The first shall be last
Feedback refers to a paper listing authors in reverse alphabetical order (28 April). It has long been clear that the secret of success in today’s citation-driven science community is to change your name to Aardvark, or perhaps Et Al.
Earth in upheaval
Following your article “Scars of a catastrophe” (21 April, p 48), it is worth reminding readers that J Harlen Bretz was not the only one preaching theories of catastrophism at that time. We must not forget Immanuel Velikovsky. While many of his hypotheses 鈥� notably that Venus is a comet ejected from Jupiter 鈥� have yet to be proven, he was the true champion for the concept that major geological (and probably societal) changes occur as a result of catastrophic events.
In the early 1970s I spent an evening with Velikovsky, who was by then a bitter man, left so because of the treatment he experienced from the scientific community. The concept of “uniformitarianism” had gained another victim 鈥� as often happens when a scientific consensus refuses to consider alternatives.
Grammar lesson
Rowan Hooper reports Kazuo Okanoyo as saying that gestures don’t have grammar (5 May, p 7), and as regSards the chimps and bonobos he was referring to this is likely, though by no means certain, to be true.
But human gestures certainly can have grammar. There are many languages based on gesture, notably various sign languages, and these have grammar just as complex as that of speech-based languages. Speech is not essential for language.
Improbability drive
You mention the line of argument which says that since our early universe had low entropy, and since this is inherently unlikely, it must be one among a multiverse of other universes (28 April, p 33). This seems to embody a fallacy that is surprisingly common among both cosmologists, speculating about multiple universes, and string theorists, contemplating the vast landscape of possible string theories.
Consider this analogy: you are sitting in a dark room playing roulette, and the number zero comes up time after time. You have to accept the possibility that, however unlikely in a large sample, it is possible that it just happened that way at your table.
You cannot reason about probabilities from a sample size of one 鈥� and the only sample we have, whether for universes or physical laws, is the universe we happen to live in. Similarly, even if we accept the theory that a universe which started with high entropy is more likely to be populated by disembodied “Boltzmann brains” than by human brains, that doesn’t logically tell us anything about the only universe we can observe. To use words like “probably” or “likely” about the observed outcome in one universe is essentially meaningless.
This same fallacy lies at the heart of much anthropic reasoning, of which Leonard Susskind in particular has lately become an advocate. It is particularly surprising that particle physicists, who deal with the probabilistic nature of quantum effects and the consequent impossibility of saying definitive things about a single event’s outcome, should fall into the trap. The law of large numbers is so called for a reason.
Tofu or not tofu
Kate Ravilious says that soya plantations “are rapidly expanding thanks to soya’s popularity as a food and suitability as a biofuel” (21 April, p 12). This is far from the whole story. The Worldwatch Institute reports that 75 per cent of soy is fed to animals, and identifies the particular soy companies involved in Amazon destruction.
If there is a boom in soya’s popularity as a food, it is not what is driving the expansion of soybean cultivation. Rather, it is the 200 million Brazilians trying to eat like North Americans, and a bunch of Europeans wanting cheap feedlot meat. The blame for the destruction of the Amazon needs to be placed on the right shoulders 鈥� not on human tofu eaters, who could be well catered for by a small portion of the global soybean production.
China's hungry years
Fred Pearce writes, “The biggest strides against hunger were made in communist China” (21 April, p 47), citing David Montgomery’s Dirt: The erosion of civilizations. He must have omitted to count the years 1958 to 1961, when according to the demographer John Jowett up to 30 million Chinese died in what may have been the worst famine of all time.
Instant instinct
You mention people’s ability to make reliable judgments about others in a very short time (5 May, p 32). I have seen this dramatically demonstrated in psychodrama sessions. Typically a participant is asked to pick a few people from an audience of 50 or so strangers, to role-play family members or colleagues. Time after time, the chosen ones not only know exactly how to play their roles but turn out to have an entire family history that dovetails with that of the participant. How the details fit is quite spooky.
This seems to be an ultra-rapid collection of vast amounts of detailed information 鈥� and only to work when people are off-guard. Within a few seconds conscious reflection intervenes. How it’s done, I can’t explain.
Decisions, decisions
Among your strategies for decision-making (5 May, p 35), option 8 suggested that we should not give in to peer pressure and should make decisions for ourselves. Excellent advice, I thought, for any strong-minded individual with a penchant for the scientific. Then I read on, and discovered that option 10 suggested we relax and let others decide for us.
I wondered which option I should choose. I wondered whether I should ask someone to choose how I should choose. And then I wondered which of these choices I should make, or whether someone else should make it for me. After some thought, I have therefore made a firm decision to remain undecided (I checked this decision with my wife as well).
Which way is up?
Apparently mathematicians labelled the lifts in their building at the University of Tasmania, as Feedback suggests (21 April). There is a lift in a shopping centre in Stirling which must have been designed by a mathematician.
