Space bias
Surely your “50 years in space” special should have been titled “50 years of the US in space” (8 September). I could find barely a mention of Yuri Gagarin, of the Soviet Luna probes, nor of the Russian Proton rockets and Soyuz capsules that kept the International Space Station going when the US shuttles were grounded. I also recall that the ISS started from work on the Russian Mir space station.
I accept that New 杏吧原创 is an international magazine and thus includes lots of American material, but it should be even-handed and not US-dominated 鈥� which for the most part it is.
So why did the Soviet era in space get so little coverage? Even the piece on Sputnik was about its effect on the US.
For the record
鈥� In the article “Engage the antimatter drive”, the words “charged particles” were mistakenly replaced with “gamma rays” (8 September, p 62). Unlike the former, the latter cannot be focused with magnets, and they travel at the speed of light.
鈥� In trying to explain how encryption could be protected against being cracked by quantum computers, we wrote “The power of Shor’s algorithm lies in its potential to use quantum processes to factorise large prime numbers” (15 September, p 30). That should of course have read “…to factorise encryption keys that are products of large prime numbers”.
Fraught font
Feedback notes a report that fatalities and injuries caused by lightning strikes in Yemen are “common due to the state’s typography” (15 September).
If they insist on using , what do they expect?
Senior satellite
The first proposal for a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit is customarily attributed to author Arthur C. Clarke (8 September, p 50). Clarke’s 1945 proposal was predated by Hermann Noordung, the pseudonym of Captain Herman Potocnik of the old Austrian imperial army. Potocnik’s small monograph, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (The Problem of Space Travel), was published in Berlin in 1929 and . The text is available in English at
Huntington's symptoms
I was intrigued to read Philip Starks’s opinion that most of the psychological symptoms of Huntington’s disease appear later than other aspects of the disease (8 September, p 14). My wife has the condition and I can assure Starks that his comments tally neither with my experience of Huntington’s, nor with those of any of the carers for people with Huntington’s disease (PHDs) to whom I have read the article.
My wife’s physical symptoms appeared in her late thirties, but her psychological symptoms were clearly in evidence in her early twenties. It was once received wisdom that psychological symptoms were of little import in Huntington’s. Thankfully, their devastating effect on the family and carers of PHDs is better understood.
Free whom?
Do I have free will (letters since 11 August, p 46)? It may depend on how I define “I”.
If “I” equals my conscious self 鈥� let’s call her “the brat” 鈥� my free will must be limited, because most of what goes on in my brain isn’t directly available to the brat. The brat is full of herself, likes to think she’s the whole story. From the point of view of the rest of my brain, the brat may be a party trick that got out of hand.
The brat disrespects the rest of my brain. It’s where the grunge comes from. If it makes a good call, it’s “just instinct”. (The brat is selective in claiming responsibility, and frequently confuses labels with explanations.)
If “I” am my total self 鈥� body, brain and yes, brat 鈥� I probably do have some measure of free will. If the brat would calm down and try listening, perhaps she could get a better idea of how decisions are really made around here.
I think all of your correspondents writing on free will are exercising free will in doing so 鈥� including those who wrote to say they don’t believe in free will.
Diverse dominance
Michael Corballis asks what makes humans so dominant on Earth: not our physical attributes, he argues, “for other species are stronger, faster…” (1 September, p 48). There are specialists, yes, but humans are the most physically versatile of all animals.
No others can swim the English Channel, free-dive to 120 metres, climb a tree or Everest, run the New York marathon, pick up a pin, and clean-and-jerk 200 kilograms. No others can spin their bodies around the parallel bars and skip a pebble across a pond. Six of us can stand on each other’s shoulders in a pyramid, the lowest ones riding horses while the top one juggles flaming torches.
The horses may be able to gallop faster than we can sprint, of course, but we can accomplish a greater variety of physical feats than any other species.
Recursive awareness
Michael Corballis suggests that recursion is central to being human (1 September, p 48).
I can’t help extending the computing metaphor. When programming a recursive routine, you must add a “termination condition” so that the process cannot run away with itself. A recursive function might, for example, keep a count of how many times it has invoked itself.
It seems natural that our minds would apply a termination condition when reporting the “Elvis recursion” 鈥� so that in the story “I know a woman who knows a woman who… was kissed by Elvis,” eventually ends with a woman kissing Elvis.
I suggest that our brains evolved to employ recursion at many levels of operation other than the conscious. Setting myriad termination conditions on the fly at many levels of processing must be complex in the extreme.
Ultimately this process (which could itself be recursive) must be overseen. We would experience this overseeing as consciousness.
