For the record
Feedback wishes to grovel to Canadian and Irish readers for asserting that the world on “consists only of the UK and the US” (11 June). In fact, neighbours of those countries feature on the Google map as well.
Culture of innovation
Reading the article “Body double” (11 June, p 30), it occurred to me that I had already read about the idea of making a facsimile of yourself from smart nanodust. It features in Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks (Orbit, 2000), under the name “E-Dust”. I love it when reality and sci-fi move in step.
Race-based drugs
Your piece on race-specific prescriptions was intriguing, but raised some alarming questions for me (11 June, p 42). If new drug development and testing is broken down into categories of race, then what’s to stop European-Americans from only researching diseases that predominantly affect their group, such as multiple sclerosis, or African-American scientists from seeking out solutions to predominantly African-American afflictions such as sickle cell?
This would complicate science, its funding and politics. People would begin looking for financial breakdowns of research funding: is more money going to support “white” or “black” research? It could even deter politicians from giving financial backing to research for fear of alienating potential voters.
If physicians are aware that specific drugs have a higher rate of success in certain groups, they could use the knowledge to benefit patients. But is a race label really necessary?
We should talk…
I found the article on “kinky bypass grafts” encouraging and depressing (11 June, p 28). Encouraging because it describes how arterial shunts are being improved; depressing because the principle of fluid dynamics on which the improvement is based is at least decades old.
Why is the medical profession only now discovering this principle’s obvious applicability to arterial shunts? Perhaps one day the profession will be more open to knowledge developed outside its culture of practice.
Lightning damage
Gary Streeter worries that the new generation of airliners with composite airframes might be at risk from lightning strikes (11 June, p 22). Yes, lightning does present a potential hazard. I spent some years as an electromagnetic pulse test engineeer 鈥� including 1999, the year of the glider accident Streeter mentions.
Modern high-performance composites tend to be based on carbon fibre, which conducts preferentially along the individual fibres. These are embedded in a non-conductive resin matrix. The net result of a strike on unprotected material is not wholly unlike the fragmentation and delamination seen when metal control lines are carried within an insulating fibreglass structure, as in the incident mentioned in the letter.
The Lear company once developed an all-carbon airframe that did not pay sufficient attention to the novel failure modes of such a material, and the design had trouble achieving certification. Nobody is going to miss that trick again.
The aviation industry has been aware of the problem for a long time, and continues to devote a great deal of effort to making its products safe. Designs have been tried and tested in the military arena and are now ready for commercial airliners.
One solution is to design in a safe path that the discharge current will prefer, to divert it away from any critical areas. My successors then get to test whether the job has been done properly. Which is good fun.
Laws of behaviour
In berating my book Critical Mass, Steve Fuller argues that “social physics” can never reveal the complex decision-making processes of real people (4 June, p 21). I agree, which is why I say as much several times in the book.
Fuller misses my point spectacularly. Even an “interloping chemist” (physicist actually, but that is probably even worse) knows that a key aim of social science is to understand social phenomena. Some of these are at the mercy of individuals’ psychology. But others appear to be shaped primarily by the pattern of interactions between people and the constraints within which they operate, more or less regardless of how they make up their minds.
For example, researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico recently showed that they could reproduce the complex dynamics of economic markets on the assumption that market traders have “zero intelligence”. This does not mean that traders do have zero intelligence (perish the thought). Rather, it means market dynamics depend not on the complexities of how traders plan their strategies, but on the way the rules and structures are set up.
Fortunately Fuller’s position, with its bizarre rejection of statistics and modelling and its disregard of any social phenomena that depend more on interactions than on the depths of the human psyche, is not the mainstream one in the social sciences. But it is troubling nonetheless to find at least one social scientist fixated on the psychology of the individual at the expense of any concern about how society works. Or perhaps Fuller believes (he would not be the first) that there is no such thing as society?
From Michael Edelman
Fuller complains that humans are far too complex to be treated statistically. And yet macroeconomics does that very successfully, constructing aggregate models of human behaviour that have helped us to understand individual (microeconomic) behaviour as well. Economists have profitably mined physics and engineering for models of fluid dynamics and other physical phenomena which neatly describe group behaviours.
Sociologists have been tremendously productive in the generation of hypotheses regarding human behaviour, but remarkably unsuccessful in constructing predictive models of behaviour when compared with economists or, for that matter, psychologists. Perhaps sociologists need more, and not less, mathematics in their approach.
Huntington Woods, Michigan, US
More fun for animals
Your section “Animals and us” was a timely reminder of the metamorphosis taking place in our awareness of the experiences of other animals (4 June, p 42). The way animals respond flexibly and complexly to their surroundings should leave no doubt that they lead conscious, emotional lives. Unfortunately, while there has been much scientific interest in the negative aspects of animal existence 鈥� their pain and suffering 鈥� positive aspects have been neglected.
Ian Duncan concludes that understanding the role of pleasure in welfare ought to be a key area of future research efforts. I agree, and have spent the past five years researching and writing a book (Pleasurable Kingdom: The animal nature of feeling good, Macmillan Science) which presents the case that the animal world is rich in pleasure. Just as it behoves an animal to be able to detect and avoid painful stimuli, evolution also favours rewards and pleasures that promote survival and procreation.
Not surprisingly, animal pleasures are shown diversely in such realms as play, sex, touch, food, anticipation, comfort and aesthetics. We would do well to take more notice of them.
From Ben Haller
I was rolling my eyes through much of “Animals and us”. I’m a compassionate person; I will even go to the trouble of freeing crane flies when they come into my apartment at night.
But I think it’s funny that the very people who most passionately argue that humans are “just another animal” are apparently oblivious to the fact that many other animals on the planet are quite comfortable with killing for a living: one does not see cheetahs or sharks turning to vegetarianism out of guilt.
I certainly think animals have emotions and feel pain, and I agree with Temple Grandin that we should work to minimise the suffering of the animals we exploit. But when Gary L. Francione points out that “it is not ‘necessary’ in any sense to eat meat or animal products”, I must point out that it is not “necessary” that humanity exist at all.
Our very existence is a plague upon the Earth for almost all other species (except rats, cockroaches and pigeons). So by Francione’s logic, we ought to simply go gentle into that good night and leave the planet to the other animals. It would perhaps be more sensible to realise that, yes, we are animals, and the simple fact that we have evolved to be omnivores implies that it is moral to be thus. If some wish to be vegetarians, that is their choice, but I see no justification for Francione to characterise meat eaters’ attitude to animals as “moral schizophrenia”.
I also wonder just what makes Francione so certain that the plants he eats don’t feel pain as they are chopped from their roots, stripped of their limbs, and crushed between his molars? If we can’t ever truly know what it is to be a bat, how much more so for a stalk of celery? Perhaps their sensations of pain are all the more intense for being deprived of a voice with which to cry out.
Menlo Park, California, US
Missing moon dust
In your article on moon dust you reveal that Apollo 11, 12, 15 and 16 experienced poor visibility while landing (28 May, p 40). But we have photos of the feet of the lander standing on the lunar surface with not a speck of dust on them. If all the dust was blown away during the landing, Neil Armstrong’s historic first step would not have left an imprint. What are we to believe?
Red rag
Red may or may not be the colour of winning (21 May, p 16), but as a schoolboy I was told that the British army wore red jackets at the Battle of Waterloo so that when men were wounded, their blood was not apparent to their comrades fighting around them. The hope was that they would not lose heart in the thick of the battle.
Too much coffee?
In your report on the disruption of the genetically modified coffee trial in French Guiana you state, “they chose French Guiana for the trial because no coffee grows there, avoiding any possibility that the GM variety could contaminate existing plants” (28 May, p 14).
In the next paragraph, however, you say: “the attack on the trial was not altogether surprising”, because “smallholders, who make up the majority of coffee-growers, fear that GM strains will enable richer farmers who can afford the technology to put them out of business.”
Forgive me, but if your reporter Andy Coghlan considers it not altogether surprising for crops to be attacked by a non-existent group of coffee-growers, he’s taking way too much valium.
Andy Coghlan writes:
Fair point, but smallholders and even activists in French Guiana can be sympathetic to coffee-growers elsewhere. And obviously someone had a motive to do it.
Give wind a chance
Ian Hore-Lacy is absolutely right 鈥� let us match wind power and nuclear on a “level playing field”, as he puts it (4 June, p 28). Let wind power be developed for 60 years; let billions of pounds of government money be spent researching it; let the world’s top engineers and scientists be employed; let the land be commandeered for it, without answering to opposition; let it be a top national priority, as if it were an essential component of a war effort. Let it receive all the advantages that have befallen nuclear power and then say whether or not it matches up.
Imagine what would happen to renewables with the kind of effort that has been wasted on fusion: over 30 years and billions of dollars have yet to return a single watt of usable energy from that massive collaboration. Wind power already works, so it might become better than our wildest dreams.