Anthropomorphic androids
If computer chips are exhibiting signs of deterministic chaos (9 July, p 17), which, as I understand it, may resemble certain processes in our brains, does this herald the beginning of Genuine People Personalities in computers as presaged by Douglas Adams’s Marvin the paranoid android in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Can we now attribute unexpected glitches to nothing more than a “bad-circuit day”? And 鈥� should we empathise?
Bird flu in China
The recent Nature article by Chen Hualan and others on the genetics of the H5N1 outbreak in migratory waterfowl at Qinghai has a curious aspect that appears to have been largely overlooked in other scientific media outlets.
The authors say the Qinghai wild bird samples were analysed along with “eight other H5N1 viruses isolated from poultry markets in Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, and Yunnan provinces during 2005” 鈥� at least two of which reportedly came from chickens.
The data published in Nature appears to indicate that there have been unreported but nonetheless scientifically documented H5N1 outbreaks among chickens in mainland China during 2005, coupled with the potentially cryptic or asymptomatic circulation of the H5N1 virus in domesticated ducks and geese in China.
This seems to explain why China’s government has gone to such lengths to discredit and dismiss the validity of the recent research papers in Science and Nature (New 杏吧原创, 16 July, p 5).
Protect our software
You reported last week that the EU had decided against software patents (16 July, p 27). When Amazon patented “one-click shopping”, hackles were rightly raised. But what about the many inventions that take advantage of cheap, flexible digital processors and are expressed as computer programs?
We are working on a solution to the “cocktail party problem” 鈥� the jumble of noise that hearing-aid wearers hear when they are in a room with several people talking. The result of our labours over several years will be a computer program. Is it to be denied patent protection?
To get protection in Europe we will presumably have to re-engineer it as a tiny analogue computer using nano-technology. A small cheer at least for the US patent office, which will protect software.
Blowin' in the wind
Mike Taylor writes that wind-power systems may alter the climate (9 July, p 21). Removal of forests and vegetation in Africa, Asia and Australia has resulted in devastating dust storms that strip the fertile topsoil away and create dangerous pollution in populated areas. To combat this, trees are being planted to hold the soil together and form windbreaks. The largest example of this is probably China’s “Great Green Wall”.
Humans have changed weather patterns very significantly by clearing forests. It seems unlikely that we will ever produce enough turbines to equal the wind resistance of these lost forests. The biggest environmental impacts of wind turbines are their noise, appearance and the danger they pose to birds.
Switch them off
I recently read that a million tonnes of greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere each year as a result of appliances such as TVs, dishwashers and VCRs being left on standby. Over a year, the power wasted in this way would be enough to keep all of the UK’s street lights lit for four years.
Surely these appliances could, in future, be programmed to shut down after, say, 20 minutes of being idle.
Government legislation could help, but manufacturers could easily incorporate this adaptation and use it as a power-saving selling point.
Musical talk
No one would dare make sweeping generalisations about ceramics, say, on the basis of 318 teacups from a 30-year period in two adjacent European countries, yet that is just what Aniruddh Patel and his team have done with regard to music (9 July, p 32).
Their conclusion could have been falsified by even a brief discussion with an actual music scholar. If language were of great significance as a determinant of national musical style, then Finnish and Hungarian composers would have written dramatically different music to that of other European composers 鈥� yet they did not. Similarly, one would expect American and British music to be almost indistinguishable, but they are as distinct as any other pair of western national styles.
Before the rise of modern nationalism, some regional styles crossed sharp linguistic borders, such as the “Venetian” style of many centuries’ duration that encompassed not only north-east Italy, but Austria and Bohemia as well. China, with its multiplicity of mutually incomprehensible spoken languages, is in a similar musical state to this day.
From Tony Nechvatal
Your box on “Musilanguage” in the article on music’s relationship to spoken language brought to mind the whistling language of the inhabitants of the island of Gomera in the Canary Islands.
Communication between villages on hilltops separated by deep valleys is effected by whistling inflected by local speech patterns. “Come home, your dinner is on the table”, “Bring more wood for the fire on the way back” and many similar instructions and conversations are understood far beyond the range of shouting.
