Cloning people
Hugh McLachlan argues that there is no good argument against human cloning (21 July, p 20). He seems to have overlooked what I thought was a common one: the human expectation of individuality. This idea is so powerful and so essential to our sense of humanity that I would have thought it trumps any pro-cloning argument.
Whether people are good-looking or homely, diseased or healthy, short or tall, they can still be comfortable in their selves in the knowledge that no conscious decision predetermined their unique characteristics. Reproductive cloning would remove the essential requirement of absolute randomness in determining the individuality of human beings. Twins, the result of random effects of cell division or implantation, are no exception.
Cloning is morally wrong because it will very likely cause enduring psychological pain for the clones. This could be avoided only if cloned children were never told the truth of their origin.
From Bryn Glover
It is, of course, very important to challenge the zeitgeist, as did Hugh McLachlan’s argument in favour of human cloning. I was with him for his first few paragraphs, but was astonished when he resorted to the so-called “” when he wrote: “for people born as a result of cloning, it is their only chance of life”. Does McLachlan have some sort of mental image of countless individuals waiting to be born, and seizing whatever chance presents itself? Anyone interested in a full debunking of the Beethoven fallacy should read the analyses of Peter and Jean Medawar, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
McLachlan ignores a far more important objection to human cloning, however 鈥� telomere length. Dolly the sheep died young of, in effect, old age, because the telomeres capping her chromosomes at birth were more or less as truncated as those of the sheep which provided her genetic material.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
Hugh McLachlan writes:
鈥� I do not accept the Beethoven fallacy; I do not accept Dawkins’s account of it; and it is irrelevant to my “debunking” others’ argument that to make cloning illegal is somehow in the interests of those who might otherwise end up as clones. My considering hypothetical people in an argument does not imply I believe they are “waiting to be born”, any more than it does for philosopher John Rawls when, in his A Theory of Justice, he evaluated existing social institutions by imagining what conditions rational self-regarding individuals living before the emergence of civil society would put on joining it.
I have come across different scientific accounts of the ageing and death of Dolly the sheep. They do not matter to my argument.
Sunblock blowback
The technological hurdles we would face in reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface will probably not be the only problems linked to the technologies David L. Chandler describes (21 July, p 42).
Any major infrastructure projects could be expected to attract the interest of groups with contrary motivations. Great efforts would need to be taken, both at the construction stage and during operation, to protect them against terrorist organisations. Recent experience in the UK and elsewhere demonstrates how difficult a task that can be.
Deliberately altering the world’s climate through technological fixes would, in addition, almost certainly mean that some countries would suffer negative climatic consequences even if the majority gained: lawyers would have a field day.
From Ross Ferguson
David L. Chandler describes atmospheric sulphur dioxide and space-based pico-satellites as possible geoengineering solutions to climate change. He sets out the environmental costs of the former and financial costs of the latter. Meanwhile, NASA’s James Hansen says we have about 10 years to effect the measures needed to avert the collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and the rise of sea level by several metres (which he described on 28 July, p 30).
I think we must investigate the potential of Stephen Salter’s design for floating wind turbines that spray water vapour high into the air (25 May 2002, p 20) to increase the albedo of cloud cover over the polar caps.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Organic manure
Gundula Azeez makes various claims about organic farming that need challenging (7 July, p 21). It is convenient for organic acolytes to claim that there are only two forms of agriculture 鈥� organic and conventional 鈥� and then make comparative claims based on some notion of a uniform conventional farm.
Conventional farming, unlike organic, uses extremely varied methods and modes: mixed or stockless farms; dairy or arable; integrated farming; no-till or minimum-tillage; mixed crops with biofuels such as willow or Miscanthus; and others.
Variations in approach and mixture make the picture of individual farms more complex again. In 1992 Gote Bertilsson showed that mixed biofuel farms produce more energy than they use (Proceedings of the Fertiliser Society, December 1992, p 1).
Measurements made in 2000 indicated that no-till agriculture produced only one-quarter of the CO2 emission of organic agriculture, and long-term research at Stoughton near Leicester in the UK showed energy use for a given integrated crop yield was about one-third that of organic farming. A survey of UK organic and conventional soils in 2002 indicated that 80 per cent had identical properties, including water retention.
The UK average organic wheat yield is 4 tonnes per hectare while conventional yield is 8 tonnes per hectare; other organic crops fare similarly. The reality of what would happen if organic farming became widespread should be drawn from existing experience, not from models constructed in organic institutes.
