Drug delving
The hangover from the 1960s has clearly yet to pass. John Horgan brought us up to date with research into the potential role of illicit substances to heal the mind (26 February, p 36). Although revealing, this report was anything but encouraging. His reference to Krupitsky’s work, which uses ketamine with people dependent on substances to instil feelings of “revulsion for their past lives” was shocking. Using “tricks such as forcing the subjects to sniff a bottle of vodka” should not, in the same sentence, be equated with “therapy”. Horgan would have done well to refer to Anthony Burgess’s apocalyptic work, A Clockwork Orange, in which similar aversion techniques led to the successful cessation of addictive behaviour at the expense of the patient’s mental health.
Current research suggests that “motivational interviewing”, a gentle, non-confrontational approach that strengthens people’s intrinsic motivation for change, is successful at reducing substance misuse. Such approaches can truly be described as “therapeutic” and question the need for other, more draconian approaches.
Close to the wing-sail
I was delighted to see Mick Hamer’s article on wind assistance for commercial ships (26 February, p 44). I have always maintained that this technology is far easier than trying to use wind power for generating electricity.
A wind-assisted commercial ship can use modern engine control methods working with the wing-sail computer to either keep the ship at a constant speed, reducing fuel flow when the wind is strong, or, for example, to allow extra speed in stronger winds.
Wing-sail technology, attractive to shipowners for increasing profit and competitiveness, can also be effective in reducing pollution. A modern medium-sized wind-assisted ship can readily save as much fossil fuel as could be achieved by taking several hundred diesel trucks off the road, and, since heavy marine fuels typically contain 500 times more sulphur than road diesel, reduce pollution by even more. And that would help with the greenhouse effect, with acid rain and with the acidification of the oceans, all of which are on the rise at frightening rates. I was especially impressed by your world chart showing how sulphur emissions are increasing dramatically along the world’s commercial shipping trade routes [included in the web version of the feature].
As long ago as 1986, the last time we had oil prices similar to those which are concentrating our minds so wonderfully now, we had some superb results at Walker Wingsail Systems (WWS) with aN 8-tonne, 13-metre-tall wing-sail fitted to the 6500 tonne MV Ashington. The ship was able to save 15 to 20 per cent of its fuel bill with only its first wing-sail. The second was never built, because Saudi Arabia then opened the taps and pulled the oil price down to $10 a barrel. It can’t do that now.
WWS turned successfully to building wing yachts using developments of the Ashington technology, and after some successful trans-hurricane transatlantic voyages in Blue Nova, began production of the Zefyr, one of which has safely circled the globe. WWS sadly ran out of money, before achieving profitability, in 1998.
Since then I have developed some useful new wing-sail technology and I intend, with the encouragement of a still enthusiastic (and astonishingly numerous) band of wing-sail enthusiasts, to start to build Walker wing-sails again. They do after all provide world-beating levels of thrust and efficiency, work beautifully on either tack, and need no extra crew.
Ghost arithmetic
The debate on how to multiply ghosts (Feedback, 19 February and Letters, 26 February) has overlooked an important factor: since ghosts should be considered to be of unnatural origin we shouldn’t stick to natural numbers only. Two ghosts could easily be multiplied by 6.5 or four ghosts by 3.25. They all end up as 13. Being a teacher I look forward to a interdisciplinary lesson with DVD and calculators.
From Leslie Martin
The assumption is that terror is indivisible. However, recent films have carried the warning “contains mild terror”, which implies that there is a fraction of terror.
What is needed is a unit of terror and I suggest the “karloff” as the main unit based on, say, the Frankenstein films. Thus you could have half a karloff of horror in any Hammer Horror film, rising to a kilokarloff for Friday the 13th.