Monifieth, Angus, UK
Shell shock
Well, looks like you got it wrong again. You say that it is a good thing that plankton with carbonate shells fall to the depths of the sea because it locks carbon away, and that if global warming hinders the growth of the plankton, this will be bad for the absorption of carbon dioxide by the sea (9 July, p 15). But when carbonates are formed in the sea, CO2 is released. Two bicarbonate ions give one carbonate and one CO2.
Love of flight
Robert Howard casts doubt on the idea that gulls ride the wind “for no apparent reason other than love of flight” (16 July, p 23). However, I have a memory which supports that idea.
Many years ago I was on the open bridge of a small warship in the North Sea. The weather was fine, but there was a fresh crosswind. To help give the watchkeepers some degree of vision in foul weather, large baffles on the outside of the bridge deflected the wind upwards, so reducing the direct effect on those trying to see around.
On this particular occasion, a passing herring gull discovered the updraught and spent some minutes trying to “ride” it. He found it quite difficult, and fell out on three or four occasions, but always did a quick circle and returned. My impression was that the bird was doing it for sheer enjoyment.
Similarly, I often watched gulls make repeated efforts to settle on the top of a ship’s jackstaff. This vertical flagpole at the bow is used to hold the ship’s anchor light, and the bulb is covered by a glass dome. A ship has many places on which a gull can easily land, but that glass dome seemed to be viewed by the birds as a challenge to be undertaken rather than as a comfortable parking place. Although a minority of the birds would manage to get enough grip to close their wings for a few seconds, most fell off while still flapping 鈥� but frequently just circled and tried again.
For the record
鈥� Several readers have pointed out that 400 per cent more is actually five times as much, not four times as much as we said in “For the record” (9 July, p 21).
Creeping creationism
It is of no consequence if the Discovery Institute insists “that nature and human beings are created by God”, while Keith Miller of Kansas State University insists that nature and human beings are the product of evolution (9 July, p 8). All that matters is which model provides the best tool for predicting and influencing the future.
Here, even the most diehard of intelligent-design supporters would have to accept that there is no contest. The Discovery Institute might “know” that God created nature and human beings, and that He retains immediate and absolute control over their future. However, the institute will also know that this model, which may be true, is useless for predicting the future, while the evolutionary model, which may be wrong, has proved a reliable and practical tool for predicting the future, and for influencing it in chosen ways.
Thus, unless ID advocates seriously propose that humankind should give up on progress and regress to primitive stone-age living, they must support the continuing effort to develop, test and teach the best scientific models 鈥� “best” being defined only by their record of success at predicting and influencing the future. Whether it is true or not, evolution is clearly one of these “best” models.
From Mike Adams, Eastern Connecticut State University
Whether or not the intelligent-design model is religious, it still exhibits the same logical flaw as creationism. The model postulates that some structures (X) are so complex that they cannot have arisen spontaneously, but must be the result of an intelligent designer. This leaves the question: “Where did the designer come from?”
Since the designer must be even more complex than X, clearly it cannot have arisen spontaneously, but must have been made by a designer of even greater power and complexity, which is even less likely to have arisen spontaneously…
Since this leads into an infinite series, let us stop at the first step. Now we have to choose between the spontaneous appearance of X, or the spontaneous appearance of something capable of designing X. Clearly the first is a much simpler proposition and, until the ID proponents can come up with a compelling logical reason to accept the second, I see no need to invoke ID.
Willimantic, Connecticut, US
From Bev Pease
You can refute the notion of intelligent design in three words: “the human backbone”.
The mammalian backbone may work splendidly in “washing line” mode. But as a “tent pole” it’s rubbish. Ask almost any human, and they will have or will have had trouble with their back. That creationists wish to blame God for such poor engineering beggars belief. On the other hand, a still-incomplete design solution fits perfectly into the concept of evolution.
Fleet, Hampshire, UK
From Richard Dolby
There is ample evidence that a supposed designer, divine or alien, who may have been involved in creating and sustaining terrestrial life, was no visionary. He was not even especially good at his job. Rather than showing intelligence, his designs reveal the slow and cautious imitation of processes capable of occurring spontaneously. His design materials were entirely based on chemical products of DNA and RNA, when any human designer could have used a wider palate of resources. He was exceedingly slow, starting with very simple life forms, taking three billion years to work up to multi-cellular life and more than half a billion years to produce humankind after that. He was a cautious God of the gaps, giving each new species a form closely resembling an earlier species.