Aisle be darned
So women are better than men at finding food stalls in a market because “in the distant past” women gathered and men hunted (1 September, p 21).
Such is the attraction of the “distant past” that it is used to “explain” almost any gender-related cultural issue in terms of a favourite hypothesis with virtually no evidence.
One ignored hypothesis is that women are generally better than men at locating food stalls because this is a skill women have learned through going food shopping, which they do a lot more frequently than men.
But then, maybe we women just can’t help frequent food shopping 鈥� due to our ingrained “gathering” instinct.
What are gods good for?
Is God good, you ask (1 September, p 32). I suggest that it is those who believe in “evil” who are the problem. There are those who believe that everything that contradicts their beliefs must be the work of a malevolent force, so they have a responsibility to wage war on it: homosexuals; abortionists; unbelievers or, worse, believers in other and therefore false gods and prophets; communists; terrorists… In the eyes of many “true believers”, crusading against these groups is doing good 鈥� even if the godless don’t want to go along with it. Especially if they don’t.
Judicial systems and foreign policies that focus on punishing and crushing, rather than understanding causes and minimising harm, do not work. However, officials in countries that 鈥� because they have many believers in “evil” 鈥� possess such systems are unable to see this. They are convinced that they are doing good.
I imagine the first “gods” were personified “team spirits” of groups of hunter-gatherers. These needed to be personified (and perhaps represented by a symbolic object) for the purpose of various ceremonies.
Team spirits are not necessarily supernatural beings. We know what we mean by “team spirit”, even if it doesn’t have a truly tangible existence 鈥� in management classes you can learn all about building one!
What are gods good for?
By concentrating on the link between religion and morality, Helen Phillips is missing the bigger picture (1 September, p 32). The roots of religion lie in the human urge to control the uncontrollable: the seasons, the weather, the availability of food and of course death as the ending of self.
Will the hunt be successful? Paint images of the prey on the cave wall and call to their spirits.
Will the sun, low at the winter solstice, rise up again next summer? Build a henge and appeal to the gods with ritual.
Will the Nile flood again next year? Make statues of the gods and placate them with sacrifice and ritual.
Assure your future in the afterlife by mummification and grave-goods. Some religions involved placating the gods with highly immoral rituals and sacrifices. Many early religions derived their strength, not from the moral behaviour of their devotees, but from the “My god is bigger than your god” mentality.
Morality as part of religion seems to have been bolted on relatively late in human history.
The main benefit that Jews, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and so on gain from their religious faith is the feeling of comfort and confidence it gives them that their lives are linked to a higher power and not at the mercy of a random and mindless universe.
In a typical universe…
Richard Gott bases his estimate of the lifespan of the human race on his version of the Copernican principle: that we should expect to find ourselves at a “non-special” position (8 September, p 51). In doing so, however, Gott implicitly assumes a linear time line. What if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct and every moment, while consistent with one definite past, branches into all possible futures, in each of which the human race has a different lifespan?
All spatio-temporal positions might then be considered “non-special” and nothing could be deduced from our current position about the lifespan of the version of the human race that we would experience if we could live long enough to see the end of it.
Why boldly go?
Richard Gott says that the future survival of the human race is a “compelling” reason for colonising other planets, but doesn’t even try to justify the assertion (8 September, p 51). Why is the continued existence of humans into the far future anything other than a neutral proposition? Barring time travel, it can’t affect anyone alive right now. If the human race dies out, there’ll be nobody around to worry about it. Granted, should natural disaster, war or disease eliminate the human race on Earth, the people involved will have a very unpleasant time of it, but knowing there’s a human population on Mars won’t make them feel any better.
No other creature operates such a species-based team spirit. Gott mentions the Copernican principle 鈥� that the Earth is not special 鈥� but appears to regard the human race as being special and as having some innate worth that we must make every effort to preserve. This is a point of view verging on the religious.
In his proposal for the infection of other planets by human life, Richard Gott ignores the potential impact on native life forms adapted to those planets. He also ignores our connection with all of life on Earth.
If Earth-based life has some unique value in the universe 鈥� an admittedly questionable position 鈥� we could potentially colonise many nearby star systems with micro-organisms of one kind or another at far less social and environmental cost than a small human colony on Mars. Who knows, some of those extremophiles might evolve into life forms as interesting as, or more interesting than, us.
Nevada City, California, US
Do I think humanity has a place in space? Absolutely, but not before we have finished trashing this planet. There are still expanses of the Antarctic and the Amazonian rainforest yet to be exploited.