Greenford, Middlesex, UK
From Paul Brown
Greg Roughan’s integer-prejudiced “multiplied by what, dumb-ass?” ignores the recent revelations regarding fractional students at the University of Dundee (Feedback, 15 January). If we can have fractional people, I’m sure “real” ghosts are possible; so how about “multiplied by 2, smarty-pants (assuming an initial population of 6.5 ghosts)”.
For those who consider ghosts to be imaginary, a similar calculation in the complex domain will suffice.
Cotton Tree, Queensland, Australia
Peak problem
I was a little confused by the graph from the Japanese study in your report on autism and the MMR vaccine (5 March, p 16). It seemed to show that the vaccine was stopped in 1993/94 and that autism peaked in 1994. Unless I read it incorrectly, would it not be possible that some of those affected in 1994 would have actually also been in the group which received the MMR?
Michael Le Page writes:
鈥� Several readers have asked this question. The graph shows the number of children born in a particular year who developed autism by age 7. It does not show the year in which they developed autism. A correct reading of the graph will show that, for example, among children born in 1993 鈥� who received MMR 鈥� some 90 in 10,000 subsequently developed autism, whereas among children born in 1994 鈥� who did not receive MMR 鈥� some 160 in 10,000 developed autism. So the high rate of autism among children who had been born in 1994 cannot be related to the vaccine.
For the record
鈥� The picture of Bathsheba that illustrates the cover of James Olson’s Bathsheba’s Breast was painted by Rembrandt in 1654, not Rubens (5 March, p 57).
鈥� Our feature on shark repellents (26 February, p 40) contained errors. Natal Sharks Board withdrew the SharkPOD in 2001, and in 2002 SeaChange Technology began selling an improved device, SharkShield (see ). The “question marks” about electronic shark repellents all refer to SharkPOD. In addition, we omitted to mention that the coroner’s report on the scallop diver killed in 2002 while wearing a SharkPOD concluded that he was not using the device according to the manufacturer’s instructions and that this had the potential to reduce its effectiveness.
No need for a Creator
How kind of you to print the letter from John Athanasiou with its thinly veiled “intelligent design” argument about the researcher input needed to produce synthetic life (12 March, p 27). It clearly takes enormous intelligent input for humans to attempt biogenesis. But Athanasiou is mistaken in his assertion that this is tantamount to proof that life cannot arise spontaneously from inorganic matter.
Closer inspection shows that he is missing two fundamental things. Firstly, the process that scientists are attempting to recreate took place over hundreds of millions of years.
Secondly, he states that there is no known model to support the creation of life without intelligent input. This is not so. There are many theories about how such a process could occur and a great deal of physical evidence that scientifically (in the true sense of the word) supports biogenesis with no external input.
Athanasiou says that believing life could come about spontaneously is irrational. How much more irrational is it, then, to favour the notion that life comes about through the actions of some supernaturally intelligent being, when there is no evidence whatsoever for such a being?
Accident prone
Talking of nuclear power, Steve Behling states that “the likelihood of an accident is almost zero” (12 March, p 27). Considering the number of accidents that have already happened in nuclear power stations, this seems a strange assumption.
Self-education
I read your special on teenagers with great interest, particularly the feature on sex education (5 March, p 44).
I fear that both sex educators and abstinence advocates are missing the point. Sex is excruciatingly embarrassing to teenagers. Sitting in a room full of your peers staring at a diagram of how to correctly fit a condom does not encourage learning. If the teacher is attractive, the whole business is acutely embarrassing. If the teacher is unattractive, it becomes burlesque.
The only solution is information 鈥� with privacy. Teens are enormously curious about sex. As a 16-year-old I found Shere Hite’s landmark sexual survey an eye-opener. Full library shelves plus full access are the key. Nothing will make a teenager more conscientious about avoiding sexually transmitted diseases than a picture of ano-genital warts.
From Bill Hyde
Looking at the teenage pregnancy rates around the world, I noticed that those countries with great inequality, such as the US and the UK, figured high on the list, whereas the more egalitarian, including Sweden and Japan, were at the low end. Social stress due to inequality has been shown to make people in the UK’s professional and managerial grades more likely to die between the ages of 20 and 65 than the poorest classes in Sweden.
