Whaling ban must stay
Your suggested solution to the whaling issue 鈥� to set quotas in accordance with the precautionary procedure produced by the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) 鈥� was for a long time my preference over the present reality of constantly escalating “scientific” catches, despite many people’s deep concerns about the undoubted cruelty of the methods used to kill whales (24 June, p 5).
However, in years of negotiations it has become clear that the governments of Iceland, Norway and Japan are completely opposed to two conditions that are essential to this proposal: that any “scientific” whales are included in the catch quotas; and that there be in place a rigorous international control system to avoid the cheating we have seen again and again during years of large-scale commercial whaling.
The purpose of whaling is profit, whether from scientific or quota catches. Japan wishes to retain the ability to take whales from stocks that are so depleted that the quotas would have to be set at zero, and to “top up” any non-zero quotas with “scientific” catches 鈥� as was done by several other whaling nations in past years. Those are two good reasons for continuing the moratorium.
From Russell Leaper
You report a declaration by the IWC saying that “many species and stocks of whales are abundant and sustainable whaling is possible” (24 June, p 14). As a member of the IWC scientific committee since 1996, I have to say that this declaration, promoted by Japan, put words into the scientific committee’s mouth.
In recent years the whaling nations have shown no inclination to abide by the principles of precaution required to achieve sustainability in practice. Instead, in an attempt to justify unsustainable whaling, they have claimed that whales are eating too many fish, despite there being no reliable scientific evidence to suggest that fewer whales would mean more fish for people.
Given the opposition of whaling countries to international control, and the lack of any mechanism to limit “scientific” whaling, there seems little prospect that “agreeing limited catches may ultimately be the best way to safeguard vulnerable species”, as suggested in your editorial.
Fort William, Inverness-Shire, UK
From G. Wedge
In response to Japan’s call to resume whale-hunting 鈥� and despite never having protested about anything before 鈥� can I ask people to consider buying products from alternative countries in future? An economic protest would probably have more impact than any other.
Dunfermline, Fife, UK
Muck 'n' magic?
I was disappointed to read the unscientific approach put forward by Peter Melchett of the Soil Association (24 June, p 26). He rejects the validity of “case-by-case scientific assessment” for determining the safety of certain compounds such as aspartame. Instead, he advocates that decisions be based on “common sense” and “intuition”.
I wonder why. On that basis, a day can be defined as how long it takes the sun to go round the Earth. Common sense also suggests that common salt should be highly reactive and corrosive, like the elements sodium and chlorine that make it up.
If we are going to make regulatory decisions about consumer products on the basis of common sense and intuition, why stop at food? If this approach means rejecting any compound not found in nature, we can say goodbye to many medicines, disinfectants, cleaning materials, plastics, and so on.
“Observation”, the other preferred criterion on which Melchett believes decisions should be made, is of course precisely what has been done in the aspartame trials he rejects. True, it would be nigh-on impossible to get an accurate picture of all the possible synergistic effects from all the compounds a human could consume. That is, however, equally true of the “natural” materials people regularly consume.
There is much about the push for organic production that I support 鈥� actively, with my wallet. There are good environmental reasons for treading lightly on the world. However, the Soil Association’s view as represented makes it look dangerously like the preserve of a certain woolly “muck ‘n’ magic” mindset. The promulgation of a position based on flawed reasoning is deplorable in itself and, even worse, it risks undermining the credibility of the whole organic movement.
From Nick Thomas
Peter Melchett’s letter was published in the same issue of New 杏吧原创 as an article on a foodstuff to which around 1 per cent of the population are allergic and that kills more than 100 people every year in the US alone (24 June, p 40). Surely it is time we banned anything that is so unhealthy and dangerous.
But wait, the problem isn’t a synthesised chemical. It is caused by natural, unadulterated peanuts. Perhaps it is time that natural foods were subject to the scientific testing to protect public health that the Soil Association is so critical of.
Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
It's no miracle
Why does your reviewer ask despairingly if we will ever explain “how non-material experience can miraculously appear in material brains” (24 June, p 58)? Calling this “miraculous” is surely an anachronism 鈥� a strange survival from 17th-century dualism. “Matter” then meant solid chunks of inert stuff, unable to move unless something external propelled them. Spirit 鈥� in fact, God 鈥� was the only source of movement. Human minds were spirits, placed by God in bodies that were quite alien to them 鈥� just vehicles provided for their temporary use.
Certainly, mind-body interaction was then miraculous. So was life. The miraculousness of both was openly welcomed. Since we have stopped believing that matter is inert, and instead begun to think of it as largely made of energy fields and forces, no miracle is needed.
“Being conscious” is, after all, not a spooky extra kind of stuff, but just one of the many interesting things that complex organisms can do.
Living cities
It was fascinating to read the recent articles on ecotopia, and in particular to see how much and how little has changed in our view of the ecology of cities since the work of Eugene Odum in the 1970s and 1980s (17 June, p 36). He compared cities to coral reefs or salt marshes, whose intense resource-hungry productivity relies on an endless subsidy from the surrounding seas. We can sometimes forget that some natural ecosystems have a huge ecological footprint.
One blind spot in this work, which persists today, is the lack of appreciation of the sheer complexity and diversity of the natural components of the urban ecosystem. Despite a quarter century of study, urban ecology is still focused on the population ecology of single species. Biologists need to recognise the existence of a rapidly expanding “urban biome”.
A deeper understanding of urban habitats and communities is urgently needed if the natural world is to play a full and proper part in ensuring the liveability and health of the cities of the future.
