Face fertility facts
Name withheld by request
Patrick Davey says that personal experience would suggest that a spontaneous abortion rate of 1 per cent is normal (29 October, p 23). That may sound right to a male who only counts miscarriages in obviously pregnant women. When we first tried to start a family there was one month when my period was quite late, but I did not become pregnant. Later we had two sons, each the result of one cycle without contraception. Several years later we decided to have another child, but it was some months before I became pregnant 鈥� and in one of those months I had symptoms of pregnancy.
So of established pregnancies, I had a 0 per cent abortion rate; of probable conceptions, 40 per cent; and of possible conceptions, 63 per cent. From the number of women I have known to have unplanned-pregnancy scares and the number who want a baby but take months of trying to “catch” before they finally do, I would guess that this range seems about right. But none of the women who discussed these things with me would have done so with any man, except maybe their husbands.
It seems probable that estimates of the rate depend mostly on definitions of how long has to pass after conception before you have a spontaneous abortion. I can’t imagine any way of testing this; we just don’t know how often conception happens.
Vienna, Austria
Fresh, green houses
Your item on the greening of domestic and commercial properties was very constructive 鈥� as far as it went (5 November, p 24). However, there is more to improving the energy-saving performance of buildings than simply controlling heat loss from radiation and air leakage.
It is indeed an excellent idea to insulate against radiative heat loss. When eliminating the main source of air leakage 鈥� draughts 鈥� one should not forget to retain sufficient air exchange. Otherwise too much moisture from everyday activities such as breathing will build up in the air and cause condensation.
Conventional air bricks and window-head vents that were traditionally provided for air exchange were often draughty, causing excess air leakage and discomfort to occupants. A new generation has recently been designed to provide the ideal balance between energy (and money) saving, essential air exchange, health and draught-free comfort. We should use them.
Fear not these frogs
I would like to reassure any readers who are afraid of being shot at by the poison dart frogs in the Colombian rainforest (Feedback, 12 November). The golden poison dart frog (Phyllobates terribilis) is indeed poisonous, in that it secretes a highly potent toxin from its skin. But it is not the frog that shoots the toxin. The Choco people of western Colombia use it on the tips of their blowpipe darts when hunting, giving the frog its name.
Fun in the Fens
I was shocked by Simon Winchester’s assertion that Lincolnshire is a boring place to live (29 October, p 20). I presume he must have overlooked such excitements as the exhibition of wallpaper, recently staged by my local council.
For the record
鈥� In the feature entitled “The undiscovered oceans” (12 November, p 38), we misspelled the name of Koyo USA, the company selling bottled deep-sea water.
Fearing science's success
Mark MacDiarmid cites three factors supporting the fundamentalist fear of science: better health, consumerist junk, and environmental damage (29 October, p 22). He fails to note that science does not cause pollution; rather, it prevents it. Which air would he rather breathe 鈥� that in London in 1805 or London in 2005? A comparison of North America and western Europe with Africa and eastern Europe reveals that environmental protection is a rich society’s privilege. Therefore, green logic would wish us all rich; a result achievable by science.
As for consumerism: how good of the Olympian MacDiarmid to share his superior product judgement with us grubby vulgarians. But though many despise bad taste, who ever fears it? I personally have come to terms with my own mere humanity, so I offer this deal 鈥� others may have their awful consumerist junk if I may have mine.
But as for better health, there MacDiarmid has a point. There is nothing that tyrants, oppressors and life-denying ideologues the world over fear more than the prospect of a healthy, well-fed and long-lived populace, especially if these blessings are brought by sceptics. Science is inherently revolutionary, and like all revolutions it has its errors, excesses, turbulence and hazards. But the world’s reactionaries do not fear these failures; what they fear is science’s successes.
Reasons for risky residence
I want to tell Simon Winchester that I would love rational people to start abandoning San Franscisco (29 October, p 20). It would alleviate traffic problems 鈥� and I’d love to retire there. The land is rich and fertile, the scenery is drop-dead beautiful, and weather dynamics over the bay mean it is naturally air-conditioned year round. The chance of a major earthquake sometime in the next hundred years would hardly deter me; I am far more likely to be killed in a car accident.
Perhaps these go hand-in-hand, and there is something about seismically active areas that makes them more beautiful places. In any case, there are perfectly rational economic reasons for settling in these dangerous areas.
New Orleans is nicknamed “The Crescent City” because it was originally settled on a crescent of raised land that weathers hurricanes pretty well (including Katrina). It was settled between a river and a lake, on the coast for inevitable economic reasons (shipping), and outgrew the crescent for the same reason. Houston, also a port city in the direct path of hurricanes, has a similar rationale behind its existence.
Two centuries from now New Orleans on the Mississippi will still be an important port. San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley will remain, through building, rebuilding, and rebuilding again. Having lived and worked a year in Phoenix, I say it has its own charms, and I never detected a water problem at all, probably thanks to the advanced technology of “pipes” that can transport water over great distances.
It isn’t rational to abandon such places when the death toll, although tragic when disaster strikes, is a small percentage of the deaths caused by threats that we face daily.