It serves three floors, which are marked in order from the lowest to the highest (in altitude): “-1”, “-3”, and “S” for the shopping level. The announcements made by the automatic system in the lift are consistent with this numbering in that when the lift ascends (in altitude), it announces “going down” and, when it descends, “going up”.
As a mathematician, used to highly generalised number systems, I do not have problems with this. I do wish, though, that the operators would expand the messages to something like “the distance from the heavens is going down” and vice versa so as to make everything a little clearer to non-mathematical users.
After these messages…
Does television affect viewers’ behaviour (21 April, p 33)? One cannot help but be struck by the fact that advertisers will spend $1 million for a 30-second spot, believing that it will change consumers’ behaviour 鈥� and then argue that the 90-minute movie it is shown with has no impact on behaviour.
Kenya's wildlife
In describing the role of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Mike Norton-Griffiths exaggerates its influence on Kenya’s wildlife policy review, and his suggestion that sport hunting is the panacea for protecting wildlife flies in the face of local opinion (23 March, p 24).
The national steering committee set up by the minister for tourism and wildlife has established, through a consultative process, that the majority of communities living with wildlife are overwhelmingly opposed to the resumption of sport hunting. IFAW’s staff in East Africa, who are all Kenyan, believe that a pro-hunting policy would negate conservation and provide even fewer returns for local communities in wildlife areas.
It is far-fetched to imagine, as Norton-Griffiths does, that IFAW has the financial and political clout to influence the views of Kenyans on such a grand scale. IFAW’s position is that to stem the decline in wildlife populations and their habitats it is necessary to have a national land-use policy that embraces wildlife conservation, the prudent management of conflicts between people and wildlife and the consequent compensation claims, and the establishment of mechanisms for equitable sharing of benefits from wildlife.
IFAW East Africa is working with local communities and landowners to construct a 150-kilometre electric fence in Laikipia district that will secure space for wildlife, reduce the human-wildlife conflicts that are rife in the region, and so improve the livelihoods of local people. This is but one example of our work in Kenya in which we offer practical solutions to the challenges facing the wildlife sector. One only wishes that pro-hunting lobbyists like Norton-Griffiths would do the same, instead of attempting to resurrect a bygone and largely catastrophic era for Kenya’s wildlife.
Humans in Uganda
It is good news that mountain gorilla populations around the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda have increased from 300 to 340 in the last 10 years (28 April, p 5). Unfortunately the human population is not doing so well. The area has been badly affected by AIDS, leaving many children orphaned, some of whom were born with HIV. Illnesses of all kinds, combined with poverty, have also left many others with no carer.
The people there have formed the Bwindi Orphanage Development Center (BODEC) and have registered it with local government as a community-based organisation. They have lots of ideas to improve health and education. Currently children walk 30 kilometres each way to attend secondary school.
BODEC has set up a website to generate publicity, and has a sponsorship scheme. Several tourists have sponsored a child during their stay, but with no system in place to keep in touch with sponsors, this funding often dries up after the first year. Bank transfer fees often add considerably to sponsorship costs. There are many dedicated, resourceful and motivated people in Bwindi who, with some practical and financial support, will be able to become a self-sufficient community, ensuring everyone has adequate food, water and shelter.
I and my sister Jo, who has visited Bwindi twice, are looking into ways of helping the orphanage and the people of Bwindi to start their website, raise the funds for their projects and increase the number of children sponsored. If any reader would like to sponsor a child (currently 拢90 per year for a primary-school-aged child to cover all education, food and clothing needs) or if you have any other input for our project, please see . We are looking into starting a UK registered charity or joining with an existing one, so please get in touch if you can help.
Stem cell trials
Reporting our work on haematopoietic stem cell transplantation for type 1 diabetes (DM-1), Peter Aldhous wrote: “risky stem cell treatments are increasingly taking place in Asia and Latin America, where approval may be granted more readily than in the US or Europe” (21 April, p 13).
I cannot speak for all Latin American or Asian countries, but this is absolutely not true for Brazil.
Our national Ministry of Health Committee of Ethics in Research (CONEP) analyses each proposed clinical trial that will use stem cells.
I can report that it is very difficult to get approval for any of these. It took more than a year to get approval for the diabetes trial we published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I have had several trials rejected by CONEP 鈥� not always, I believe, with good reasons.
Moreover, Aldhous suggests that our patients might have entered a “honeymoon period” during which they can live without insulin injections.
Any endocrinologist will doubt that 14 consecutive type 1 diabetes patients would become insulin-free in this way for up to three years, as shown in our paper.
Aldhous also mentions the possibility that the effect may have been due to antithymocyte globulin 鈥� but this and other anti-T-cell antibodies like OKT3 have already been tested and found to show only very transient and modest results judged by the rate of insulin-independence achieved by DM-1 patients.
Children are the predominant group of DM-1 patients. They suffer faster beta-cell destruction and worse long-term complications from DM-1, and they would benefit most from insulin independence.
These facts justify the test of haematopoietic stem cell transplantation in children, and we intend to do this test soon.