Consciousness comes later
It is not necessary that your consciousness is directly involved in moving your finger, as Ben Haller implies (4 November, p 25). Indeed, since conscious decision-making can be quite a slow, involved process, there is an evolutionary advantage in it not being involved in the movement.
As Haller points out, “we sense all things in a delayed fashion”, and so if we actually reacted to them in a conscious way we would often be too late. Nowadays we view the brain as a network of interacting systems, with evolutionary early behaviour being moderated or overwritten by later functionality. From this viewpoint, an evolving consciousness would fit on top of existing behaviour. The problem is how to enable fast, instinctive reactions, combined with the advantages that free will brings, for example in being able to adapt our behaviour 鈥� all this within an evolutionary framework of evolving brain function.
A solution is actually what Haller argued against, namely a “conscious decision that appears later on … [and is] … illusory or faked”. Because this illusion will seem real to us it will affect our later decisions, even though it does not affect the immediate decision. The point being that reflection and memories, and hence also memories of past conscious decisions, will play a part in the earlier, faster, decision-making process which consciousness moderates. Clearly the idea that “practice makes perfect” fits this model.
Copyright traps
I read with interest your recent article on copyright traps (21 October, p 62). Some years ago my colleague, Julian Dow and I put the second edition of our Dictionary of Cell and Molecular Biology onto the web as a resource for bioscientists. We had more than one-third of a million hits on the site, and by logging the abortive searches we knew how to choose the new headwords for the third edition. Interestingly, the hard copy (published by Academic Press) continued to sell.
Recently, preparing the fourth edition (which will be published by Elsevier next year), again using the abortive searches list, I’ve come across several examples of our dictionary entries being copied verbatim and without acknowledgement into other on-line dictionaries. Included amongst these was one that was a copyright trap, exactly as you describe, and it brought a wry smile. It illustrates nicely how misinformation can propagate, though this particular trap is sprung in the new edition. Sadly, we could do nothing for those unable to spell 鈥� and I’ve collected more than 50 recognisable attempts to spell “mitochondrion” so far!
The case for the pill
You discuss the relative merits of the pill and the coil for birth control (28 October, p 7). I understand that the pill may also mitigate against the awful, often fatal, disease of ovarian cancer.
Few people seem to hear about this until they have a dear relative with the disease or they get inside a cancer ward. A large trial of ovarian cancer screening has just begun, though the results are not due out for another six years 鈥� see
What triggers memory?
Keith Kendrick says animals have “only limited volitional control over calling up memories”, and that events in the present trigger memories that control their behaviour (28 October, p 26). How does that differ from the human experience?
Combating creationism
As a science education specialist and researcher into the issue of creationism teaching in schools, I am extremely disturbed by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dismissive attitude on the issue of creationist teaching in UK schools (4 November, p 51). To state that action would only be necessary should creationism become “the mainstream of the education system in this country” is na茂ve in the extreme. Action at that point is no action at all and would be too late.
This attitude displays a lack of understanding of the motives and tactics of the creationist community. Mr Blair’s statement about his visit to the Vardy Foundation’s King’s Academy indicating that, “as far as I’m aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way” is surprising since Vardy schools have publicly accorded equal importance to creationism and theories of evolution. Indeed Stephen Layfield, the head of science at another Vardy academy 鈥� Emmanuel College Gateshead 鈥� backs lessons on creationism that contain factual errors and unscientific ideas on the relationships of living organisms. That is not at all what I would call normal science curriculum teaching. He is also a Director of the newly instigated “Truth in Science” movement, “that appears to have sufficient funding and determination to distribute thinly disguised “six-day” creationist teaching materials to all secondary schools, masquerading as science lessons. They clearly intend to make creationist teaching in science “mainstream”.
Mr Blair’s contention that creationists do not view their ideas as “science” is also incorrect. Having attended more than one creationist lecture that purports to refute scientific evidence for evolution, I can confirm that for most, the mission is to replace good science with a faulty, unscientific explanation for the development of living organisms. They seek to undermine geology, biology and astronomy with their unscientific claims. They dismiss long-established, well-evidenced and widely accepted scientific facts, such as the existence of transition fossils, with nothing more then unsubstantiated ideas of “created kinds” and a tired mantra that fossils of transitional species “do not exist”, even when the physical evidence is clear for all to see in the many fossil collections around the world.
It may interest readers to know that the current curriculum in UK schools already has provision for an examination of the perceived tensions between religion and science and an examination of ideas, religious and scientific, on the development of the universe and life. The problem for the creationists is that this exists in the Religious Education curriculum, its rightful place, and not in the science curriculum which is where they seek to place their own unscientific ideas, including so called “intelligent design”.
Given that this provision for an examination of origins already exists, I wonder then why the creationists are so vocal and insistent on teaching their non-scientific ideas in science? Clearly it is their intention to replace mainstream science with pseudoscience.
Low-tech voting
Celeste Biever discusses safeguarding democratic elections (21 October, p 30). But this demands all three pillars of verified voting: transparency, auditability, and security.