If the concern is property damage, the residents still act rationally. The poor get bailed out by the national government and the rich get bailed out by insurance companies.
I don’t know enough to speak for the rest of the world, but these “dangerous areas” in the US are prime real estate for very good rational reasons.
Restricted research
In disparaging the “predictable” idea that nuclear weapons should never have been developed, Timothy Ferris adroitly avoids the likelihood that nuclear weapons were developed under a system, the Manhattan Project, that could hardly have been more regulated 鈥� by the military (22 October, p 50). Granted, the few individuals within the US government who knew what was going on were actively promoting the development of an atomic bomb during the early 1940s. Nonetheless, the military regulation of the post-1945 development of nuclear science was, I would venture to say, something for which we can all be thankful.
While the military just might not be the most appropriate institution to oversee the development of stem cell research (Ferris’s liberal scientists must have forgotten to mention the danger of creating super-soldiers), the government has the right to regulate both the process by which stem cell research is conducted as well as the ultimate results of such scientific inquiry 鈥� similar to the way that the government regulates, or ought to regulate, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
A place for religion
In US schools, religious education is illegal (29 October, p 6). In the UK it is compulsory. As an atheist I used to favour the US model but I now see two advantages to the UK system. It sets out a national religious studies curriculum that is inclusive and discursive, challenging dogmatism. And it means that there is no significant pressure to include religious viewpoints such as creationism within science classes 鈥� such ideas can be included in religious education classes where they belong. Maybe American scientists should be arguing for religious education in schools, to take the pressure off the science teachers.
Nowhere near a toddler
The robot Darwin VII is claimed to have “managed to master the abilities of an 18-month-old baby 鈥� a pretty impressive feat for a machine” (5 November, p 28). This is rather less impressive when you realise that all it does is crawl around finding “tasty blocks” that are prominently striped. An 18-month-old baby typically understands simple speech, has at least a dozen or so words of its own, has all sorts of complex social behaviours such as shyness with strangers and attention-getting strategies, can find hidden objects, identify named objects, imitate gestures…and on and on.
Artificial intelligence has been plagued since its inception with vast underestimates of the difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve, and vast overestimates of the progress it has made. To say that Darwin VII has the abilities of a toddler is a breathtaking overstatement in the worst of this tradition, which really needs to end if AI is ever to be taken seriously.
Fat is a fiscal issue
Geoff Russell believes that it is unethical for scientists to develop a method that enables people to eat freely and stay lean (29 October, p 23). But there is already a proven method for doing just that. It’s called exercise. Is this also unethical? For those who cannot, do not have the time to, or simply do not want to exercise, would a pill that mimics exercise really be “highly unethical”?
He seems to believe that obese people deserve to suffer from diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, but he forgets two things. The first is that although the rise in the incidence of obesity is almost certainly due to our changing lifestyles, susceptibility to this change is strongly influenced by our genetic make-up. I suspect that he is lucky in this respect. The second is that it is not just obese people who pay: we all pay for the chronic diseases of others through our taxes.
Left can be handy
The Edinburgh Handedness Inventory rates me correctly as a strong right-hander (5 November, p 36). My score of 100 per cent suggests, however, that the list of tasks is not fully representative. My left hand usually (though not always) takes the active role for one task only: picking up small shards of broken glass. I’ve noticed this in other righties too, and wondered which (if either) is the reason for it: to protect the strong hand from injury, or to use the greater sensitivity of less-calloused fingertips. I suspect the latter would be more important, given that my right hand undertakes many tasks that are much more likely to result in cuts and abrasions.
Testing's dark side
Genetic testing is bringing the subject of insurance discrimination to the public’s attention (5 November, p 7). But the “dark side”, the personal and familial impact of test results, is rarely explored. Psychological repercussions that erupt in anxiety, paranoia and psychosomatic illness are likely among fragile individuals who become fearful either of a disease itself, or of its potential to harm other family members.
The shock of discovering an incurable inherited illness, or a mutant genetic marker in one family member and not another is bound to disrupt emotional bonds. At the worst, such results could lead to anger, hostility and estrangement among siblings, disrupting families that could have been the anchors from which to draw strength during times of stress from adversity or illness.
Are we knowledgeable enough to protect people from such long-term effects of being robbed of hope? Has the scientific community fully explored this hazard to mental health? Can we be confident that people can process complicated information and share it 鈥� or withhold it 鈥� appropriately? There is an ethical responsibility to let clients know that in the aftermath of genetic testing, they could face serious moral dilemmas that affect their relationships.
God is dead
Bravo Edward O. Wilson! His analysis of the relationship between science and religion is politically bold, and yet on scientific grounds must be seen to be entirely uncontroversial (5 November, p 48). The implications of Darwinism for religion were known even before On the Origin of Species was published; they led Darwin to keep his work secret from his devout wife for years. Philosophers quickly grasped the truth. Karl Marx rejoiced that “a death blow [is] dealt here for the first time to teleology”; Friedrich Nietzsche saw that “God is dead…And we have killed him”.
A rapprochement on this point between science and religion is surely an oxymoron. Rapprochement is equilibrium through diplomacy; it is not necessarily a condition of rational agreement. If Galileo reached any settlement with his inquisitors, it was just by keeping his mouth shut. He never agreed with the church’s position and never wasted time as a scientist by seeking an arbitrary common ground.
