owner’s name. Cooking was by roster but the man responsible was expected to prepare three different meals, according to individual preferences and supplies. There was no lending, borrowing or giving at any time 鈥� except, presumably, in an emergency.
Long experience had shown that this practice was the only way to guarantee harmonious relationships in a small crew, isolated for long periods with no hope of rapid physical contact with the mainland, at least until helicopters became available.
Today, of course, all rock lighthouses are automated and have a helicopter platform on top 鈥� but the experience gained on them might be relevant to deep space voyages.
Religious road sense
The findings about Orthodox Jews as pedestrians will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked and lived in many countries outside western Europe and the US (22 January, p 16). Whether it is Allah who protects some, or a more fatalist understanding to be found in South Asia, the challenge of managing the interaction between pedestrians and vehicles is huge. But let this not be a one-sided argument that “pedestrians must behave more responsibly”. I interpret South Asian behaviour as a healthy disrespect for those who consider the car as god.
The Global Road Safety Partnership, set up by the World Bank, has a lot to offer in deeper understanding. Meanwhile, it is the poor and pedestrians that lose out in transport policy.
Meaningless image
I should like to point out that Kevin O’Regan’s claim that we do not experience colour inside our brain and that, therefore, all our experience is perceptual, has not gone unchallenged (29 January, p 40). As I pointed out in a commentary in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, where he and Alva No毛 put forward this view, it makes the error of ignoring the patently empirical fact of internal sensation.
Take this example: a little girl aged five experiences an after-image. She does not know that it is an after-image 鈥� indeed she experiences it for a moment or so without actually paying it any attention. However, happening to close her eyes, she does come to notice it, but only as a meaningless splodge among other meaningless splodges.
But after a second or two, she notices that it is in a hexagonal shape. In this same instant she realises that her mother has brought her up her favourite sweet as she usually does, and that it is on the silver hexagonal dish that she usually brings it on, and that she has placed it on the window sill in the bright sunlight. So at last she has perceived with the aid of her sensation. She opens her eyes and goes and gets the sweet, that before she had not realised was there.
Unfortunately for O’Regan’s thesis that there is no such thing as internal sensation without attendant perception, here we have a counter example, for the child first experienced internally a “raw-feel” sensation (for everyone admits that after-images are not in the external world), then noticed it, still as meaningless, then at last used her perceiving mode to project upon that internal experience an “objective” interpretation.
If this is possible for after-images, there is nothing to prevent us claiming the same structure for ordinary open-eye visual sensation: that it is fundamentally meaningless, internal, and open to experimental changes of perception.
From Ian Jackson
Your article described a blind person “seeing” via a tactile pad on the tongue. It is good to see this development in real life. I first read about this concept in the science fiction story The Persimmon Sequence published 34 years ago by Don J. Fretland, where a compact head camera and tactile pad was used by a blind character to “see” basic shapes at low resolution. The only significant difference in the story is that the tactile matrix pad was strapped to the inside of the upper thigh and provided feedback through skin sensitivity.
Drouin West, Victoria, Australia
Adult AI
Michael Witbrock believes that “the web will ultimately make it possible for computers to acquire a very detailed knowledge base” (29 January, p 21). If he is right, then the first artificial intelligence humanity ever creates will know an awful, awful lot about porn.
Scottish bikes
Mick Hamer describes enthusiasm in the bicycle as not being revived until Parisians showed an interest in the 1860s (29 January, p 48), but he omitted to mention the Scottish contribution in the 1840s. In 1842, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a Scottish blacksmith, devised and built a treadle-driven bicycle.
This was sufficiently efficient for him to be able to ride it from his home at Courthill Smithy at Keir Mill in Dumfries to Glasgow, a distance of over 90 kilometres. There he had the distinction of having one of the first recorded cycle accidents when he collided with a little girl who strayed into his path. British cyclists regard Macmillan as the originator of the modern bicycle and his name is celebrated to this day.
It is very relevant that Karl Drais’s invention was prompted by the high cost of oats for feeding horses. We may yet be driven back to the bicycle by the increasing price of petrol and diesel oil.
For the record
鈥� In the interview with Barry McSweeney (29 January, p 44), it was stated that a group of senior staff at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre had been fired. In fact, they had changed responsibilities as part of the reorganisation of the JRC and have significantly contributed to developing it as an important European policy support body. Our apologies for the error.
鈥� The Liverpool vaccine plant mentioned in our news item about a glut of flu vaccine (5 February, p 14) is now run by Chiron, not GlaxoSmithKline as stated.
Heating Earth's crust
Mike Follows’s letter (5 February, p 28) shows a lack of understanding of the subject of crustal expansion first raised by Peter Mockeridge and Nathalie Bugeaud (15 January, p 28). His calculation that global warming will cause heat to penetrate downwards by only 10 millimetres is not worth the envelope it was written on. Thermal conductivity does not work like that, and anyway the Earth’s crust is being heated from below. That a NASA spokesman should reject Mockeridge and Bugeaud’s entirely reasonable and well-founded thesis only goes to confirm the impression that new ideas do not figure in the agency’s current ethos.
Speaking broadly, the crust is in a steady thermal condition, conveying heat upwards from the mantle to the atmosphere, in places via the oceans. But if the temperature of the atmosphere changes, so will the temperature of the rocks at the surface and the thermal gradient throughout the Earth will readjust, over a timescale of centuries.
Mockeridge and Bugeaud’s estimate that this mechanism is capable of producing 20 metres of overthrust at tectonic plate margins for a rise of only 1 kelvin has a horrible current relevance given the Asian tsunami, but this effect is probably not going to cause earthquakes where otherwise none would have occurred. Rather, we should expect intervals between earthquakes to be shorter during periods of global warming, and for some time after temperatures stabilise at the surface.
Of course global cooling would generate a similar influence.
Dyslexic drivers
I have an IQ of 131. I have just submitted my PhD. I am in the top 2 per cent for linguistic ability in my age group in the country. However, I spell like an average 12-year-old, read at the speed of an 11-year-old and construct words phonetically like an average 7-year-old. In a word I am dyslexic. Now, it appears, I drive like a drunk, or least like someone who is over the limit (5 February, p 12).
Fortunately, your story included information on the very small group that the results were derived from. Only 6 dyslexics were compared with 11 non-dyslexics. Imagine if such a limited test had been carried out on say 6 women and 11 men or 6 black drivers and 11 white drivers and any such claim for difference had been made. The uproar would have been, quite rightly, deafening.
What surprises me is that data from such a small (dare one say minuscule) group has ever seen the light of day. Before publishing anything of this nature, much more research should be undertaken. Like many dyslexics I have suffered over the years from constant discrimination, as I cannot spell and find reading difficult at times. This new “revelation” will not help this situation.
All I can say is thank you for a reasonably well balanced report and for including the numbers of volunteers used, as this will allow anyone with an ounce of sense to see the ludicrous nature of the conclusions that have been drawn.
From John Clark
Surely, if this was true, then Jackie Stewart, who is dyslexic, would never have been Formula One world racing car champion.
Leeds, UK
From Susan Parkinson, Arts Dyslexia Trust
This question highlights the important difference between audio-sequential and visual-spatial thinkers. The first, who are happy relating things according to their position in time, may sometimes react more quickly to road signs. But the second group, to which most dyslexics belong, are more acutely aware of how things relate in space. Safe driving would seem to demand not only quick reactions but good spatial judgement and an awareness of what is happening on the road ahead.
In fact, the people who lack visual-spatial awareness are likely to be a very much greater danger on the roads than any poor time-keeper, whether dyslexic or not.
Ashford, Kent, UK