Transparency means that just about everybody understands how their vote is recorded, counted, and secured. Auditability means that whenever tampering or other problems do occur, they can be reliably detected and therefore appropriately remediated. Security includes anonymity and means that both voters and their votes are safeguarded against manipulations. Ignoring transparency almost guarantees compromises to auditability and security.
Unfortunately, all software-based voting systems share the same problem over auditability. Even when they can prove that they have accurately recorded voter inputs, they are still capable of reporting fraudulent outputs. Thus, the only potentially reliable way to audit for such output fraud would be to test output data against samples of input data. But, contrary to implications in your article, valid statistical samples could never be obtained. Only volunteer samples would be recoverable, and these would be invalidated by the well known effects of volunteer bias. Software-based voting systems, especially cryptographic systems, make this auditing disaster less transparent and thereby threaten the security of our elections.
The solution is to return to low-tech voting systems that can and do provide transparency, auditability, and security. The voter simply marks a durable ballot next to their candidate’s name and drops that ballot in a secured ballot box. Ballots are then counted by any reasonable method to generate the output report. True auditability is assured, because the original input ballots can always be recounted. Furthermore, security for such low-tech voting systems reduces to securing the chain of custody of physical ballots.
While this is no small task, its distributed nature also means that it would take a vast conspiracy to steal an election. In contrast, security for software-based voting systems requires securing the chain of custody of ballots that are both invisible and vulnerable to attack all at once from a single networked location.
Breastfeeding and obesity
You report that heavier people have more children (4 November, p 34). But I wonder what proportion of normal weight, overweight or obese women breast-feed their children, and for how long. It is my experience, being of normal weight and a mother of four children, that the longer I breast fed each child, the more closely I approached my original weight. I believe that women who do not breastfeed, or breastfeed for less than 7 months, do not gain the benefit of weight loss, not to mention the closer bond with the child.
This poses another question: what proportion of formula-fed babies and children are overweight or obese, compared to those who were breastfed?
Virus virulence
Bob Holmes’s “Rules of contagion” made for wonderful reading but also made a significant omission: the latency or incubation period of pathogens (28 October, p 44).
Just as endurance outside the host does seem to contribute to a pathogen’s virulence, its ability to remain undetected in a host during the latency period considerably increases its chances of being transmitted. That allows it to evolve into (or remain as) a nasty killer. This is certainly the case for email computer viruses, in which long latency periods thwart an early response by antivirus companies and coordination centres, allowing sustained expansion and an arbitrary degree of virulence when the virus is finally activated.
It could explain the virulence of some pathogens such as HIV, which has no remarkable endurance outside the host, does not use a secondary vector and is not easily transmitted. Yet despite this, it does still exact a considerable death toll if unchecked.
From Eric Kvaalen
While it may be true that existing pathogens show a relationship between virulence and transmissibility, this can be explained by an “anthropic principle”.
If a pathogen had developed high transmissibility and high virulence, then it would have exterminated the human race, and we wouldn’t be around to ask such questions.
But the fact that no pathogen has exterminated us in the past does not preclude the possibility in the future. After all, species do go extinct, and as far as we know this may often be due to them being killed off by some new pathogen.
Pathogens do not plan for their future, and they may evolve in ways which in the end will cause their own extinction.
The 1918 flu virus apparently went extinct because it lacked a combination of characteristics which would allow it to exist for more than a couple of years. It nevertheless did much harm while it lasted.
If the H5N1 virus increases its transmissibility and retains its virulence, it could wipe us out, and perhaps go extinct itself in the process. Other viral variants might be more “fit”, but they wouldn’t have the chance to prove it.
La Courneuve, France
Primate problem
The debate about animal experiments is not as simple as the media 鈥� or Mark Matfield 鈥� would have us believe (11 November, p 24). It is no longer about science versus animal welfare, but about “good” versus “bad” science.
The revision of the key EU directive on animal experimentation (86/609/EEC) is indeed a golden opportunity to allow the law to catch up with 21st-century non-animal testing methods that are species-specific and therefore methodologically relevant. In the UK, there is already a parliamentary move to ban the use of primates in scientific procedures in the form of Early Day Motion 1704, signed by more than 160 MPs.
Of particular concern is the use of non-human primates in research and testing. Around 10,000 non-human primates are used in laboratories across Europe each year, more than a third in the UK. The vast majority will be deliberately poisoned with an overdose of chemicals or drugs by pharmaceutical companies. This testing regime is as unscientific as it is cruel.
There has been an increasing trend over the last few years to use marmoset monkeys instead of the much larger macaque.
An enlightening paper published by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry makes a valiant attempt to pretend that the choice of marmoset is rooted in science, but it is abundantly clear that the real reasons are considerations of cost and convenience for researchers. Marmosets weigh around 400 grams and are thus comparatively cheap to dose with valuable test compounds.
Anaesthetic awareness
I enjoyed reading Helen Phillips’s article describing how “animal studies and test tube experiments” suggest that some anaesthetics may increase the risk of an elderly person developing Alzheimer’s disease (28 October, p 12). But Phillips could have balanced the story with population-based data showing no increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s from the use of general anaesthetics: for example, the studies by Nicolaas Bohnen and colleagues.