Non-Christian science
Here, amidst the American “descent into superstition”, we of course all take on faith Richard Koch’s and Chris Smith’s belief that science and reason are in decline because “the full emergence of science required belief in one all-powerful God, whose perfect creation awaited rational, scientific explanation. This condition was peculiar to Christianity” (24 June, p 25).
This, clearly, is why pagan Greek culture produced no Aristotle or Pythagoras or Hero of Alexandria, and why its calculations of a round Earth’s circumference erred by more than 100 miles. This is why the works of those unscientific ancient Greeks survived and came to us not via Greek-speaking Christian Byzantium, but by way of Muslim scholars in the universities of Baghdad a millennium ago. This is why Galileo enjoyed full freedom of scientific thought and expression in Christian Italy, and why Jews such as Albert Einstein never became scientists.
Koch and Smith ought to have added that scientific scepticism’s erosion of Judaeo-Christian belief produced a vacuum that was briefly filled by the now failed pseudo-scientific cults of Nazism and Marxism. We are again, like the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, awaiting “a rebirth of wonder”. God plays dice with the universe, and we humans are the dice.
From Eric Worrall
Koch and Smith conclude that the existence of the human intellect, creativity and love are enough to compensate for humanity’s cosmic insignificance. This is plainly not the case for most people. All popular religions and New Age beliefs subscribe to the idea of continuity after death, and offer hope of a deeper meaning and cosmic purpose to life.
Were science to offer something similar, such as biochemical eternal youth, the strayed sheep would soon return to the altar of reason.
Shalford, Surrey, UK
From Michael Paine
Koch and Smith ask why science is “under attack as never before”. They suggest the rest of society is now much more critical of science, which has revealed a darker side, such as atomic weapons and “poisoning of the planet”.
Another, more likely reason for the demise of science is revealed in the article “The political brain” by Michael Shermer in this month’s Scientific American. He describes magnetic resonance imaging studies that have revealed how it suppresses rationality and reasoning in favour of emotions that reinforce confirmation bias 鈥� “whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence”.
Science, of course, is built on that rational, reasoning function of the brain and is founded on scepticism, and so does not bode well for politicians, religious fanatics or marketeers of consumer products who utilise emotional responses to ply their trade. Is it any wonder that science and scepticism are discriminated against when these same groups now have a huge influence on the media?
Beacon Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Give us a break
Distractions at work are portrayed as extremely costly in terms of lost production (24 June, p 46). They can indeed be very irritating, but would people really be working any harder if all technological distractions were eliminated by better design?
My suspicion is that workers need certain levels of distraction. Remove some and others will appear to take their place.
Workplace productivity as measured by economists rises every year, so clearly more productive work is being done, despite all these terrible distractions.
We simply need a given level of distraction, which probably reinforces productivity in some non-obvious way through social effects, group bonding, brief rest breaks, and so on.
Water from power
Having taken many voyages on large, modern container ships, I understand these vessels provide for themselves an abundance of desalinated sea water as a by-product of the ship’s engines (1 July, p 30). If desalinated water can be produced as a by-product of power generation, this could alter the economies involved for the better.
For the record
鈥� Although he was active in the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission from 1960 until three years ago, Sidney Holt, whose letter appears opposite, was never its chairman, contrary to what we stated (17 June, p 14).
鈥� In the article about desalination we managed to get the quantity of water on the planet wrong by a factor of 1 billion (1 July, p 30). The correct figure is 1400 cubic kilometres, not cubic metres.
鈥� The “Moon life” feature (1 July, p 44) mentioned a planet five times the diameter of Jupiter: that should have been five times the mass.
Arcs in the sky
I fear that Andrew Brightwell is mistaken in supposing that he has seen circumhorizontal arcs just before dawn (1 July, p 27). Circumhorizontal arcs arise when light enters each ice crystal through a vertical face and exits through a horizontal one. They may be observed only when the sun’s altitude is greater than 58 degrees (see Rainbows, Halos, and Glories by Robert Greenler, Cambridge University Press, 1980). They are therefore normally seen only from low latitudes.
The phenomenon that Brightwell saw was most likely a circumzenithal arc, in which the light enters through a horizontal face and exits through a vertical one. This arc lies between the zenith and the sun, usually approximately symmetrical about the zenith-sun line. The spectral dispersion has blue towards the zenith and red towards the sun, whereas circumhorizontal arcs have blue towards the horizon. Circumzenithal colours are highly saturated, but never as vivid as those in circumhorizontal arcs.
Costly bullet protection
Barry Fox’s website article on password-protected bullets dated 27 June (www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9412-invention-passwordprotected-bullets.html) article was very interesting, but I doubt this would be embraced. A a single round of .22LR costs about $0.02 or $0.03. The added costs would be astronomical, and I do not think there is a single firearms enthusiast (living or dead) who would countenance them.
Antidote at hand
In “Snakebite antidote without the venom” you note that “metalloprotease enzymes… make the venom deadly” (10 June, p 20). Has anyone considered immediately injecting the snakebite site with a safe metalloprotease inhibitor like tetracycline? Such an injectable could be widely distributed at minimal cost as part of a basic first aid kit.
Debora MacKenzie writes:
鈥� Jose Maria Guti茅rrez at the University of Costa Rica has used local injection of a metalloprotease inhibitor, though not tetracycline, to prevent tissue damage in snakebite, and recommends more such experiments, as many relevant inhibitors have been developed for other disorders (PLoS Medicine, vol 6, p 727).