It seems that teenagers, unhappy in the society we have made so stressful, are seeking the oldest solace. Probation officers dealing with promiscuous teenage and pre-teen girls have told me for years that a sense of being valueless is a significant driver of this behaviour.
Offham, Kent, UK
Nature isn't God
Paul Davies’s article proposing that “emergent” organising principles come into play beyond a certain threshold of complexity is reminiscent of an old theological debate (5 March, p 35). The standard Christian view is that God is transcendent 鈥� beyond mortal categories. The 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza held that God is immanent (within the universe). Davies follows Spinoza, substituting nature for God and arguing a case for the immanence of natural law.
The reductionist case survives if you concede that while the details of emerging complexity are inherently unpredictable, they are inevitable. We can, for example, predict the emergence of life from a prebiotic soup if we can observe that this in fact invariably happens.
We may not have a big enough computer to predict this from first principles. This may, indeed, be theoretically impossible. Nature, however, can do things that are non-computable. It is absurd to suggest that it pulls back because it can’t do the calculation.
Laws of emergence may exist, but not laws that are emergent. Laws of nature remain true even if inapplicable, just as truths of mathematics or logic are independent of circumstances. A given complex protein may have properties we cannot predict on reductionist principles, yet those properties could not have been any different, and they do not vary from one molecule to another, or one place to another.
The physicist John Wheeler argues for a link between physical law and the evolutionary state of the universe. But would not such dependence itself be subject to some deeper, transcendent law? If it were to turn out that the transition from quantum to classical conditions can be predicted by the Landauer-Lloyd limit on computability, I would think again. For now, the concept of immanent natural law, making nature subject to the restrictions of mind, seems just too anthropomorphic.
From Peter Grant
The reductionist theory claims only that the lowest-level mechanisms will work locally, at their level. There is no claim that they have to compute, think about, predict or worry about the consequences. Nor do they ever make mistakes. All that sort of silliness emerges later, with our efforts to understand what is going on in complex systems.
Twickenham, Middlesex, UK
Neil Fitzgerald
There seems to be a major oversight in Paul Davies’s feature: natural laws make different kinds of prediction, and whereas it may take enormous computational resources to churn out a precise description of some part of the universe at some time, that doesn’t preclude the practical possibility of us being able to compute “high-level” predictions giving all the information we need.
If the intention of Davies’s article was to convince me that there is something fundamentally different about certain kinds of phenomena (such as protein folding) that puts them beyond the reach of the sort of hierarchical explanations we routinely use in science, in which the bottom of hierarchy is the fundamental laws of physics, then I’m afraid he has failed.
Carshalton, Surrey, UK
From Peter Rowland
Here we go again with Paul Davies proposing yet another GOG (God of the Gaps) mystique. I am surprised that Davies does not mention Fred Hoyle’s now-discredited 1981 “demonstration” of the impossibility of one simple bacterium arising from a primordial soup. Assuming that it needed a collection of 2000 functioning proteins, of 300 amino acids each, Hoyle calculated the odds of its self-assembly to be 1 in 1040,000.
Davies has done little more than this, merely redoing the calculation for the folding of a protein rather than a whole cell. As Hoyle did, he snatches figures out of the air. He assumes that we must deal up front with the huge total information of the product 鈥� or its low entropy, considered as its staggering improbability. This is akin to saying that every time we write anything we face the same challenge as a roomful of typewriting monkeys face in producing the works of Shakespeare.
Evolution does not operate that way (for example see Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable). It proceeds simply by selection of those naturally arising variations that have survival value. In effect this process finds algorithms that increase the organisational complexity of systems 鈥� and do so step-by-step, virtually independently of the hypothetical entropy of the product. Any given organism, of course, takes up only relatively few of the enormously large number of atomic arrangements which are theoretically open to it. That is why life is regarded as a low-entropy state.