She states that “anaesthetists need to log more carefully the combinations and doses of the anaesthetic they give to patients…” But anaesthetists in the UK fill out a chart for every anaesthetic that they administer and on this they document exactly how much of the intravenous anaesthetic they have given, as well as the percentage of inhaled anaesthetic they administered. How could we log this “more carefully”?
Who's influencing who?
In focusing so heavily on funding, your report on industry influence on patients’ groups misses other important aspects of the relationship (28 October, p 18). As in the US, some UK “patients’ groups” are in fact genuinely consumer-led and governed; others are entirely professional associations; while some appear to be voluntary bodies but are in fact extensions of industry.
Influence can be traded in more subtle ways than direct funding. Many all-party parliamentary groups in the UK, for instance, are funded by industry 鈥� or by voluntary bodies that channel funding from industry. The ascendancy of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in health technology appraisal in England has resulted in voluntary groups that contribute to appraisals making alliances with manufacturers, and sometimes receiving support from them in cash or kind.
This is not intrinsically wrong. There is sometimes real overlap between voluntary groups’ objectives of ensuring that their beneficiaries receive the best available treatment, and industry’s mission to ensure take-up and a successful return on their huge investments.
But it is proper to ask questions about who is influencing whom. Last year’s debacle in which Patricia Hewitt, the secretary of state for health, appeared to endorse the drug Herceptin, in advance of NICE authorisation, left many questions unanswered.
There is a simple way of ensuring that questions can be asked about the independence of voluntary groups.
Those that receive support from industry can publish full details in their annual reports. Macmillan Cancer Support does it, as do the other health charities which I have led. There is no downside, so why don’t they all do it?
Reason and rhetoric
“Science is not democratic”, writes Martin Livermore of the Scientific Alliance in defence of the organisation’s climate-change scepticism (4 November, p 24). No, it does not work by majority vote, but it does work by consensus. That is how peer review of evidence works. When he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 Thomas Kuhn upset the scientific community by showing how much of what counts as knowledge depends on what the community agrees.
From Matt Salusbury
Martin Livermore demonstrates by the structure of his letter that his goal is anything but a “return to scientific principles”. Rather, he puts a “defence case” for carbon emissions, like a public relations consultant or a lawyer with a dodgy client.
Science may not be a simple democracy. Nor does it work by the rhetorical convention, embodied in court procedure and newspaper reports, that every story has precisely two sides that must be accorded equal weight.
The fundamental tactic of the lobbies that deny climate change 鈥� just as it was for those who denied the ill effects of tobacco 鈥� is to pretend that science can be discussed in these simplistic terms. They claim that as dissidents they deserve equal space to “balance” the “other side” of the argument 鈥� the legions of scientists who have reached consensus on climate change. Unfortunately, this tactic works well on those who are concerned with a lawyer’s concept of “fairness”, notably professional politicians. The same tactic works equally well for quacks, creationists and conspiracy theorists.
Science, however, is not fair. Nor is it prepared, for example, to acquit gravity of making apples fall on the basis that someone can argue “reasonable doubt”. Livermore develops his adversarial defence by accusing New 杏吧原创 of “rigid dogmatism”. He claims that the Alliance are “certainly not the ones doing the bullying” 鈥� so who, allegedly, is?
The necessary basis for understanding the output of lobbies such as the Alliance is not logic, but the analysis of rhetoric. Perhaps this study should be a compulsory ingredient of science courses, since we never know what scientific work will make it into the glare of publicity and face such attacks.
London, UK
Combating creationism
UK prime minister Tony Blair says that if he notices “creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country, then that’s the time to start worrying” (4 November, p 51).
I’m sorry, Mr Blair. If we do reach that stage it will be too late.
Climate and culture
I agree with your editorial “We have been warned” that climate change has emerged as a much more complex phenomenon than can be understood and solved by science alone (4 November, p 18). But I very much doubt that the language of economics alone, even the version used in the UK’s Stern report, will yield the transformation of society you seek.
The idea of climate change reaches much deeper than simply the economic balance sheet. Differences in ideology, religion, psychology, governance and materialist aspirations all lie in wait to place obstacles in the way of any globally engineered pathway towards a serene climate. We will do what we can, and will try and do more, but climate change will not be “solved”.
From Mark Petrie
To state that scientists have largely failed to get their case across about the urgent need to tackle global warming is offensive. Over the past year the momentum of change in attitude to global warming has been impressive, with no world leader now openly dismissing the science in its entirety. The Stern report has helped push the argument into the economic arena, and it is certainly the highest-profile report of its kind and a further sign of the gathering momentum.
The report would, however, carry no weight without the acceptance of the preceding scientific work. Your editorial seems to suggest that maybe the scientists should have been making economic arguments from the start. The only reason that politicians have been able to avoid global warming for as long as they have, is that they could question the science, and therefore the subsequent economic implications. It is entirely unreasonable to suggest an economic perspective at an earlier stage would have moved politicians to act.
Brisbane, Australia