His redesigns have always mimicked adaptation. That is, the changes gave their possessors competitive advantage in survival and reproduction over earlier forms. As a redesigner, he showed comprehensive lack of foresight, modifying older life forms to suit the prevailing conditions, but never preparing life for new and unexpected conditions before they happened. He was extremely mean about the implementation of each design solution, passing it on only to the direct descendants of the first beneficiaries. And whenever a design solution was accidentally lost, he often denied it to later species.
It would be hard for an uncommitted outsider, such as an extraterrestrial, to see the human species as anything other than a ghastly design accident, a catastrophe in the making. For example, although we differ very little from similar animals (our origins were just a small step in genetic terms), we differ from them in our inbred capacity to acquire culture. With culture, we were quickly able to escape containment within a limited ecological niche. And now, with culture, we have the capacity to destroy the present form of the terrestrial biosphere.
Everything which takes us beyond our animal nature is culture-bound. Surely it is poor design practice to create a species that can generate and sustain diverse cultures but has no inborn mechanism for reconciling cultural differences except through competitive struggle. When negotiation fails, even the true believers of religions fall back upon war. If only our culture-carrying nature had been designed on better thought-out principles!
We will have to construct our own solutions to the problems of cultural diversity, or struggle on as we are. Certainly, no solution has been provided by the hypothetical designer.
Perhaps an intelligent designer worked outside of time, creating our universe a short time ago, burying an illusory multibillion year history within its details. But why did he then undermine his miraculous accomplishment by making it resemble the product of a slow natural process? Such an intelligent but deceitful designer does not deserve our respect.
If the notion of ID is offered as a scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, then on the argument presented here, it fails. God’s work as interpreted by current science, and God’s word as interpreted in the American bible-belt tradition, simply do not agree.
Canterbury, Kent, UK
From John Lowell
Why are biologists so nervous about intelligent design? An uncommitted layperson is likely to form the impression that they are running scared and want to suppress ID at all costs.
I think the challenge of ID should be wholeheartedly accepted in a spirit of scientific openness. It may mean some loss of time in the classroom, less detailed biological knowledge among high school students. But future biology professionals will quickly catch up at university, and for the rest, what is important is not a body of facts quickly forgotten after the examination, but an insight into the culture and methods of science. What better way to achieve that than a critical analysis of conventional evolution and ID?
Objections to evolution along the lines “how could that happen?” could be examined in detail. Theology professionals would no doubt be glad to help with problems arising with the ID theory. I have in mind such questions as how omniscient the designer might be in view of the apparently incompetent design of the human spine, and whether the designer has a purpose or is merely amusing itself. If the former, what exactly is the purpose of the AIDS virus with its built-in evolutionary potential, and if the latter might we not hope for a less bleak view of the world?
I am confident that after a few years of “teaching the controversy” religious fundamentalists will be demanding that ID be removed from the curriculum as atheistical.
Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, UK
From Ronald Alexander, Wartburg College
I agreed down the line with the editor’s comments about the problems of intelligent design until the very last paragraph and the gratuitous comment that reads “Teach it [ID] in philosophy or sociology by all means” (9 July, p 5).
I will let the sociologists defend themselves on this issue. But what makes the editor believe that philosophers would want to teach ID?
I might indicate the nature of ID in the context of a philosophy of science course, but I would certainly show that it has serious conceptual and methodological problems as contrasted to the theory of evolution, just as the editor indicated.
I find it very interesting that when many scientists step back from “doing” their specialty and desire to theorise about what they are doing, they turn to philosophy to give conceptual weight to their theorising (often misusing or misinterpreting the philosophical reference). But it seems to be the standard operating procedure on other occasions for scientists to make disparaging remarks about philosophy. They often use sweeping generalisations about the discipline not realising that philosophy moves along just as science does.
