Am I your figment?
Chris Frith plainly disagrees with the dualistic view that we live in two worlds, the mental and the physical (17 February, p 50). Yet he boldly makes statements such as “If I think there is a wine glass in front of me, my brain predicts how it will feel when I touch it.”
This appears to suggest that “my” brain models the world for “me”. But who then am I? The philosopher Daniel Dennett derides the “Cartesian theatre” in which “I” view the world projected onto an inner screen, viewed by a homunculus, on whose screen…
I assume Frith likewise subscribes to the orthodox western scientific view that we live in but one world and that there is no homunculus for whose benefit the brain generates models: I in fact am those modelling processes. Perhaps Frith’s apparent dualism is merely an artefact of the difficulty of presenting non-dualist ideas within a culture that deeply assumes dualism.
A separate point that is often missed in discussing the common ground between Buddhism and science is that one of the central tenets of Buddhism is the doctrine of anatman or “no soul”. In essence, this states that my sense of “I” is an illusion. The Buddha remained silent on the issue of precisely whose illusion “I” am. For his part, Frith seems to suggest that I might be yours.
Goethe's quake
Matt Kaplan discusses animals detecting earthquakes, but doesn’t mention that some humans also claim this ability (17 February, p 34). A person said to have been in the service of the poet and scientist Johann von Goethe told the following anecdote to Johann Eckermann, recorded in his Conversations with Goethe (1836): “Once there was a call in the middle of the night, and when I went to [Goethe] in his room, he… lay observing the sky… ‘Listen,’ he then said to me, ‘this is a significant moment; at this moment either we are having an earthquake, or we’ll have one’…
“The next day my master related his observations at court, at which one woman whispered into her neighbour’s ear, ‘Listen! Goethe’s mad!’ But the count and the other men believed in Goethe, and it was soon revealed that what he had seen was correct, because after a few weeks the news arrived that on that very night a part of Messina had been destroyed by an earthquake.”
'C' is for…
There are many C-words relating to the problem of climate change and its possible solutions: carbon trading, carbon sequestration 鈥� and now corn-based biofuels, according to George W. Bush (3 February, p 15). The C-word missing from everyone’s lips is the one that matters: capitalism.
By its nature, capitalism needs continually to expand 鈥� to find new markets, new resources and new ways to accumulate to maintain profit for its investments. It cannot, therefore, offer a sustainable future.
The only country that has achieved a sustainable economy is Cuba (see the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2006, p 19 鈥� based on data Cuba supplies to the United Nations). Cuba would be perceived, at least in western nations, as having a relatively low standard of living: it is clear that an extraordinarily large change in our way of life is necessary to achieve a sustainable future.
Maybe that is why another C-word is missing: communism. Capitalism will have to be replaced with a system that does not depend on expansion but is based on the real needs of people and the planet. Call this what you will, but it is not capitalism or anything resembling it.
For the record
鈥� We attributed information about the earthquake-sensitive animals of the city of Helice to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (17 February, p 34). He is generally thought to have died in 401 BC 鈥� about 18 years before the Helice incident. The correct attribution is Diodorus.
鈥� We said that Tangshan, in Hebei province, China, is south of Beijing (17 February, p 36): it is east and slightly south of the capital.
Shift shift sought
Stuart Clark describes cosmologists busily “redecorating” the universe, (16 February, p 28). It seems to me that the redecorators will not discover the major cracks in the edifice unless they turn their attention from “dark energy” to ask one basic question: how do we know the universe is expanding?
If astronomers continue to interpret red-shift values as being solely due to speed, distance and acceleration, then the foundations will sink even deeper. Direct observation shows this fundamental assumption to be flawed. Those who dare to expose this flaw are expelled from the club: the astronomer Halton Arp is a prime example.
If and when galaxies are recognised as evolving systems, producing offspring with high energy, high red shift and low luminance, a firmer footing will be formed. Let us hope that cosmology, the queen of sciences, chucks her paint pots and grabs a shovel before it’s too late.
Bell wether
I was disappointed that Jeff Hecht did not mention in his article on the decline of Bell Labs one of its most significant contributions to computing: the development of the Unix operating system in the 1970s (3 February, p 18).
Unix is the cornerstone of many data centres, was a foundation of the internet and the inspiration of the ubiquitous open-source Linux operating system, which is the platform of choice for machines ranging from commodity broadband routers to the world’s top supercomputers.
