Biodefence doesn't pay
In your article on biodefence in the US you highlight two crucial problems with Project BioShield (7 October, p 18). These are its “one bug, one drug” approach and its inadequate plans for a timely and effective delivery of countermeasures. I suggest the project also faces two additional shortcomings.
First, the reward structure in defence contracting is not aligned with the prevailing incentives in the biopharma industry. The operating margins, or rates of return, are substantially less for defence contractors 鈥� about three times less by one estimate 鈥� than they are for successful biopharma companies. Venture capitalists looking for high-risk/high-reward business models will not invest in companies based on contract R&D at industry averages.
Second, the big biopharma companies are highly unlikely to turn their attention to biodefence countermeasures unless the potential product-liability suits that could arise from adverse reactions to the preventive use of medical countermeasures are adequately addressed.
Can animals think back?
The sidebar “Inside the mind of a cow” in the article on animal welfare states that “most species only seem capable of thinking in the present” (23 September, p 7). But what about memory, which is certainly a characteristic of many animals?
For example, my dog once buried a bone and found it again when we next passed the site three months later. Even if he had forgotten about it, and I had said the word “bone” to him, this would probably have jogged his memory enough to go and look for it. This is surely “thinking in the past”. And what about squirrels and jays which have to remember numerous burial sites?
From Rosemary Sharples
The mere fact that a pet can be trained, and recognise its owner, proves that it can think about the past.
Penshurst, New South Wales, Australia
Keith Kendrick of the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, responds:
鈥� All animals have good or even amazing memories for places, individuals and things that are of value to them and their survival. This doesn’t mean they have the same developed concept of time as we do. Animals have only limited volitional control over calling up memories or planning a long way ahead. They are mainly restricted to events in the present triggering memories which then control their behaviour. So while they are mainly locked in the present, they can still have very effective memory skills.
Like it or not
Clear thinking seems to be in danger of being overwhelmed by science’s own version of political correctness: anti-anthropism. “Why is the universe the way it is? Most physicists would prefer a deep reason that has nothing to do with our existence,” says your piece on multiple universes (7 October, p 38). Should scientific judgement really be based on what people prefer? Try saying “most scientists would prefer a deep reason for climate change that has nothing to do with our existence” to see the problem with this approach.
Give oldies their due
“Is it fair to expect 25-year-olds to pay very high taxes to support perfectly healthy 70-year-olds in retirement?” ask Paul and Anne Ehrlich in their article on population (30 September, p 46).
This question deserves thought, given that the 70-year-olds may have already contributed to society by working for up to 55 years, while young people in today’s more affluent societies are in some instances becoming wealthy enough to retire in comfort in their mid-30s.
Some might say this is because they have put in the hard yards and have got their just desserts. I would say the 70-year-olds have also put in the hard yards, under different economic circumstances. We have to look at a balance of effort and reward for effort. If the now 70-year-olds hadn’t put in the effort, the 25-year-olds would be hard pushed to find well-paid work and opportunities, because it was the past generation that created today’s economy.
Everybody who contributes deserves a fair go, and so do those genuinely unable to contribute.
Who to believe?
Why do members of the public persist in continuing to live an unhealthy lifestyle, despite very public warnings and recommendations from various sources? Perhaps it is because they are highly confused about diet and lifestyle advice.
Your article on diabetes being caused by eating fish (30 September, p 18) clearly contradicts UK government advice on the consumption of fish. This tells us that to maintain a healthy diet we should consume at least two or three portions of oily fish per week, for their beneficial oils. Yet in your article Shing-Hwa Liu recommends we limit our fish intake to a maximum of two portions per week to avoid the dangers of mercury-induced diabetes.
This is not an isolated case. In the debate over whether children should be given the MMR vaccine, we had so-called “experts” supporting both sides of the argument, both lobbying parents to come round to their way of thinking. No wonder parents were, and still are, confused as to whether to have their child immunised.
We are constantly warned of the dangers of ingesting high levels of pesticides and herbicides from fruit and vegetables, yet we are told we should consume four or five portions per day. Some diet experts recommend a high-carbohydrate diet, while others say this is a recipe for obesity.
No wonder the public are perplexed by diet and lifestyle advice, and simply plough ahead with their old ways irrespective of government or “expert” advice. What and who are we actually supposed to believe?
Hit the low notes
Subharmonics are nothing new (30 September, p 60). George Crumb scored them in his 1970 string quartet Black Angels, and I described them (as “undertones”) in my 1985 Handbook of Instrumentation. They can indeed be elicited from any bowed stringed instrument, as well as from certain woodwind and brass instruments, and even drums.
For the record
鈥� In our story about North Korea’s nuclear test (14 October, p 9) the size of the explosion, estimated at 0.5 kilotons, or the equivalent of 500 tons of TNT, is incorrectly compared to the Oklahoma City bomb of 1995. In fact, the Oklahoma City bomb was smaller by a factor of around 100.
鈥� In the feature “Legally high” (30 September, p 41) we erroneously referred to John Halpern of Harvard Medical School as a psychologist. He is a psychiatrist.
Biofuel opportunities
I wonder whether seaweed had been considered as a fuel crop (25 September, p 36). It uses neither freshwater nor arable land and grows in relatively low light levels.
From Dominic Wormell
The article on biofuels implied that vast environmental destruction would be caused by their production. However, this assumes that biofuel production would have to fit in with other current land-use practices and that it would be business as usual in agriculture.
But surely many agricultural practices add greatly to the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Chief among these is the meat industry, with its massive carbon footprint and environmental impact due to its energy consumption, water use, effluent production, and so on 鈥� not to mention its frequently appalling welfare standards.