Driven to distraction
You report that 1 kilogram of beef adds the equivalent of 6 kilograms of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, plus other climate-change pollutants (21 July, p 15). One implication of this is that driving a car is “greener” than walking 鈥� if you’re a beef-eater, that is.
Chris Goodall writes in How to Live a Low-carbon Life: “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles adds about 0.9 kilograms of CO2 to the atmosphere.” Walking the 3 miles instead would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100 grams of lean beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6 kilograms of emissions 鈥� four times as much as driving.
Despite spite
Chimpanzees are incapable of spite, it seems (21 July, p 16) but researchers are having difficulty reconciling this with the idea that chimps do exhibit altruism (30 June, p 10). I suggest a simple explanation: spite is not the “evil twin that cannot be separated” from altruism, as researcher Keith Jensen puts it.
Altruism is the tendency to do things that benefit others, at your own expense. Its opposite is miserliness.
Spite is the tendency to attempt to harm those who have benefited in your stead. Surely its opposite is the tendency to attempt to help those who have suffered while you have gained. Is this not sympathy?
If chimps show sympathy towards individuals who have been deprived for their benefit, but not spite towards those who have benefited from their loss, then there might be some explaining to do.
As weak as…
OK, we get the idea that IBM’s latest supercomputer is very fast, but what’s this comparison to a 2.4-kilometre-high pile of laptops (27 June, online news service)? Whose laptops were they, fitted with which processor, running at what clock speed? How neat was the pile or would that have been a carefully balanced tower? And what were the physical dimensions of these laptops?
What a pointless, meaningless, ridiculous comparison!
Far-flung life
Ron Oren describes the expansion of water when it freezes as a unique property, making it particularly suitable for the development of life (7 July, p 20).
It is not, however, unique in this respect. Those who remember the days when newspapers were set using linotype machines (are they really that long ago?) may recall that type metal also had this property, ensuring a crisp and clear reflection of the moulds when it set.
The editor writes:
鈥� Yes, it was that long ago. There was something wonderfully satisfying about shortening a piece by dropping a handful of lines of type back into the simmering pot of molten tin/antimony/lead alloy, excluding them from the moulding of the . But you really wouldn’t want to try evolving in there, would you?
That was never out!
Hawkeye, the ball-spotting system used in cricket and in tennis at Wimbledon, has given millions of extra people the opportunity to misunderstand science and technology. Whereas the umpire was always seen as “defining the event”, Hawkeye is presented as infallibly getting it right 鈥� which it can’t.
The disputed line-call in the Wimbledon final match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal on 4 July represented the problem in a nutshell. In tennis a ball is “in” if it clips the line, but since the ball is furry and squashy and the court lines are fuzzy at the edges, there is sometimes no discernable “in” or “out” and it is bound to be a matter of judgement.
Given the chance to see the filmed replay, no human would ever have called that disputed ball “in” but Hawkeye’s algorithm did 鈥� to Federer’s enormous frustration, since he had the best view of all, in real time. In that example, Hawkeye was not correcting the umpire’s call but changing the rules of the game because its decision-procedure does not match the best possible human judgement.
Hawkeye’s “decisions” are statistical 鈥� they have “errors bars”, like every other scientific measurement. It would be possible to state the size of the error. I wrote to the company and asked them whether they had tested their cricket machine by bowling balls at undefended stumps and seeing how often the algorithm 鈥� stopped at the point where a batsman’s pads would normally be 鈥� correctly predicted whether the ball struck the wicket. My repeated mailings were met with silence. Something similar could be done for tennis. Hit balls at a line while filming with a high-speed camera and compare Hawkeye’s decisions with the way a human who saw the film would judge the matter.
It is the duty of sports commentators to demand this information so that when Hawkeye is referred to, the public can be told exactly how the point is being decided. Given that, and assuming the statistics are not too bad, I would be in favour of more use of the technology. Here is an opportunity to educate the public in the statistical nature of science and technology and to serve sport, both viewers and players, better.
Walk/can't walk
Describing links between obesity and global warming, Ian Roberts seems completely out of touch with the reality of most live in the US (30 June, p 21). “Walk the half mile to the office”? If most Americans lived within half a mile of their office, they would dance there, not drive.
The problem is not that obese people choose to drive from the living room to the mailbox, it is a more fundamental one of community design. Consider a family of two adults who work at two different offices and children who go to more than one school. Then add in buying and cooking food, doing odd jobs and finding time to go to the park, movies, or the library.