Waverly, Iowa, US
From Andrew Donovan-Shead
After a public outcry at the appearance of creationist displays at Tulsa Zoo in Oklahoma (9 July, p 11), the exhibit was removed. Patrons and supporters of the zoo were not consulted by the zoo board when it first voted to install the exhibit at the request of a local advocate of creationism. Once it became apparent to the board that the zoo was losing financial support as a result of its decision, they reversed it.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, US
From John Davis
The startling advance of creationism in several guises is only part of the crisis in American science. In matters of global warming, star wars defence, environmental regulation, and so on, research is being rewritten and censored by the industrial lobbyists and political hacks that the current administration has made heads of many of the nation’s research institutes.
“Research groups for hire”, whose sole purpose is to provide materials to engender doubts about the research that influences public policy, are regularly employed by the energy and pharmaceutical industries. Their work, without benefit of peer review or publication, is often given equal weight in the media with science. This technique was pioneered by the tobacco industry, and is now used by the proponents of ID. American science is being tailored for the interests of two groups: corporate political contributors and the fundamentalists who get out the vote.
Jackson, Mississippi, US
Australia and climate change
Your editorial asks “Why won’t politicians face up to the reality of climate change?” (16 July, p 3). The answer is very simple 鈥� the voters won’t face up to the reality of climate change.
Politicians do whatever they think is necessary to get votes in the next election. In Australia, election cycles are short so politicians don’t have to think very far ahead.
In Sydney, large quantities of money are being spent on under-city tunnels and other road projects while the rail transport system degrades. They wouldn’t be spending taxpayers’ money on projects that increase greenhouse gas emissions if they thought these projects would cause them to lose the next election.
We (taxpayers and voters) don’t vote only on ballots in elections. We vote every time we choose to drive to work rather than walk, cycle, take a bus or train. We vote every time we purchase a large fuel-inefficient car or four-wheel drive rather than a small economical car. We vote every time we turn on an air conditioner or heater rather than use a fan or put on a jacket. When the Sydney Opera House is a metre under water, what are we going to tell our grandchildren when they ask: “Why were you so stupid?”
TV intelligence
The children who spent their time watching TV were given the wrong standardised achievement tests (9 July, p 6). They should have been tested on: “plot development in mass-media drama”, “common perception of forensic science”, “the influence of moon landings in the formation of space-travel myth” and “character development in continuing dramas”. If one must test science, quiz them on “the reliability of modern weather-forecasting methods”.
The TV watchers will now score the highest, confirming the perception that TV is educational and reading text books is a load of tosh.
The <i>Children's Encyclopedia</i>
Philip Stewart’s recollection of an orang-utan escape story inspired me to dust off our family copy of the Children’s Encyclopedia (16 July, p 23). Sure enough, the story is there (vol 1, p 160), although the animal seems to have escaped using brute force rather than lock-picking skills. Here is the account.
“‘The worst of playing with an orang,’ said a keeper of the apes at the zoo, ‘is that you never know where he will have you, for he grips with four hands, and his strength is that of two men.’ But two fine orangs made history at the London zoo. Jacob, the larger, is dead now, dying from a human complaint, tuberculosis; but at the time of writing his friend Sandy is in the enjoyment of health and vigour at 27. Caught when 2-years-old, he lived in captivity for eight years in Singapore, and has spent 17 in London.
“Sandy and Jacob were concerned in a famous breaking out. It began with Sandy, who, twisting off a piece of the stout wire of his cage, made it into a sort of chisel, then passed it through to Jacob, who was in the cage adjoining. Jacob improved on Sandy’s plan, for, using the tool as a lever, he ripped open his wires and escaped into the ape house. When a keeper scaled a ladder to recall him to a sense of home and duty, Jacob slid down and shook the ladder so violently as almost to throw his old friend from it.”
“Jacob must have dreamed of the ways of home. Through the glass beyond the wire of his cage he saw trees and grass and liberty, and one night he broke through the roof of his den again, knocked out a window with a flower pot, slipped through, descended into the grounds, chose his tree, skipped up it, made a nest of broken twigs, and lay down and slept like a king in a castle. The keepers got him home in the morning, and pretended to be cross with him. But they photographed the nest and wired it round as a great treasure 鈥� the first nest ever built by an ape in England, and the first positive proof that orangs do really make nests to lie in on the tree-tops, as the old stories said they did.”
