Physics porn
Michael Hanlon’s “Reality check required” was presumably written tongue-in-cheek (9 February, p 22), but it still managed to get up my nose.
He asks “What about Occam’s razor?”
Many of today’s superficially wacky theories are in fact the result of attempts to do a reality check on quantum mechanics. The “Schr枚dinger’s cat” thought experiment challenges our notions of causality, especially after Alain Aspect’s experiments showing that the cat really is both alive and dead until we actually check (technically, until we check that Bell’s inequality is not satisfied).
Niels Bohr famously said that anyone who does not think that quantum mechanics is weird has not understood it. General relativity isn’t exactly intuitively obvious, either.
Hanlon’s article reminded me of the attitude that the church’s reality checkers took to Galileo’s wacky theory. To them it was obvious that the Earth was the centre of everything, and of unique and prime importance. Michael Hanlon is taking the same view about our universe. Also, if we are a simulation, how different is that from believing in a creator? It is too soon to string up the string theorists or to deride the David Deutsches.
Celebrating Darwin
Are Americans really as parochial as Michael Zimmerman’s article calling on Christians to celebrate Darwin seems to suggest (2 February, p 16)? While greatly admiring the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, I have always thought his assertion that creationism was a “peculiarly American” phenonenon to be very wide of the mark.
Christians around the world have always had similar beliefs. Many Muslims believe absolutely in a recent creation.
But many of the ancestors left the “old world” to escape what they perceived as religious persecution or intolerance, setting themselves apart from the more mainstream, liberal believers. If, as Jim Giles suggests (2 February, p 28), our political and religious leanings are hard-wired in our genes, America has more than its fair share of the fundamentalist gene pool.
Could this genetic inheritance explain why 45 per cent of Americans cannot embrace Darwinism.
From John Scanlon
I would like to express support for Michael Zimmerman’s efforts to end the “war between science and religion” by persuading the religious that their faith (properly understood) is not in conflict with scientific method or the facts and theories of biology. If it is, so much the worse for their faith.
Annual observance of Charles Darwin’s birthday as “Evolution Weekend”, though, seems in a religious context unlikely to help dispel the standard creationist lies that equate modern evolutionary biology with “Darwinism” 鈥� as if modern physics could be dismissed as “Newtonism”. It may also promote the other lie, that evolution is itself a kind of religious faith.
While I agree that “there are areas of importance to humans that fall outside the reach of science 鈥� subjective areas that are not open to rigorous hypothesis testing,” the only examples seem to be what we call “Art”; I have yet to hear of a religion that does not make (potentially) falsifiable claims.
Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia
Physics porn
I applaud Michael Hanlon’s audacity in entering the fray and calling us all to arms against the “wilder shores of physics” (9 February, p 22) though I find it ironic that it takes a journalist 鈥� a member of the species that we all love to hate in science 鈥� to do so. We have created and encouraged a culture where scientists are terrified to express their opinions about other disciplines, even if these spout patent nonsense, for fear of being branded ignorant.
Hanlon should be supported by all of us who believe in the fundamental tenets of science, otherwise the credibility that has been so hard to attain will be washed away like a sandcastle. Funding bodies should ensure that whatever resources are to be spent on science, they balance the fundamental and the applied in a rational manner.
Hanlon’s argument is based on the mistaken idea that belief means the same to scientists as it does to the religious. When a scientist says “I believe that the Earth orbits the sun”, or that “matter is composed of atoms”, what we mean (or should mean) is that there is sufficient evidence accumulated to make it worthwhile to behave as if this statement were true. Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming but, even so, we do not mean that it is a true description of reality. We allow for the replacement of the concept by a new one if further, conflicting, evidence is found. The religious believe wholeheartedly that “This is the truth”.
I wince when I read statements by respected scientists that they “believe” their latest theory. It plays into the hands of the proponents of “intelligent design”, who also confuse the two meanings, saying there is no difference between their creationist beliefs and scientists’ “belief” in scientific theories.
We scientists should avoid using the word.
Occam's puzzle pencil
Andy Biddulph points out that there are many possible solutions to your fill-in-the-grid puzzle (9 February, p 25). He forgets that simplicity is a criterion for preferring one rule to another. Had the rule been as complex as he makes it, I would have turned to the next page without delay.
Biddulph explains that many brain-teasers test only whether you can spot the arbitrary choice made by the person devising the problem.
Surely this is what intelligence is for?
Dream physics
After reading Paul Davies’s letter asking about the physics of lucid dreams (2 February, p 18), I carried out Galileo’s experiment on falling objects within one. Two of the three balls of different weights that my assistant dropped from the Tower of Pisa reached the ground simultaneously. The lightest, however, remained suspended in mid-air about halfway down.
Crop invasion!