Meat production worldwide consumes a huge amount of energy and land, and is extremely inefficient. The amount of land turned over to producing meat or crops to feed livestock could feed another 4 billion people on the planet, a point emphasised in an article in New 杏吧原创 two years ago (13 March 2004, p 19). If the land now turned over to meat production were used for biofuels, I am sure the majority of our energy needs could be met.
Jersey, Channel Islands, UK
Seasonal electricity
George Monbiot suggests that electricity generation from solar photovoltaic panels would be poorly matched to demand because demand peaks in the middle of the winter (30 September, p 24). This is not borne out by a long-term study of electricity consumption in our house.
We have recorded our domestic electricity consumption daily since June 2005. Whilst our power consumption peaks in winter, it also rises in mid-summer, during school holidays. Conversely, at night, our house uses less than 0.1 kilowatts. This suggests that solar pv electricity might be better matched to our domestic electricity demand than Monbiot might think. In contrast, on a windy night, most of the power from a wind turbine would just leak away.
We have also tried to save energy, by using low-energy bulbs, not leaving appliances on standby, and so on. Recently, we replaced an old fridge and two freezers with a single large fridge-freezer, the most energy efficient model we could afford. As a result, our use of electricity for September 2006 dropped by more than 10 per cent compared with the previous year. The simplest way to save energy, and CO2, is not through expensive solar panels or wind turbines. It is easier and cheaper to not use it in the first place.
Dogma is the danger
Was it by divine coincidence that Mary Midgley’s article (7 October, p 50) appeared in the same edition of New 杏吧原创 as the cover story on confabulation?
Midgley is right to say it is not irrational to use imaginative structures as a necessary preparation for reasoning, but she is wrong when she asserts that, “with the largest, most puzzling questions, we have no choice but to proceed in mythical language which cannot be explained in detail at all”. Mythical equals confabulation.
OK, we can’t yet answer these questions 鈥� but the operative word is “yet”. Our understanding of the world is a work in progress so it doesn’t make sense to attempt an answer to such questions in any kind of language, mythical or not. The correct choice is to admit that we don’t know the answers and leave it at that for the time being.
Science is the only tool which offers any hope of answering questions, large and puzzling or otherwise, and although the investigation may start with a guess 鈥� a hypothesis, in other words 鈥� the next steps examine the validity of the proposal until, finally, peer review accepts the evidence as convincing. Imagination may be necessary in the beginning, but not required by the time we have a result.
No religion has ever convincingly answered any question. On the contrary, leaders of the major religions have recognised the threat which truth represents to their version of events and have struggled to hold back our quest to understand the real world.
From Robert Cailliau, CERN
Midgley writes: “Adding God is not, as Dawkins thinks, adding an illicit extra item to the cosmos, it is perceiving the whole thing differently.”
Dawkins sees evil in all religion; Midgley points out that atheist regimes have been criminal too. In fact, similar dangers are likely to arise from any world view that stops contemplating and is no longer curious but begins to rest on dogma. These may be world views with or without a god, though historically they have included gods.
I have heard outsiders commenting on people working at CERN along the lines of: “Amazing! Here are people who change their minds in the face of evidence!” We might like to think that this is the normal way to behave in the face of evidence, but dogmatic people indeed refuse to do that 鈥� and most of us will avoid changing our minds if it means we will lose face. Combine both and you have fundamentalists: they have painted themselves into the corner of their dogmas.
Geneva, Switzerland
From Eric Rippingale
I found Midgley’s article, describing Richard Dawkins’s dismissal of religion as a consequence of a flawed ideology, refreshingly clear. When people such as Dawkins resort to words such as “childish” or “silly” when referring to religion, it is evident, in my opinion, that they are not aware of 鈥� or indeed may not be capable of having 鈥� experiences that some of us hold to be more important than the everyday sentience of our main body senses and emotions.
Deeper meanings in our lives, whether we frame them as religion or otherwise, will not seem “silly” to those who experience them.
Hitchin, Hertfordshire, UK
Confabulation in court
Lawyers have been pragmatically applying tests to defeat the “tendency to confabulate” for a few centuries (7 October, p 32). When questioning your own side’s witness there is an absolute rule that you cannot employ leading questions. Every courtroom lawyer has experienced the sinking feeling that results when what previously seemed rock-solid testimony turns into confusion. Cross-examination, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of leading questions, designed to separate testimony of apparent facts from the overlay of interpretation that a witness has put on it.
Your article is particularly interesting concerning testimony from children. Here, particularly in abuse cases, a child’s interpretation of facts can be very different from an adult’s. An adult questioning a child has to be very careful not to project their interpretation onto the child’s testimony.
Adults as well as children are inclined to believe as absolute fact something they have heard from somebody else. Until tested, they mostly overlook the fact that it is second-hand information. This, of course, is the basis of the rule against admitting hearsay evidence. I have frequently had to trace hearsay evidence to its source and have hardly ever found it to be accurate.
From James Hamilton-Paterson
In her story on confabulation Helen Phillips states: “It is known that people tend to subconsciously prefer the rightmost object in a sequence.” I have often seen this claim made, and it always makes me wonder who these “people” are. Might this alleged preference be determined at least as much by culture as by biology? We in the west read from left to right. Words and sentences progressively make more sense and accrue accuracy and significance with rightward scanning. We are so used to this movement that even sequences of coloured squares, such as in Microsoft’s “loading” display, run from left to right, as do strip cartoons. It is almost as though time itself were structured in this direction.
For people whose language is Arabic, or any of the other languages written from right to left, might the reverse be true? And what about Chinese speakers, who are used to reading vertically?
Timelkam, Austria