The only likely convergence between creation mythology and Darwinism will come when neuroscientists and perhaps evolutionary psychologists find the physiological seat of our species’ pervasive belief in the supernatural.
From the Rev. Ron Partridge
Edward O. Wilson does a great disservice to science as well as faith by presenting a false dichotomy between science and faith. I have loved all branches of science all my life. My faith relates to my personal values and purposes and to the larger framework within which all nature exists.
Wilson’s false opposition between science and faith makes it impossible for people like me to act as credible allies in defence of science. He proves to conservative believers that we are traitors to faith, while trying to present us as opponents of science.
Richard Dawkins, in a BBC debate in 1996, observed: “I should like to say something as a Darwinian … if I were sitting around the table trying to come to some agreement about morality, the first thing that we should do is to throw out Darwinism.”
He did not mean that we should throw out science, only that biology offers us no usable basis for morality. We are so often told that science is “value free”, and places no special premium on humanity as a species. As human beings, we must therefore work out some better basis for human value than scientific fact alone.
Sittingbourne, Kent, UK
From Grenville Wall
What is scientific about Wilson’s scientific humanism? Is it merely that this humanism does not contradict science, especially evolutionary science, a virtue supposedly lacking in the alternatives he mentions? If so, this is a pretty thin qualification for being scientific.
If it lies in the stronger claim that it is “based on” science, this arouses suspicion of a potentially invalid inference from evolutionary fact to ethical value. Or it would do if Wilson had offered us a view of humanism with some ethical substance to it.
His appeal to an evolutionary theory of human nature does not help, because one job of such a theory would be to explain how evolution made possible the full range of human ethical capacities (good and bad). It is not obvious how a humanist ethical position could be derived from such a theory alone without the fact-value problem arising again, perhaps buried in a disguised form of social Darwinism. Rather than offering a radical world view, Wilson’s scientific humanism looks suspiciously empty.
Vantaa, Finland
From Hoyt Davidson
I consider myself a scientific humanist when it comes to learning about our universe and biological systems (I am after all a loyal reader of New 杏吧原创). It is truly the “light and the way” to greater technology, knowledge, material well-being and a more tolerant and stable society. I also strongly support the serious teaching of evolutionary theory in our schools as being based on clear and persuasive science.
Unlike Wilson, however, I and millions of other Americans are also people of faith who do not read the Bible so literally. We believe that despite all the beauty, power and success of evolutionary theory, there will indeed always be a vital core of unexplainable phenomena and first causes that leave open the possibility of an intelligent designer.
Basically, we want our Darwin and our God too. To think there is not room for both is the height of scientific hubris and human arrogance. I am frequently amazed at scientists who proudly describe the big bang and the inflationary universe and see some fundamental difference between that technical description of the first tiny fraction of a second, an event with no cause nor explantion, and the snapping of God’s fingers.
The case with evolution is really no different. Yes, we have figured out the science and of that we can be justly proud. But I think Kepler had the right idea. In such circumstances we should celebrate having caught a glimpse of God’s mind, not place ourselves as the future and inevitable omnipotent beings of the universe.
New Canaan, Connecticut, US
Inscrutable design
God by definition is the creator of time and space, and is beyond time and space. We just do not know and cannot imagine what sort of intelligence a being beyond time and space would have, or what design they would carry out (29 October, p 6). We humans habitually and inevitably attribute our own features and characteristics to God, because we cannot think of characters beyond and different from our own.
It may well be that describing God in this way is itself a sort of blasphemy. Proponents of intelligent design are obviously referring to God, and their arguments bring down His position and pronounce Him as essentially just like us, with an imagined purpose and plan for its achievement.
We use our own linguistic pronoun “He” in His absence because we have no other suitable word. If both sides of the argument fully understood our language limitation they would realise that the whole argument is nothing more than a linguistic error.
From Brian Wilson
I assume that the “intelligent designer” must also be responsible for such things as bird flu, HIV and malaria. These are after all living organisms and exhibit very complex designs. Or is the designer responsible only for the “good” things (like us!) with the “nasties” the result of some mindless evolutionary process? Or perhaps the Devil is also an intelligent designer, so that between the two of them the good, the bad and the ugly are all covered.
Doncaster, Victoria, Australia
From Alistair McConville
I have been surprised at the crass equation of intelligent design theories with religious fundamentalism. You seem at pains to tar all forms of religious belief with the same brush. Such oversimplifications do no credit to the scientific community. Many thinking believers who reject creationism see powerful arguments for a divine mind in fine-tuning arguments.
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK
From Michael L. Murphy
You make passing mention of Richard Dawkins’s “idea that Darwinism disproves religion” (October 29, p 9). Surely some qualification is in order. Darwinism may in fact go a long way toward disproving the underlying ontology of western religions. However, it is difficult to see how Darwinism could do any violence to eastern religions such as Buddhism, particularly since religious leaders including the Dalai Lama have taken the position that “it is up to Buddhism to cope with what science finds”.
Baltimore, Maryland, US