If Mark Tester and Peter Langridge think that crops aren’t invasive (9 February, p 24) they should visit the UK, where they’ll see bright yellow oilseed rape (Brassica napus) rapidly spreading along miles of roadside verges, railway lines and hedgerows.
For the record
鈥� The figures for energy per kilometre driven in a table accompanying the article on efficient cars (2 February, p 32) were 1000 times too high. Apparently, the researchers’ software mistook a comma which was a decimal delimiter for a thousands separator 鈥� and we failed to notice the discrepancy.
Born what way?
The studies cited in Jim Giles’s article (2 February, p 28) perpetuate the falsity that the spectrum of political thought lies on one axis, running from left to right, with liberals on one end and conservatives on the other. In this formulation, the liberals tend to exhibit the personality trait of “openness”, described as being “open to new experiences, focusing on change as an opportunity rather than a problem, and thinking about the world as it might be”.
One wonders what sort of questions were asked to ascertain the prevalence of this trait. Consider opposition on the left to the dynamic change wrought by free trade and globalisation and to scientific advances such as genetically modified crops.
I doubt many on the left would regard these sort of changes as opportunities rather than problems.
From Bryn Glover
I was intrigued by Giles’s apparent throwaway line: “[Political scientist Evan Charley] feels that inherent biases in the make-up of academia, which is dominated by liberals, leads to the ‘pathologising of conservatism’.” In light of the overall tenor of the piece, has no one sought to examine the reasons for this apparent “domination” in greater detail?
I recall that in the earliest days of growing awareness of institutionalised racism in British society, sometime during the 1970s, the realisation came quite clearly that many people’s entrenchment was unmovable, and the only sensible tactic was acceptance, ring-fencing, and the long wait till they and their attitudes died off.
Was it Trotsky who said: “If you can’t acquaint a fascist with reason, acquaint his face with the pavement”? Somewhat drastic, but not inconsistent with the findings you have reported.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
Clean coal and oil sinks
You are right to expose the sham of “clean” coal based on the promise that carbon-capture technologies will be there, one day, when they get round to doing the research and development (9 February, p 5). But that isn’t the only link in the carbon chain that needs attention.
How will we get carbon from UK coal-fired power stations into those old oil fields in the North Sea? Think of it as building an oil industry in reverse. We need the equivalent of all those oil wells, tankers, terminals, refineries, gas stations and other bits and pieces.
Oil is one of the biggest industries around. Time to start investing in its mirror image?
Surgeons at play
As a medical student and a keen video games player, I was very excited to find out that playing Nintendo’s Wii console had been shown to improve surgical skills (19 January, p 24). While I was excited by the prospect of finally having an admirable reason for playing on my new Wii, it should be recognised that video games can not only be used to improve surgical technique but also to judge inherent aptitude for surgery.
In a 2002 study I published with T Miskry and A Magos entitled “If you’re no good at computer games, don’t operate endoscopically!” 鈥� also based around a Nintendo console 鈥� junior doctors completed three timed laps of the Nintendo 64’s Diddy Kong Racing video game before having their endoscopic surgical skills assessed.
We found a highly significant correlation between trainees’ overall race time and their surgical skill scores, and concluded that commercial video games could be used towards assessing the innate ability for surgery. The US study by Rosser et al that you mentioned supported this finding.
Compared to the Nintendo 64’s stick controller, the “Wiimote” used in Kahol and Smith’s study requires dexterity and hand-eye coordination closer to that necessary for successful surgery, but it is nevertheless worth pointing out that the link between video games and surgical aptitude was discovered long ago.
Toddlers and fossils
As a mother of toddlers, discussion of the “death throes” posture of fossilised animals (22/29 December 2007, p 62) rang a strong bell with me. It is the exact position assumed by a recalcitrant child having his nappy changed against his will and is known as “banana baby” in my circles. Perhaps it is an atavistic response to distress and powerlessness which adult humans exhibit only when their intellectual self-control has been stripped away and they return to an infantile state.
Diet and delusion
Brian McPherson says (9 February, p 24) that he is confused by my saying that obesity is not caused by overeating (19 January, p 17). Animal models of obesity are consistent: take any animal; restrict the animal’s caloric intake; and it will still get fat, or stay fat, since it shuts down energy expenditure.
Some animals will actually grow fatter if you restrict their intake from birth, but will cannibalise their lean body mass and organs to do so. You end up with an animal that has more body fat, smaller organs and less muscle than an animal that did not have its calories restricted, but which weighs roughly the same.
If you restrict calories in rats with their ovaries removed, or in animals with brain lesions in their ventromedial hypothalamus, they become virtually immobile, body temperature drops, their metabolic rate slows, and they get obese as fast as if you had let them eat until they were full.
Whatever causes the fattening, it does so by disregulating the fat tissue: obesity is achieved whether or not you allow the animal to “overeat”.