Crymych, Pembrokeshire, UK
The flawed frontier
Won’t your readers on Alpha Centauri giggle at the title you gave your special “Conquest of Space” issue (8 September)? As they will know, the idea of humans colonising space, as opposed to just exploring it, has turned out to be a pipe dream.
It was a hangover from the colonial age, essentially from the notion of the American West as a refuge where people who had messed up their lives could always get a second chance.
But consider the practicalities. On colonising Mars, for instance, Richard Gott remarked that it “could start with just eight people… if couples had four children on average, the colony could double in size every 30 years” (p 54).
Has Gott tried bringing up 16 children in a space station?
Evolution's mistakes
We do appear to be badly “designed” by evolution (11 August, p 36), but there are of course reasons for the “mistakes”, which may or may not be obvious.
During primate evolution the brain has become larger, causing the snout to become shorter and the face to be “flattened”. This, together with our upright stance, has led to all kinds of problems including a shorter jaw with weak muscles and insufficient room for the easy eruption of the back molars, and a squished nose with our nasal passages arranged in a ridiculous inverted U-shape, which causes all kinds of respiratory problems.
Such difficulties must be expected when something is designed as it goes along 鈥� modified and adapted over time rather than designed from scratch.
Close attention
I welcome the opportunity to clarify some possible misunderstandings about the nature of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), following Ryan Hopf’s response to my letter of 14 July (1 September, p 24).
First, Hopf is absolutely right to make the point that people labelled with ADHD invariably have many positive (and sometimes exceptional) qualities and capabilities, and nowhere in my letter was I disputing that. The point of contention revolves around what philosophers term the “ontological” nature of the “condition” of ADHD: that is, what is it, precisely, that the term “ADHD” refers to?
In citing the “scientific evidence of a neurological difference between people with and without the condition”, Hopf seems to assume that this somehow necessarily proves that ADHD is a medical condition 鈥� but of course it proves no such thing. All it demonstrates is that people behaving in different ways have observably different neurological activity patterns, which tells us nothing whatsoever about causality 鈥� about whether the neurological pattern is causing the behaviour, or vice versa. (Some philosophers of mind, incidentally, would even challenge whether it is helpful or appropriate to speak of these phenomena in such linear-causal terms.)
In addition, in no way was I suggesting or implying in my letter that the blaming of parents or families for children’s behavioural disturbances is appropriate. Certainly, it would be an equally ideological and one-sided stance to completely rule out some kind of inherited influence on the symptoms labelled “ADHD” (whatever “inherited” might mean); but the environmental underpinnings of disturbed behaviour include all manner of phenomena of technological society, not least televisual technologies and the way in which children’s vulnerable senses are routinely bludgeoned in modern culture. This is one reason why (with children’s campaigner Sue Palmer) I co-organised the Daily Telegraph’s Open Letter about “toxic childhood” and “junk culture” in September 2006.
Finally, I would never argue, imply or even think that the symptoms of ADHD are “insubstantial or non-existent”. Such a view would be insulting to those who experience these often distressing symptoms. But to assume that “ADHD” is a medical, predominantly genetic condition risks the highly unfortunate consequence that the noxious environmental factors that might well be underpinning it are ignored and left unchallenged.
Nervous free will
In his response to my letter about the 1983 Libet experiment (1 September, p 24), Chris Frith asks two questions: What triggers the action demanded by the experiment, and why the report of the urge to act should occur after the act itself.
I tried to hypothesise in my original letter that the trigger was an unconscious random or pseudo-random interval generator in the brain. One could easily program a robot to act as experimental subject using this technique, so it seems reasonable to suggest that the brain could work this way. As for the order of events following the trigger, we know that the brain has a highly parallel and asynchronous architecture, so if two processes are triggered simultaneously, we should expect the simpler to complete ahead.
But what would cause the initiation of the random interval and the pre-programmed response to its trigger? On my hypothesis, this would be the hearing of the experimenter’s instructions, at which point a conscious, free-will-deploying decision is taken whether or not to obey the instruction. If this decision is affirmative, the brain unconsciously implements the self-programming necessary and no further deployment of free will is required.
The same model could be applied to the more complex experiments Chris Frith describes. The brain must be capable of contingent as well as time-delayed self-programming, so unless it is presented with a decision which is both unforeseeable and consequential, it has no need to deploy conscious agency. Think about what it feels like to drive a car over a familiar route: enormously complex decisions are being taken second by second with little or no conscious awareness.