The encyclopedia has no publication date, but in our copy of Cassell’s Natural History (People’s Edition, 1896) someone has obligingly pasted two newspaper cuttings indicating that the first orang arrived at the zoo in June 1900, and the second, “still smaller than the one previously in the house”, in July 1902. If these are the jail-breakers, the incident must have occurred before 1919. This fits with the apparent date of the encyclopedia, which features photographs of the construction of the Quebec railway bridge, which was completed in 1917 after much trouble. “In 1907 half the bridge collapsed under its own weight. In 1916 the great central span, when being hoisted into position, fell into the river.”
No fix for bombers
The technologies described by Debora MacKenzie are ingenious 鈥� but they won’t stop suicide bombers (16 July, p 10). The most they could achieve would be to change the timing and location of the explosion. The would-be suicide bomber carries a hand-operated detonator in, say, a coat pocket. At the first sign of detection 鈥� an alarm sounding, or an attempted arrest 鈥� the bomb is detonated. Instead of an explosion in a crowded train we have an explosion in a crowded booking hall or station concourse.
Anyone charged with addressing this threat to public safety should be required to read Arthur C. Clarke’s 1999 novel The Trigger. In his disconcertingly prescient way he anticipated our current dilemma. The story, set in a not-far-future US, concerns a technology that safely neutralises all explosives 鈥� bullets, bombs and landmines.
Against opposition, the technology is deployed, first to clear landmines, then to make violent city districts safe again. Devices are installed on buses and trains and at entrances to certain streets. A utopian era of peace is predicted. Then a group works out how to turn the very presence of these devices into a weapon of public terror. As the novel draws to a close, Clarke outlines a dystopian nightmare.
To address the threat of suicide bombers we have to turn to the human sciences of history, politics, sociology, psychology 鈥� and perhaps religion. There isn’t, and never will be, a technical fix.
Selecting weakness
I am curious to know whether I have drawn the correct inference from Bob Holmes’s article on evolution (9 July, p 28). One point he makes is that human activities that “artificially” select out the largest and most attractive members of a species, such as shooting the elephants with the longest tusks, bias evolution in favour of members that are smaller and less attractive, including elephants with smaller tusks or no tusks at all. And these evolutionary changes can be observed within a few generations, far more quickly than was realised until recently.
I suppose it follows that “artificially” protecting the weaker and most disease-prone members of a species will tend relatively quickly to increase their proportion in the population. If this is so, what does it mean for the medium-to-long-term future of humans as our health-care systems become more effective and far reaching? As a species, do we face a future of steadily increasing dependence on drugs and other forms of medical care?
Bob Holmes writes:
鈥� Not to worry. Hunting actively favours short-tusked elephants, but modern medicine merely reduces the disadvantage of genes for poor health. As a result, the incidence of these genes should increase only slowly, if at all.
Return of the epicycle
In ancient times Aristotle proposed that the planets travelled in orbits of perfect circles. No special force was needed to keep the planets on track because they were following simple perfect paths. With various tweaks this theory remained the only show in town for centuries.
Unfortunately, increasingly sophisticated observations suggested that this simple standard model could not be quite right. Around AD 130 Ptolemy produced a hugely influential book, the Almagest, which proposed a series of circular “epicycles” operating on the circles to modify the positions of the planets.
This explained observed positions fairly well, but as the centuries went by into Renaissance times, more and more epicycles had to be added to explain the latest observations. The “dark force” of the epicycles was necessary to make an unquestioned theory work, but the reason for their existence was never explained. Even when Copernicus proposed putting the sun at the centre of the universe in the 16th century, this only reduced the number of epicycles needed from 80 to 34.
It was not until Kepler’s calculations in the early 17th century that it became clear the planets were actually travelling in ellipses. Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation published in 1687 finally gave this mathematical and academic respectability and allowed the entire panoply of unexplained epicycles to be junked.
The world of astronomy is once again invaded by dark forces (and dark matter) to make the calculations work in a theory that many claim to be the only one in town. Each time the observations don’t fit 鈥� as in an apparent increase in the rate of expansion of the universe 鈥� new unexplained forces are invoked. This should be warning us that we need a major rethink.
Congratulations to New 杏吧原创 for thinking the unthinkable in your article on the big bang (2 July, p 30). All we need now is a new Isaac Newton to provide us with a replacement framework of thinking.