I am a family physician and ask every overweight patient who comes into my exam room what they eat for breakfast, lunch, supper, between meals 鈥� and what they drink. Breakfast is often skipped (leading to reduced metabolism) or is a stereotypical farmer’s breakfast of eggs, sausage and hash browns. The meat is always mentioned and the side dishes are not. Rare is the intake of salad, and vegetables are few. Meals regularly have potatoes or rice, some have both. Between-meal and night-time snacks are routine. When I ask about exercise, most often I hear that they do none or “I play golf”.
Taubes suggests there is no shred of evidence to suggest that obese people are unconcerned, ignorant or unwilling to change, but actually this is exactly what I find in my practice. When I explain what can be improved in their diets, some of my obese patients express surprise at the caloric value of their food and effects on their weight, others shrug and feign acceptance, still others openly admit they don’t care and like what they eat.
Those that have been receptive to my advice and applied it have lost weight.
Pinehurst, North Carolina, US
Inherited personality
To ask why evolution has left such a variety of personalities in the population (9 February, p 36) would be a challenging question with respect to solitary animals, but humans have succeeded only because we are social animals, surviving by working in concert. The outlook for a solitary human is poor.
A group containing different and complementary abilities and personalities is better able to exploit different environments and situations, especially with our unique knowledge-sharing abilities. Group selection 鈥� as opposed to individual selection 鈥� would favour those groups with a rich mixture of abilities and outlooks. Perhaps this inherited diversity of personality within groups is why we have been able to spread rampantly across the globe, exploiting a larger range of habitats and niches than any other mammal.
Daniel Nettle does his best to accentuate the positive, carefully emphasising that there’s nothing inherently good or bad about personality traits, and is upbeat about choosing a social niche to fit your personality.
Nevertheless, this is a clear example of rapid progress in cognitive neuroscience taking us into areas for which we are ethically unprepared. Nettle points out that local ecological pressures may favour one personality type, as in the case of more and less adventurous birds in summers with more and less abundant food.
For millennia, different human groups have been subject to markedly different local ecological pressures, presumably favouring at least subtly different personalities. Perhaps partly as a consequence, human cultures value traits like extroversion and self-control quite differently, so that sexual selection for culturally favoured personality types is likely to enhance any effect of local environmental differences.
Wouldn’t such selective pressures lead to differences in the reproductive success of groups of individuals with differing sets of traits 鈥� that is, to differences of what was once called “national character”?
We need some serious ethical discussion now, before this kind of science is used to lend respectability to some political notions that have accompanied talk of “national character” in all-too-recent history.
A modest proposal
If a person’s political preference is predetermined by their genetic make-up then we may have a solution for falling voter turnout. People are disinclined to vote because they don’t feel that any candidate or party effectively represents them; or because they are not interested in educating themselves on party platforms; or simply because they find the whole political process dry and tedious.
Those who do not feel adequately represented are often members of a minority of some kind, while those confounded by the whole mess are often under-educated. So there is a bias towards the wealthy, educated majority members who actually make it to the polls and vote.
But if everyone were to register their genetic politics then there would be a fairer representation of what the people actually want and need in a leader. Start an election by enumerating the population’s genetic preferences, and leave polling stations available for those who wish to rebel against their genes. All voices could still be heard. How different would the world be?
Born what way?
Jim Giles makes a convincing case that our tendency to be a liberal or a conservative is at least partially determined by our genes (2 February, p 28). But previous work has shown almost the opposite: people can radically change their most fundamental opinions and values. Clare W. Graves, who taught psychology in New York in the mid-20th century, demonstrated that many adults do exactly that at some period in their life.
Examples are well known: a street drug dealer converting to a life of faith, as Malcolm X did; religious people going for personal freedom and economic success after losing their faith; a successful businessman becoming a hippy; a hippy a self-employed consultant.
These “conversions” seem to be accompanied by a switch from a form of liberalism to conservatism or vice versa.
Graves speculated that each state of mind is accompanied by a specific neurological state. It may be that each of us has a natural political tendency but, depending on our experiences, it can switch.
The same genes may be expressed differently at various stages in life. Among primates, young adult males are the group most likely to challenge the existing social hierarchy, before themselves maturing into reactionary silverbacks. It is no accident that a number of America’s leading neoconservatives are former Trotskyite communists. Same genes, different politics.
Rodmell, East Sussex, UK
One glaring problem with this whole theory is trying to scientifically define “liberal” and “conservative”. The term “liberal” has very different connotations in, for example, the UK, Australia, the US and France. And even within classifications, individuals’ positions are mixed: what do we make of a “liberal” who supports abortion and gun control but is pro-nuclear and pro-technology? And what of a supporter of the Christian Coalition who believes the US state should “protect US jobs and US interests from foreign competition”, even though this position might be shared by plenty of grass-roots democrats?