Algorithms and art
Feedback comments on Mary Anne Clark’s protein-structure-based music (3 February). John Dunn should be credited as well 鈥� he’s the man behind the wonderfully named music software company Algorithmic Arts (perhaps a nod to the fictional organisation of the same name in Vernor Vinge’s far-future novel A Fire Upon the Deep). He wrote the software that Clark used and has done a lot of compositions of his own: see for a substantial amount of additional music, with sequences and notes from Clark.
That page and the associated notes go into some detail about how the music is structured. It’s much more elaborate (and fascinating) than you described and there’s a lot of artistic expression involved; it’s not just a mechanical process. I’m not sure whether it’s art or science or education. Perhaps it’s all three at once.
Dedicated follower of fashion
In your report of the survey by Bruno L盲ng on blue-eyed men preferring blue-eyed women, only genetic game-theoretic explanations are mentioned, with the observation that the genes of a brown-eyed competitor would show up (20 January, p 16). Whether this makes the woman more cautious, or whether the blue-eyed cuckold would slaughter her brown-eyed offspring to make the detection strategy pay off, we are not told.
A generation ago, however, the same data would have confirmed Freudian ideas of men seeking women who resemble their mothers (blue-eyed men have a higher fraction of blue-eyed parents).
I hold no brief for either theory, but I do enjoy watching intellectual crowd behaviour.
Sisterhood is pubertal
There is a very good evolutionary explanation for the effect that the presence of a girl’s biological father has on the age she reaches puberty (10 February, p 38). A female shares 50 per cent of her genes with her children, but also shares 50 per cent with her full siblings. Thus, genetically and evolutionarily speaking, a child is ambivalent as to whether she should stay around and help her parents raise her siblings or go out and try to start a family of her own.
This is, obviously, true up to a point. Starting a new family on her own is a difficult and risky task. When the biological father is around, and the family is functioning well, it is a smaller investment for a child to stick around longer and help raise her siblings or increase the chances for their birth. This argument is also true for males, though they have a different (usually smaller) investments involved.
Thus, it makes perfect sense for a physiological mechanism to develop that can make a girl mature faster when it seems that the chances for full younger siblings are smaller.
Therapies analysed
It was interesting to read Darian Leader and David Corfield describing the effects that medical views popular from the 1970s had on training and on the diagnosis of psychosomatic illness (17 February, p 46). I was surprised, though, by their belief that people might need to see a psychoanalyst “three or four times a week over several months or years”. Is it the patient who benefits from this belief about ability to change, or the analyst?
Constructivist modes of psychotherapy start from a presupposition that people can change quickly and effortlessly when the correct motivations for change are identified. It seems unscientific to suggest that a person can undergo a rapid traumatic change and yet deny that they can change equally rapidly in a developmental way.
From Mary McAuley
I was bemused by Leader and Corfield’s proposal that doctors could treat people more effectively “if they opened up to psychoanalytic ideas”. Did any other readers familiar with different psychological approaches 鈥� behavioural, cognitive, humanist or evolutionary, to name a few 鈥� appreciate the irony of Leader’s conclusion that “all we’re hoping for is a culture in which there is more dialogue between the specialties”? How can busy GPs requiring working knowledge across the medical spectrum be expected to take on board ideas from psychoanalysis when Leader himself apparently fails to recognise the contributions of psychology outside the Freudian tradition? Since the medical profession relies heavily on evidence-based practice, it might even be expected that psychoanalysis is the area of psychology that would appeal least to doctors. It should not take a psychoanalyst to work out what drives 鈥� conscious or not 鈥� might cause Leader to “repress” the contribution of other psychological research to our understanding of illness.
Cambridge, UK
Don't blame the plague
Sharon Moalem hypothesises about plague’s contribution to the persistence and spread of haemochromatosis (17 February, p 42). A more parsimonious hypothesis might be that haemochromatosis was an adaptation to an iron-deficient diet, anaemia being a serious contributory cause of death in the past and present.
Perhaps most damning for the plague hypothesis is that one of Moalem’s key arguments 鈥� that young males with their higher haemoglobin levels were more susceptible to dying of plague than females, as observed in 17th-century London 鈥� cannot be generalised. More recent reliable records from 1908 to 1917 from the Punjab in India show a highly significant 23 per cent excess of female deaths due to plague, averaged over all age groups.
Sharon Moalem replies:
鈥� Bouma’s theory and my own are not mutually exclusive. Haemochromatosis mutations may well have arisen to increase iron uptake, especially in females in regions that have an iron-poor diet. But the C282Y mutation, which results in the most iron loading, is only found in appreciably high numbers in western Europe, and the H63D variant is considerably more common in western Europe than elsewhere, although iron deficiency is not special to western Europe. The Indian example is flawed, since women there probably had diets extremely poor in iron, resulting in severe anaemia and much greater risk of infections.
From Jan Meulendijk
Reading Sharon Moalem on the potential benefits (at least for some) of bloodletting, one wonders whether that practice found its justification in the iron-lowering effects it has on the subject. Maybe it was not altogether as silly an idea as one might nowadays think.
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, UK
Fear of anaesthesia
In the article “Alzheimer’s alert over anaesthetics” Helen Phillips cites work by Pravat Mandal showing that the inhalational anaesthetics halothane and isoflurane, and the intravenous anaesthetic propofol, “encourage clumping of amyloid beta protein” (28 October 2006, p 12). Indeed they do 鈥� in the test tube, using artificially high concentrations of both amyloid beta protein and anaesthetic. This is not novel; it was shown two years before by one of us (Eckenhoff) and co-workers. However, it is the breathtaking leap to clinical relevance that concerns us.
You quote Mandal saying “it is a seriously deadly combination when an older person receives halothane”. This is a grossly premature statement that borders on irresponsibility: there are no adequate animal or clinical studies to support it. The available epidemiological evidence shows no association between Alzheimer’s disease and previous surgery requiring anaesthesia.
If elderly patients put off necessary surgery for fear that the anaesthetic will harm them, they may place themselves at higher risk of disease or death than any small cognitive effect caused by surgery and anaesthesia.
Better brain plumbing
The mammalian brain is rather better protected against stroke than shown in the illustration to the article “Back-up circulation kicks in after stroke” (24 February, p 14). The diagram showed the two arteries, carotid and vertebral, that supply each side of the brain, and the Circle of Willis, which connects all four arteries. A blockage at the site shown 鈥� in a carotid below the Circle 鈥� would have no effect on the brain, as the other three arteries can supply the brain’s needs.
What you should have shown were the main branches from the Circle: the anterior, middle and posterior cerebral arteries. Blockage of any these could benefit from the work described.
Graphical grief
Your diagram comparing natural solar radiation with man-made effects is misleading and could be seen as dishonest (10 February, p 9). It shows two discs to compare these effects, the larger one having about 13 times the diameter of the smaller one. As you write, the increase in solar radiative forcing is 0.12 watts per square metre, compared to man-made effects accounting for 1.6 W/m2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: that is, about 13 times as much. But discs are seen as surfaces, not as diameters, in a comparison: thus the graphic suggests that the relative human impact is much higher than it is.
Hedge figures
Hugh Warwick refers to 658 hedgehogs culled on Scotland’s Uist islands and says that “breeding outstrips extermination by 20 to 1” (10 February, p 16). This is misleading because what is important is not the total population size and breeding rate, but the population in the key areas where Scottish Natural Heritage was focusing. Hedgehogs have been spreading steadily northwards from the bottom of South Uist, but had not yet become firmly established on North Uist when the SNH cull began: an SNH priority was to try to halt or slow this spread.
The hedgehog rescuers’ press releases talk of saving more hedgehogs than SNH culled, and for less money, but the two groups are doing two distinctly different things. The rescuers have happily taken hedgehogs from anywhere on the islands, hedgehogs which at the time arguably would have lived out their lives in no risk of encountering a cull (although their descendants might).
The costing calculation is skewed by SNH employing staff to search for hedgehogs in specific, often low-density areas; whereas the cost of a volunteer sitting in a house on the island of Benbecula (between North and South Uist and connected to both by causeways), waiting for a motorist to bring them a hedgehog from a grass verge halfway down South Uist, is of course low.
Hugh Warwick responds:
鈥� Yes, I was being unfair, in that the cull focused on the less populated areas first 鈥� but the point still stands, because SNH has claimed that its aim is eradication. There are 3000 young each year, and last year 148 hedgehogs were killed.