Who lives within half a mile of all those things in the US? Well, I do. But I live in Manhattan, and don’t need to own a car. Most Americans live far more than a mile from their job. Often, it’s more like 40 miles. The problem, my happy little denizen in your ivory tower, is not that people are making the wrong choices, the problem is that there are no choices.
Cloning people
Hugh McLachlan is onto something when he says opposition to human cloning is illogical (21 July, p 20). He takes a step too far, however, in asserting that “in a free society, actions should be legal unless there is a case for making them illegal”.
The effective use of laws is much more problematic than that bald statement might suggest. They are more than mere algorithms putting into effect the dictates of pure logic: all laws are statements of human relationships, and have no meaning outside that context. And “relationship”, on a broad level, amounts to culture.
It is entirely possible for laws to lag behind, or overreach themselves beyond, what a culture is prepared to accept, whether or not the disjunction between them and the realities of human fears and aspirations makes logical sense. The long and tedious path of disseminating accurate information, of teaching people how to think effectively and, above all, building trust in the great project of scientific enlightenment, won’t be easily circumvented by a mere act of parliament.
For the record
鈥� We mangled Christopher Zeeman’s proof of the infinitude of the primes (21 July, p 48), as several readers have pointed out. With our apologies, here is a better version. Assume there are a finite number of primes. Multiply them all together and add 1. Call this number n. Now n cannot be divided by any of the primes we started with, so it must be either a prime itself or a product of primes not in the original list. Either way, our assumption that the number of primes is finite must be wrong and there must instead be an infinity of them.
鈥� In an article headed “Popular breast cancer drug could backfire in rare cases” we referred to a report in Oncogene, vol 46, p 4106 (7 July, p 18). That should have been .
The kindest cut
I was dismayed to see neutering called “the ultimate indignity” in a printed headline (14 July, p 15).
I worked for several years as a veterinary assistant and I can assure you that neutering and spaying are not an indignity. Sterilisation causes no psychological harm to pets and prevents both pet overpopulation and a long list of debilitating, painful and expensive health problems.
Veterinarians have enough trouble convincing pet owners that they and their dogs will not be “unmanned” by responsible neutering, without having them see the procedure described in these terms.
Wonderful coincidence
I have been following, with not a little incredulity, the letters concerning the anthropic principle, kicked off by Paul Davies’s article (30 June, p 30). And I have thought, as I always do on encountering such stuff, of a tale by Douglas Hofstadter, which I retell as follows.
Once upon a time there was a muddy puddle. Having been muddy-puddling about all day, when evening came she was very, very tired.
But her luck was in: as she eased her shoulders down into the little hollow in the rock, sighing a contented sigh as she did so, she marvelled 鈥� and not for the first time 鈥� at just how amazing it was that, right down to the tiniest indentation, that little hollow should be exactly the right shape for her. Truly, it must have known she was coming.
But then, she was only a muddy puddle and had, therefore, only a muddily-puddily understanding of such things.
Megananobucks
Your feature on nanomaterials and the span of their possible conformations and configurations is of great interest to many who have recently discovered that they’ve been nanotechnologists in biochemists’ clothing for over three decades (14 July, p 38).
This is of course modulated by the discovery of the origin of the term “nanotechnology” as a “fundable buzzword” (see Mike Holderness’s review of the “brilliantly opportunistic title” Nanotechnology and Homeland Security, 18 October 2003, p 53).
What's a conspiracy?
I was intrigued by your checklist for creating the “perfect conspiracy theory” (14 July, p 35). It struck me that this process has been used to great effect by the executive branch of the US government.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was the big bad guy. His operations were so shadowy that they were referred to as “playing a shell game”. Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations as Secretary of State certainly qualifies as “carefully selected information that weaves together into a compelling story”. Iraq’s proposed nuclear connection to Niger offered a prime example of what to do when new evidence conflicts with your story. Ambassador Joseph Wilson published that contradicted the nuclear theory 鈥� no uranium had gone from Niger to Iraq. Life then became very uncomfortable indeed for Wilson.
The theory on Iraq keeps mutating, as does the strategy. Apparently, if you’re in power then your plotting should not be considered a conspiracy.
From Solomon Rubin
You incorrectly asserted that in the Iran-Contra scandal, the US “sold arms to its enemy Iran… to help secure the release of US hostages taken by Iran”. The hostages were not taken by Iran, but rather by Lebanese groups over which Iran had some influence.
New York City, US
From Geoff Locke
Patrick Leman assures us that he is not secretly in the pay of various western intelligence agencies.
Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK