Genes still central
David Sloan Wilson’s lifelong quest to redefine “group selection” in such a way as to sow maximum confusion 鈥� and even to confuse the normally wise and sensible Edward O. Wilson into joining him 鈥� is of no more scientific interest than semantic doubletalk ever is. What goes beyond semantics, however, is his statement (it is safe to assume that E. O. Wilson is blameless) that “Both Williams and Dawkins eventually acknowledged their error…” (3 November, p 42).
I cannot speak for George Williams but, as far as I am concerned, the statement is false: not a semantic confusion; not an exaggeration of a half-truth; not a distortion of a quarter-truth; but a total, unmitigated, barefaced lie. Like many scientists, I am delighted to acknowledge occasions when I have changed my mind, but this is not one of them.
D. S. Wilson should apologise. E. O. Wilson, being the gentleman he is, probably will.
David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson write:
鈥� Our comment about Dawkins specifically relates to the error of using the replicator concept 鈥� genes as the “fundamental” unit of selection 鈥� as an argument against group selection. Dawkins writes in The Extended Phenotype (p 115): “The point here is that we must be clear about the difference between those two distinct kinds of conceptual units, replicators and vehicles… The majority of models ordinarily called ‘group selection’… are implicitly treating groups as vehicles. The end result of the selection discussed is a change in gene frequencies, for example, an increase of ‘altruistic genes’ at the expense of ‘selfish genes’. It is still genes that are regarded as the replicators which actually survive (or fail to survive) as a consequence of the (vehicle) selection process.”
Another error is to suppose that within-group selection poses an insuperable problem for between-group selection. Dawkins has yet to acknowledge this error and we apologise if our article seemed to imply otherwise. Finally, Dawkins seems to think that one of us has somehow confused the other. We are united in our view about group selection, which we converged upon through separate lines of enquiry.
Going green
Fred Pearce’s excellent article (17 November, p 34) does not mention that energy is a commodity, whose price fluctuates with supply and demand. In simplistic terms, conservation leads to a drop in demand which is then reflected in a lower price.
This reduced price then drives demand in other areas and other sectors, locally and globally. Free markets will continue to act to spur consumption of fossil fuels and other natural-resource commodities. This is why I believe that, regrettably, governments must act to reduce the use of fossil fuel energy.
I hope another reader can point out the flaw in this argument.
As someone who believes in shouldering a high level of personal responsibility for reducing carbon emissions I find it comforting to know that I can potentially make a difference. However, what seems to me to be the most obvious way of reducing carbon emissions has been missed off Pearce’s list: limiting the number of children one has.
I recognise the economic problems that population limitation or reduction lead to, but if the population reaches the point that Earth cannot support it, economies will collapse anyway.
I also know the human rights arguments against population limitation. But just how different is the right to have as many children as one likes from the rights to fly as often as one likes or to eat intensively farmed and imported food?
We could ignore the problems of climate change, and thus trade the welfare of other current and future individuals for our own welfare today. Alternatively, we could aim for social equity between and within generations and choose either a low carbon quota for each of a large number of individuals, or a larger quota 鈥� and greater welfare 鈥� for everyone within a smaller population. Given the difficulties of nations decreeing limits to family size, this is by necessity an extension of one’s personal responsibilities.
Rugby, Warwickshire, UK
Is the UK’s per capita emission of CO2 9.4 tonnes, as stated in one of your diagrams (17 November, p 36), or 12 tonnes, as stated in another (same issue, p 37)?
鈥� The UN statistics division publishes a national per capita emission of 9.4 tonnes; 12 tonnes is your personal quota if you include things that the UN leaves out, like flights.
Demise exaggerated
Even to a physics imbecile like me it seems pretty obvious that Lawrence Krauss’s idea that we have speeded up the universe’s demise just by looking at it (24 November, p 8) represents a pretty obvious misunderstanding of quantum strangeness.
As I understand it, the idea that a quantum state is “resolved” by the act of “observation” is, firstly, just one interpretation of what is going on when you put cats in boxes and so on; and secondly, without any meaningful definition of “observation”, it can only ever be considered the loosest of models to describe how the world works.
The idea that by observing dark energy our consciousnesses have reset the cosmos’s “to be or not to be” clock should surely have been laughed out of court. Either that, or we live in Narnia.
The light observed from these supernovae has been falling on Earth for billions of years, so presumably merely pointing our telescopes in their direction will have made no difference. It must therefore be the off-line analysis of the data that caused the upset. Now that would be spooky action at a distance!
The quotes I gave which appeared at the end of the article were too glib. I do not want to imply that our observations cause the universe to meet an early end. Rather, by making observations we may effectively have determined that our universe lies in an exponentially decaying regime. This issue is far from settled, and how our observations can be used to tell us about the nature of the wave function of the universe is still an issue requiring further study, as we imply in our paper.
As someone who is keenly aware of the possibilities of confusion when trying to explain scientific results in a popular context I should have been more careful, which is why I would now like to remove the confusion, if possible.
Between meals
You report that fasting is good for the heart (10 November, p 21). I wonder whether any research has been done into the effect on the pancreas of our modern habit of “grazing” throughout the day, instead of confining our intake of calories to set times as was common before the advent of snack foods and fizzy drinks.
Is it possible that eating two or three meals per day 鈥� separated by some hours during which insulin-producing beta cells have a chance to “reset” 鈥� is actually better for our health? Could the constant stimulation of the pancreas caused by our way of eating, not just what we are eating, be fuelling the increase in diabetes?
Taser danger
It is unfortunate that your Last Word column about how to evade the effects of Tasers (10 November) appeared just weeks after the on 14 October in which a man was tasered several times and died. Jon Ackroyd may be right that Tasers are sometimes used on people that “are not sane”, but this tragedy demands more than a thorough investigation into the possible misuse of the Taser: it also speaks volumes about the attitude of most bystanders.
Poor maths?
In the discussion of the “number of people living on less than $1 per day” (20 October, p 14, and Letters, 10 November, p 26), is this $1 adjusted for changes in its purchasing power? This never seems to be stated.
鈥� It is adjusted: in the article we noted that the figure was $1.08 in 2004 dollars.
An empty claim
I can offer an alternative to the phrase “This page left deliberately blank” that Feedback derides as “patently false” (6 October): “The information content of this page has been intentionally minimised”.
I hold the copyright for this phrase, but hereby grant New 杏吧原创 full permission for any normal use.
For the record
鈥� We said: “making one beer or soda can emits 170 grams of CO2… The average person gets through 120 cans in a year, which adds up to 0.2 tonnes of CO2” (17 November, p 34). That should have been 0.02 tonnes.
鈥� The sparkling opal-like gems of sapphire and quartz that Tom Mossberg wants to make would, contrary to what we suggested, be more expensive than silicon gems (24 November, p 27). Also, it is the gems that are between 3 and 20 millimetres wide: the pattern elements are 60 nanometres.
Apocalypse obfuscated
Michael Hanlon complains (17 November, p 20) that hurricane Katrina “was reported across the board as a symbol of climate change” 鈥� and so it was. His objection? Such reporting “deliberately links putative future catastrophes with a current event and implies they share a common cause”. In fact, the media repeated, over and over, that Katrina could not be linked to global warming in any sort of cause-and-effect way. The link between putative future catastrophes and current events such as Katrina is not that they share a common cause, but that they share a common effect. Katrina is quite rightly a symbol of climate change, not because it was caused by climate change, but because we can expect many more such events, caused by global warming, in the future.
More bizarrely, Hanlon objects that “pictures of polar bears… are effective visual shorthand for ‘Arctic in peril’, but it is dishonest to show individual bears and claim they are in danger when they are not.” Has anybody done this? Hanlon provides no example or citation. All of the coverage I have seen simply says that we expect polar bears to be extinct in the wild due to global warming in the reasonably near future, and provides a photo of a polar bear to accompany the text. That does not constitute a claim that the particular polar bear depicted is going to die, and given the difficulty of obtaining photos of polar bears from the future that are in fact going to die, it is hard to see what Hanlon would have the media do.
