Niche and superniche
The finding that new species emerge faster in cold than hot climes depends upon a uniform judgement of “sister species” (24 March, p 21). But in cold climates with few competitor species in the ecosystem, ecological niches are broad but shallow: they offer a wide choice of food and habitat, but in small usable quantities. Sister species will therefore diversify rapidly in order to minimise competition and maximally exploit their now-divided niche.
In the tropics, because of competition from large numbers of similar (not sister) species, niches are narrow but deep. Sister species cannot therefore diverge far without coming into competition with other species occupying nearby niches, perhaps cousin species.
Heat and light
It is true, of course, that the new generation of light bulbs offer a much greater output of visible light and correspondingly less heat per watt of electricity (31 March, p 26). However, in a temperate climate such as that enjoyed (or suffered) in the UK, we usually have the heating on at the same time as the lights. Thus if we use bulbs that emit less heat than the incandescent variety, we will use radiators and heaters to make up the difference. Thermostats will make the process automatic.
There are more detailed considerations. The typical gas-fired power station is around 60 per cent efficient at best, while the latest domestic gas-fired condensing boilers are around 88 per cent efficient. So there is some gain to using such a boiler to heat your home rather than mains electricity via light bulbs, but not nearly so much as your article would have us believe. For households with an older boiler, around 60 per cent efficient, there is probably a disadvantage, because the cost of manufacturing the new kind of bulb is higher, as is the cost of purchase.
In developed countries with warmer climates, air conditioning is a major drain on the power grid. Here, the use of light bulbs with low heat emission is certainly thoroughly justified.
From David Tong
A real obstacle to greater use of compact fluorescent lamps around my home has been that many automatic timers, light-controlled switches and remote controllers can’t handle them. Things are improving, but CFL-friendly timers still cost a lot.
Leeds, UK
Drug discovery
Angela Saini asks a valid question: if patent enforcement in developing countries is so vital for drug innovation, why have we so little to show for it (31 March, p 20)?
There are a number of factors making the discovery of new drugs progressively harder. A very simple one is that the easiest treatments have already been discovered. Another arises from nobody wanting another thalidomide catastrophe. As patients’ and public expectations rightly rise, so do the regulatory hurdles, accompanied by escalating costs.
Truly innovative products and original research are prohibitively expensive and would simply bankrupt the pharmaceutical companies. That’s why most innovative research is publicly funded. During my time working for a large pharmaceutical company we did many analyses and simulations. Whichever way we manipulated the figures within real financial constraints, there was no way to switch to the regime Saini proposes.
From Dusan Chech
Everywhere, including in the west, full pharmaceutical patent protection should be offered only to companies that devote a nominated percentage of turnover plus the full proceeds of litigation to innovative research and development. This should be focused on a list of diseases to be regularly updated by the World Health Organization.
Yeppoon, Queensland, Australia
Breeding on time
Your editorial addresses human egg-freezing, a technology solely intended to provide a further indulgence of equality of opportunity for women (24 March, p 5). Women are correct that they have an innate right to bear children, but evolution has selected the optimal time for this to the betterment of the child.
How can any would-be mother justify sacrificing the child’s prospects of a youthful healthy family? Giving an active 10-year-old the disadvantage of 50-year-old “grandparents” to interact with is not the best way to teach social discipline and interpersonal skills.
From Beth Scott
A reproductive revolution, is it? Why should healthy young women feel they need to freeze their eggs for later?
Is it really so they can be in complete control of their reproduction? Or is it because the western working world is based on the very male model of working your way up the ladder quickly so that you are “sorted” by 40 鈥� in the sense of the male need to prove his dominance and secure his ability to attract mates. Why should women be forced to follow the same model? Why should anyone be forced to follow this model now, when we will all most likely have to keep working until we are 70?
The average couple desiring to have two children will probably require from three to seven years of flexible working time. If they have children when it is biologically best to have them, most will be ready (and willing) to return to full-time work by their mid-30s, leaving 25 to 30 more years of a full-time career.
Aberdeen, UK
Bacterial memory
You say that “bacteria seem to move in no particular direction in their search” for food (17 March, p 16). Almost 40 years ago Daniel Koshland not only observed E. coli bacteria swimming towards food sources (and away from poisons) but established that in order to do so they remember their past and compare it with the present.
In short, if things are better now than they were, the bacteria keep on swimming in the same direction; if things are worse, they tumble violently and start anew in a random direction.