Unsurprisingly, at this extremely early stage in genetic science we have not yet fully deciphered all the details of such processes. Davies seeks to use this state of “work in progress” as an excuse to evade the direct simplicity of the accepted system 鈥� and gratuitously to tack on special “emergent principles” that guide it.
This is all too redolent of the “vital force” that was deemed necessary for the creation of organic molecules. Until, that is, 1828, when Friedrich W枚hler synthesised urea, which had been held to contain “vital force”, from inorganic mineral precursors.
London, UK
Trials and tribulation
Robert Matthews is right to point out that most clinical trials do not have the statistical power to detect the incidence of relatively rare adverse events (5 March, p 23). Unfortunately, most adverse events come to light many years after a product has been licensed, by which time thousands, if not millions, of patients have been exposed to treatment.
Even when many thousands of patients are taking a treatment, delay in identifying adverse events occurs because there is no appropriate control group with which to compare them. The available figures are subject to a range of confounding variables: for example, most genuine patients, as opposed to drug-trial volunteers, are actually ill and many have other diseases too, on top of the one for which the treatment is designed.
There is a potential alternative. Once a new treatment is licensed, half of general practitioner practices, selected at random, could be allowed to use it on any patient for whom it is indicated, while the remaining practices would have to stick to existing treatments. Monitoring of anonymised general practitioner records would continue for a year, or longer if necessary. If there then appeared to be no serious adverse events, all practices would be allowed to use the treatment.
Implementing such a surveillance system would be inexpensive compared with the price of ignorance.
From Ken Green
Robert Matthews draws attention to the circus which surrounds the risks from newly introduced drugs. By the time you read this I shall have had an operation known as angioplasty. It is likely to give my life back to me. But it carries a 1 per cent chance of stroke and a 1 per cent chance of death. I happily signed the consent form.
There is risk in any and all operations, especially those with anaesthetics. So why the outrage about the obvious risks of intervening in complex body chemistry with new drugs?
Tintagel, Cornwall, UK
Language counts
In your report on evidence that simple arithmetic is not dependent on the language areas of the brain, you perpetuate the myth that “language doesn’t count in maths” (19 February, p 18). Simple arithmetic is not, however, the same as mathematics, which is a highly complex creative activity that engages many areas of the brain in both hemispheres. In this it is akin to music and language.
Our research on university students whose first language is not English but who are learning mathematics in English has repeatedly confirmed that they are at a disadvantage of about 10 per cent compared to native speakers. This is the same disadvantage seen in students of, for example, history or education. What is more, the disadvantage is greater at higher levels of study.
At school, mathematics is often taught as a series of standard procedures. At senior undergraduate level it becomes increasingly a matter of understanding complex statements, theorems, proofs and illustrative, rather than paradigmatic, examples.
It is not true, therefore, that language doesn’t count in mathematics. Language, logic, symbolic representation and visualisation are closely intertwined, and all are necessary for the abstractions of pattern and relationships in this field.
Terminator vista
Michael Le Page argues that well-meaning environmentalists overlook the value of seed-sterilising “Terminator” technology in containing genetically modified organisms (26 February, p 23). What he in turn overlooks is the possibility that the rates of mutation and recombination may be high enough to compromise Terminator as a containment strategy if it was used on the scale of commercial agriculture.
Terminator is effective enough, however, to prevent farmers growing crops from saved seed, and potentially to jeopardise the seed-saving efforts of neighbouring farmers. Poor farmers who use seeds developed to meet their particular needs should not be forced to use seed made sterile by Terminator, which would deprive them of the ability to collect and share seed and to breed for local conditions.
Instead of depending on the private sector and its intellectual property for crop improvement, a better alternative is to provide appropriate funding for public research that works with farmers’ own expertise. This would maintain farmers’ independence and prevent any movement toward bioserfdom.