If his concern is that the public be given a fair picture of the risks and current effects of global warming, then he really ought to look to his own prose. When he mentions “evocative scenes of melting glaciers” in one breath, and “the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (which have been shrinking since the 1880s)” in the next, the careless reader might conclude that there is doubt that any glacial melting is due to global warming at all. Actually, even the Kilimanjaro study recently published in American 杏吧原创 states only that Kilimanjaro “has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate”. To imply, as Hanlon does, that because it was observed melting in the 1880s none of its melting today can be linked to global warming in even an indirect fashion is disingenuous and scientifically unfounded. And glacial melting worldwide is not due to sublimation at below-freezing air temperatures, and so has nothing to do with what is happening on Kilimanjaro.
There are a great many aspects of global warming that receive too little publicity, not too much, such as: the ways that blooming and breeding times are already shifting; the difficulty that plants will have in changing their ranges as quickly as they will need to; the ways that coevolution and symbiosis imply that difficulties faced by one species will cascade through whole ecosystems; the rapid melting of the tundra and the consequences that is likely to have; and the ways that warmer temperatures will promote disease. Hanlon doesn’t complain about any of this; it seems that although he has renounced his former position as a global warming sceptic, he would still like the media to talk less about global warming. He warns that reporting on the dangers of global warming risks “pushing the undecided public from a state of concern into one of despair”, but given that politicians still don’t see enough public concern about global warming to propose effective measures to address it, I think Hanlon’s fears in this area are wildly overblown. Now is not the time to put the brakes on.
A friend recently read Daniel Botkin’s piece “” in The Wall Street Journal, which trots out many of the same arguments as Hanlon. He showed it to me, saying, “Here, look: this is why I don’t believe in global warming.” That is the danger of articles such as Hanlon’s. Global warming is real, and poses an enormous threat to civilisation. Better that people believe in it with some scientific inaccuracies in their understanding of the details, rather than be persuaded that it’s a delusion or a myth by people such as Hanlon and Botkin.
Going green
Your headline “Why bother going green” (17 November, p 34) is the sentiment, if not the exact words, expressed by my teenager daughters when I ask them to switch off their computers and lights. I guess I now have some stronger arguments as a result of Fred Pearce’s article: but I am mystified by the suggestion that individuals should start using wood-burning stoves. Here in South Australia the State Government effectively pays people to stop burning wood. Given that it does get cold in winter (and double glazing is unknown in Australia) am I not minimising my carbon footprint by burning natural gas?
鈥� Gas is cleaner than coal and oil, and has a lower carbon content, but it’s not renewable and it is still a fossil fuel.
From Alexander Middleton
Now that we are encouraged to unplug appliances or switch them off at the wall to avoid the energy-wasting standby mode, isn’t it time for manufacturers to start removing this unnecessary feature?
Moorooka, Queensland, Australia
We could feel smug saving the world by turning down our heating and wearing thermal vests, by not using “Chelsea tractor” 4-by-4s or by switching off our energy-saving light bulbs. But such measures simply leave us money for higher living standards which will create pollution in other ways.
Ultimately carbon dioxide production reflects how much fossil-fuel energy is passing through the economy. The more efficiently this can be done the higher our standard of living. Being green in our individual actions will not alone reduce society’s overall carbon footprint. Reduction of society’s footprint requires switching to other energy sources.
Fred Pearce raises the now-common idea that choosing not to take a flying holiday will greatly reduce an individual’s carbon output. While it is true that per-person on a long distance return flight a couple tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted, it is not necessarily true that by choosing not to fly that the equivalent amount of carbon will be saved.