If something unexpected happens, particularly something with the potential for moral consequence, the brain interrupts consciousness and applies it to the problem. In engineering terms, consciousness (and therefore potential free will) is a limited resource, computationally expensive and single-threaded. It surely makes sense that we should have evolved to use this resource only when it is really needed.
John Hind suggests that the responses we make during the Libet experiment might be set up in advance in our brains. I agree.
At the very beginning of Libet’s experiment we have to work out how to obey Libet’s under-specified instruction to “respond whenever you have the urge to do so”.
I suspect we choose a strategy something like this: “I must give about 10 responses, but I will vary the intervals between them so that Libet can’t predict when I am going to respond next.”
If this is really what happens, then free will only comes at the point at which we agree to take part in the experiment. There are many examples where we decide what we are going to do in advance and then just let the unconscious part of our brain take over the task. And it is not just simple actions that this autopilot can control.
My colleague reports managing to drive about 50 miles (including changing from the M25 motorway to the M1) then suddenly “coming to”, with no memory of the last 45 minutes, convinced she was still on the M25!
So, if there is a place left for free will, we exercise it when we instruct our autopilot how to behave. As a result of putting such plans in place, we can often find ourselves in the middle of an act we have no recollection of initiating. This has the paradoxical consequence that a truly moral person demonstrates her goodness by acting well without having to think about it.
War and human nature
Michael Bond did a great job of reviewing the evidence for the waging of war not being a natural part of human “nature” (1 September, p 51). But while it would be an excellent start to provide the tools of mindfulness and critical thinking to those in schools and colleges, a substantial problem exists. As long as we as a society think that war can solve anything, and have the deeply embedded machinery for weapons development located within colleges and universities, supported by powerful companies, any hope for change will be stymied.
The military sector has a profound “presence” in the teaching, training and research systems in the US and UK. How can critical skills be taught in such places, when corporations such as BAE Systems and Boeing provide “curriculum tools” and send in “ambassadors” to present the acceptable face of such weapons development to the young and impressionable?
Corporate alliances with universities also provide for the training of scientists and engineers to work for the likes of BAE, to pursue military objectives rather than help to seek broader forms of security. What is needed 鈥� in addition to Bond’s ideas of overcoming our self-deception about just what security is all about 鈥� is to severely limit the involvement of science, technology and engineering with offensive weapons and their support systems 鈥� in all countries that have bloated military R&D budgets.
None of us, after all, will need an arsenal of weapons, nuclear or conventional, when global warming inundates coasts and produces yet more flooding. A national debate is long overdue to uncover what the real security threats that we face are.
Been there, got the atheist
I share the concerns expressed by Lawrence Krauss about T-shirts for atheists (25 August, p 21) and would suggest several others.
Firstly, as demonstrated by the recent TV programme Enemies of Reason (on Channel 4 in the UK), it is very difficult for scientists to avoid an air of intellectual superiority 鈥� and that will not win converts.
Secondly, it is misleading to portray the issue as a confrontation between the natural sciences and all religions, since at least one, Tibetan Buddhism, promotes an understanding of science: both the Buddha and the current Dalai Lama urged that, when newly acquired knowledge is found to conflict with a belief, it is the latter which should be discarded.
Thirdly, I fail to understand how scientists without religious affiliation can be classed as atheists. Atheism implies certainty, whereas an essential ingredient of scientific method is scepticism. Surely they should be classed as agnostics, which would also serve to demonstrate the humility implicit in not claiming to know the answer where there is none.
Lawrence Krauss is perfectly correct when he asserts that Richard Dawkins’s scarlet letter campaign will do little to “win hearts and minds in middle America”. He is, however, missing the point.
By wearing a T-shirt from , or the slightly more subtle ones from or any similar emblem, a person is not trying to convert anyone. The T-shirt is simply a statement that the wearer is proud to be an atheist.
It is unfortunate that we live in a world where teachers advise schoolchildren applying for a US visa not to tick the “atheist/no religion” box on the application form because it can cause problems; where politicians commit political suicide by declaring they are atheist; and where an American president can publicly assert that atheists should not be considered “citizens” or “patriots” of his country.
Wearing an atheist T-shirt does not preclude engaging in the kind of “rational public discourse” that Krauss endorses, nor does wearing an Einstein T-shirt preclude the study of physics. The T-shirt does, however, show that the wearer has made a conscious decision to view the world from a rationalist, atheistic stance and that this is nothing to be ashamed of. Many religions have managed to pigeon-hole atheism as an absurd, somewhat repugnant notion held by a few. Society will only start treating atheists with respect and tolerance once atheism emerges as a visible and valid opinion.