If bacteria from rich and poor media are suddenly transferred into the same moderate environment, those from the poor background will swim straight whereas the formerly privileged individuals will tumble: one’s paradise is another’s purgatory. Koshland elucidated the molecular details of how they remember and translate this memory into action 鈥� see his Bacterial Chemotaxis as a Model Behavioral System (Raven, 1980).
Love all
Dan Jones reports on the various strategies and delusions involved in romantic love (31 March, p 42). Might it be fruitful to undertake a study of the love lives of scientists (and reporters and readers) now aware of such delusions?
Are they subsequently rational, but probably unmated? Or do they manifest denial and, while espousing the latest science in their rational lives, continue to merrily mate with possibly unsuitable people while arguing the superiority of their mate in the face of all available evidence? Are they happy because they’re right and unhappy because they can’t get it, or having it both ways?
From Rachel Garrod
Many years ago, I had a generally happy relationship with a man. When we started dating he liked me because I was vivacious and chatty; some months later when we split it was because I was loud and talked too much. At the start of the relationship I had been intelligent and articulate, but sadly I became opinionated and a know-it-all.
For my part, when I met him I liked his solid, strong body and his seriousness; of course, towards the end I knew he was just fat and boring. Not only is love blind but falling out of love is indeed its mirror opposite.
Richmond, Surrey, UK
What rises to the top?
Discussing the roots of our moral sense, Marc Hauser mentions its deficit in psychopaths (3 March, p 44). I have often wondered why such mental “illness” does not get bred out of the species. I assumed it was just a recurring failure of the mechanism, which comes back as fast as it breeds out.
However, discussion of “corporate psychopaths” 鈥� for example the article “Snakes in suits” (21 August 2004, p 40) 鈥� suggests that at least some phenomena that we call illness or deviancy may be an evolutionary positive. Many philosophers of politics tell us that a national leader needs to be totally ruthless and impassive when making decisions. A ruler is subject to conflicting emotional appeals: they need to make decisions that are efficient for the collective. Most major decisions by a ruler will involve grief and hardship for some subset of their people. War, in particular, calls for decisions that only a psychopath could make.
Could it be that we need a certain percentage of psychopaths in our society to give us effective leaders? Do we also need some sociopaths, with a milder lack of empathy now labelled by those endlessly inventive psychologists as antisocial personality disorder, as lieutenants and managers?
Or is it just that the ruthless, driving types breed more?
Efficient for whom?
Brian Hicks argues that command economies such as Cuba’s are inherently inefficient (31 March, p 23). This is based on a socially constructed notion of efficiency: there is no “natural” law involved.
We can choose to define efficiency in any way we want 鈥� though the “we” tends to be those who have become powerful. One definition might be the total amount of labour and other resources used to produce a given amount of output. However, this says nothing about how you could produce the same output and consume the same resources if social and welfare conditions such as income and gender inequality were very different.
A capitalist economy using labour productivity as the criterion of efficiency will have (fluctuating) unemployment. This is externalised by the accounting system of corporations, and so the measurement of resources used is able to exclude this blatant inefficiency.
By contrast, a command economy disguises its unemployment by sharing work between all available labourers. There is often a significant benefit for all people in such economies because a portion of the aggregate income is allocated as a “social wage”, giving everyone secure housing and pensions, free education and healthcare. The lack of some of this welfare in capitalist countries such as the US is not regarded as an inefficiency, showing that there can be severe moral inefficiencies depending on the definition “we” are allowed to use.
Clearly many people who have lived in command economies try to vote with their feet, mainly because of the repression the political elite uses to maintain the system. On the other hand, there are increasing numbers of people in the former Soviet Union and China who have lost jobs, welfare benefits and pensions. But never mind, it is more efficient.
Film flaw
I was dismayed to read in your recent article on “dark tourism” a casual reference to “the rise of… the snuff movie” (31 March, p 50). There is as yet no recorded evidence that any snuff film 鈥� a film of killing made purely for the sake of entertainment, as opposed to things like hostage execution videos 鈥� actually exists, despite an obsessive search by journalists and the police.
Nevertheless, the allegation that such things are out there has been used to justify all sorts of public hysteria and dubious political decision-making.
Climate of fear
Reading about the influence that soil and climate may have on agricultural produce (24 February, p 54), it struck me that the reluctance of the current US administration to engage with the reality of climate change can be explained if it is part of President Bush’s “war on terroir”.
When is the universe?
If I am interpreting the main diagram accompanying your article on the fractal universe correctly, the timescale of this “view” of the universe is 2.74 billion years ago at the edges and current time at the centre (10 March, p 30).
If this is the case, presumably the further out from the centre we look, the less likely it is that anything we can see is still as we see it. If so, is it valid to make any assumptions about a structure to the universe on these scales, unless one can predict how galaxies may have moved around over several billion years?
Bee bother
There is one possible and simple answer to the question of why bee colonies are disappearing (24 March, p 10). It is that beekeepers are to blame.
When I first became interested in the subject, I was instructed by local beekeeping club members and my mentor that it was important to strip each hive at least once a fortnight and to destroy any queen cells, which are usually found at the bottom of the frames. This is supposed to prevent swarming.
I found that for every queen cell destroyed the bees built two or three more, and the colony grew ever more restless. Leave the queen cells alone and, over weeks, they did not increase in number and were always close to being ripe. I concluded that bees believe in insurance: should they lose their queen, then those ripe queen cells made it possible to replace her quickly in egg-laying condition.
Secondly, there is a belief that honey yields can be maximised by removing all the bees’ stores and feeding sugar solution in times of inclement weather or in preparation for winter. This ignores the fact that honey contains a proportion of pollen, which is the bees’ source of protein. I always left each colony with at least 18 kilograms of honey and was considered odd.
There came a very wet and cool summer. Three out of every five colonies in our club were lost and honey crops dropped to 5 to 10 kilograms per keeper. I, however, lost just a double handful of bees from three of my 14 colonies and my yield was over 300 kilograms.
We were content that beekeeping paid our local taxes. Today the pressure to increase profit is greater than ever, and I shudder to think how colony management may have changed, particularly in the commercial scene.
Dissidents smeared
Taras Wolansky denies that physicists have any special qualification for expressing opposition to US policy on nuclear weapons (17 March, p 26). He surely goes too far in saying that they are less capable than laypeople. He certainly goes too far when he smears those opposed to US policy by comparing them with scientists who gave nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era.
Many have been critical of US and UK foreign policy, now and in the past. Weapons have continued to be developed, even in violation of agreements made with the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, other countries have aspired to become nuclear powers, possibly with western assistance. It seems that policy is oriented toward military domination rather than preserving peace.
Not NICE
I was surprised that your article on the efficacy and cost of pharmaceutical products described the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) as a “success story” (10 March, p 8). Patients and the pharmaceutical industry have not so much been disappointed as astonished and appalled at some decisions made by NICE.
The recent decision on the anti-cholinesterase Alzheimer’s drugs Aricept, Exelon and Reminyl is a case in point. Research and clinical trials have shown that these drugs are most beneficial when started in the early stages of the disease, and that the earlier treatment begins, the longer the benefits last. The decision by NICE not to allow their use until the condition is well advanced therefore seems perverse 鈥� so much so that the Alzheimer’s Society in the UK has sought and been granted a judicial review into the decision, and the drug companies Eisai and Pfizer have launched separate legal challenges.
Some of NICE’s decisions seem to have more to do with clinical economy than clinical excellence.
Becoming classical
Marcus Chown describes how both decoherence and the imprecision of our instruments can lead to a transition from quantum to classical experience (17 March, p 36). It is timely to note a brand new idea: that a transition between quantum and classical behaviour can also arise out of a fundamental property of nature.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in conjunction with the presence of cosmic expansion velocities (Hubble velocities) within an object, lead to uncertainties in spatial position that depend on the object’s size. Small objects exhibit large uncertainties in position and large objects exhibit very small uncertainties. Amazingly enough, application of this straightforward idea provides a fundamental general cause that necessarily leads to classical behaviour for all large extended objects.
See for example my “The role of Hubble time in the quantum-classical transition” (Physics Essays, vol 20). A popular discussion of the basic idea, “Why our human-sized world behaves classically, not quantum-mechanically”, can be found at .
Worlds of difference
You report Johannes Koffler asking: “In short, how does the well-behaved, everyday classical world emerge from the schizophrenic quantum realm?” (24 March, p 44).
So the quantum realm has a severe psychological disorder characterised by personality disintegration, hallucinations and delusions?
Maybe it does. But to use the word thoughtlessly would be offensive.
For the record
鈥� We quoted Persi Diaconis asking whether there are any decks of cards larger than 52 cards that take “a deck-size number of out-shuffles” to bring them back to their starting sequence (24 March, p 52). That should have been in-shuffles.