Most regular commercial airlines operate scheduled services, which still fly regardless of whether they are full or not. If the aircraft is going to fly regardless, the only carbon saving that can be expected would be from the difference in fuel used if you had or had not been on the airliner. The empty weight of an average airliner is significantly larger than the weight of the total passenger load it carries (For example the 747-400 with an empty weight of approximately 179 tonnes, carrying 400 passengers and their baggage, assuming an average combined weight of 100 kilograms each, has a total passenger weight of only 40 tonnes.). As such, the majority of fuel required for a long-range flight is consumed lifting the aircraft itself. Thus the carbon saving of not being on the flight will be vastly lower than the per-capita emission of someone on the flight.
The only way in which holiday fliers could be sure to significantly reduce their carbon footprint would be if a critical number were to stop flying so as to force the airline to reduce its total services.
The economic consequences of this may be dire, however, given that many of the world’s regular commercial airlines are already on a knife-edge of profitability. Alongside this, international air tourism injects billions of dollars a year into the economies of developing nations and facilitates a worldwide flow of ideas and culture that is irreplaceable.
With many close-to-home carbon-cutting options available, which can directly and measurably cut an individuals emissions, and some airlines beginning to offer carbon offsets to their passengers, the environmentally conscious traveller should not feel so guilty about taking that yearly overseas trip.
Adelaide, South Australia
Einstein's Freudian slip
Michael Brooks reveals an inconvenient truth about how great scientists like Albert Einstein may be too keen to see their beliefs backed by experiment (17 November, p 58). The great psychiatrist Sigmund Freud had the same experience. He analysed a translation of an old document and claimed it corroborated his theory. Then it turned out that the translation was wrong, and the correctly translated document did not corroborate his theory.
Needless to say, Freud could only conclude that he should have been more careful. It was the only conclusion that could be drawn from his analysis. But, like Einstein, Freud had an intellectual honesty that gave him a teflon quality, and his reputation was not marred by the mistake.
Freud even got away with causing the infamous “cocaine scandal” of the early 20th century, when he tried cocaine on himself and recommended it as a therapeutic stimulant without realising how addictive it was. Freud himself had the strength to break the habit, but many weaker addicts were destroyed by it.
Just as Einstein suspected Rupp, Freud suspected that cocaine could be addictive, and knew a translation could be wrong, but turned a blind eye to these inconvenient possibilities, thereby unintentionally and indirectly emphasising the importance of investigating suspicions, which have an inconvenient way of coming true.
Reason or religion
One of the jarring things about the whole discussion of atheism is that it seems to proceed on the assumption that the word “religion” has an agreed definition (10 November, p 6). It does not.
It covers a vast gamut of human experience, literature, culture and reflection. It might involve belief in a god; or in many gods; or in no god at all. It includes wild-eyed fanatics and sober rationalists, staid conservatives and fire-breathing radicals; holy-rolling preachers and reclusive lamas; the learned, the intelligent and, yes, even the determinedly ignorant.
There is a scholarly, if not scientific, approach to the study of the world religious traditions, namely comparative religion, about which we can safely assume the materialist proponents know very little.
From Lawrence D’Oliveiro
Let us accept the idea that, for large parts of the human population, atheism is unworkable. Let us accept that there is a widespread human need to believe in something that in some sense transcends ordinary day-to-day human experience. So even those who do not believe in religion need to realise that it is an inescapable part of the reality of the human condition.
Then what about other similarly transcendental beliefs, such as in astrology, the occult, mediums and so on? Certainly, among the monotheistic religions, such beliefs tend to be frowned upon as somehow heretical. Yet they persist throughout history, just as the organized religions themselves have persisted throughout history. If science must accept the inevitability of religion, then both must in turn accept the inevitability of the occult.
It seems to me that atheism 鈥� the idea that a recently evolved large-brained ape with some clever technological extensions to its limited senses, knows the secret of life, the universe and everything and just needs a bit more time to fill in the gaps 鈥� requires as much faith as any religion. I would describe myself as an agnostic, but the dictionary defines agnosticism as a belief that we cannot know. Can anyone suggest a term for those of us who just try to keep an open mind?
Caythorpe, Lincolnshire, UK