Neurons mirror what?
A. C. Grayling’s essay (3 May, p 50), with its leap in argument from diffuse flashes of neuron activity to universal morality, is a series of non sequiturs. Whether one performs an action, or observes someone else doing it, there is a perception of that action. Is there any reason to conclude that the neurons activated in both cases are doing anything more than that? The leap to assigning to them the “seat of empathy” is frequently made, but I have yet to see it justified.
Even if that were so, what would it tell us? We already know that people can read other people’s intentions. The crudity of existing brain measurements allows us only to find the approximate location of what might be the brain “hardware” running a process. This tells us nothing about what it might be capable of. It is fanciful to describe these gross measurements as “direct insight into other people’s states of mind”. (A colleague likens the process to UFO hunters seeing flashes of light in the sky and exclaiming “Ooh! There’s an alien spaceship!”)
What is the connection with morality? There is a suggested connection with autism, but autistic people are not especially known for their failure of moral behaviour; whereas intelligent psychopaths can be perfectly competent at social interaction.
And even if “fundamental morality” is to be found in the neurons, where other than in the neurons does Grayling expect to find the “customs” that differ between cultures? The whole thesis is thus a tautology.
From Matt Hollingsbee
When A. C. Grayling suggests that empathy induced by mirror neuron activity is “the very basis of social capacity itself, and thus of morality” and that therefore “moral judgement is hard-wired 鈥� and therefore universal”, he ignores the fact that empathic responses are themselves subject to personal and cultural bias.
Treating others as you would like to be treated yourself falls down because others do not necessarily want to be treated in the same way as you might like to be treated yourself. One can easily imagine a culture where people go through some ceremony which we find disgusting or cruel, firing off all manner of mirror neurons in our brains, only to discover that for the participants it was the proudest day of their lives.
Reading, Berkshire, UK
From Catherine Scott
Thanks to A. C. Grayling for once again demonstrating to us the profound silliness of biological reductionism. We have neurons in our brains that fire when we see people performing actions or reacting to circumstances, so that means there is only one way of defining the good life? Oh, come on! Beyond some basic situations, what pleases or distresses you is a matter of meaning, not biology. Meaning is bestowed on actions and experiences by culture.
Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
Short cuts in mind
You report John-Dylan Haynes finding it possible to detect a decision to press a button up to 7 seconds before subjects are aware of deciding to do so (19 April, p 14). Haynes then concludes: “I think it says there is no free will.”
In the same issue Michael Reilly interviews Jill Bolte Taylor, who says she “was consciously choosing and rebuilding my brain to be what I wanted it to be” while recovering from a stroke affecting her cerebral cortex (p 42). Taylor obviously believes she was executing free will.
The brain is very good at delegating tasks to the subconscious to make them effectively automatic. A good example is walking: we never consciously think about taking a step, as we did when learning to walk. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to walk and talk at the same time. We do it with language as well: writing this, I don’t have to consciously place every word.
If free will is an illusion, Taylor’s experience suggests that the brain can subconsciously rewire itself while giving us the illusion that it was our decision to make it do so. There comes a point where the illusion makes less sense than the reality.
Belief elsewhere
Michael Le Page reported rates of belief in evolution from 18 countries (19 April, p 31). The opinions of residents of Iceland, Latvia and Denmark are reported, while China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Canada and Australia are left out. One country in Asia (Japan) and one country in North America (US) are included, but not a single country in Africa or South America is mentioned. There’s a whole opinionated and intelligent world out there.
The editor writes:
鈥� If anybody has done large-scale polls in these countries, we couldn’t find them. Even if they were done, it is difficult to compare results of different polls as you can get quite different results by asking different questions. That’s why we used a shortened version of a table originally published in Science.
Coley's cure
Using bacteria to treat cancer is hardly unexpected (29 March, p 17). In the 1890s, William Coley effected many cures using mixed killed cultures of Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens.
The critical factor was the induction and maintaining of a fever. Tumours typically disappeared completely in under a month (12 January, p 34 and 2 November 2002, p 54). Coley also observed that fevers induced by such diverse diseases as influenza, measles, malaria and smallpox caused malignant tumours to disappear.
The difference with the modern use of Listeria monocytogenes is that it has been genetically modified and hence can be patented. Coley’s toxins cost at most a few dollars per cure.
Carbon to go
I am a farmer, and I would love to grow trees for Ning Zeng (3 May, p 32). He can reduce the wood to carbon and then bury it. There are lots of empty ships going back to China, and he could use these to transport the carbon and bury it in empty Chinese coal mines. As fast as he can bury his “new coal” others will be digging coal out from the other end to burn in China’s power stations: so we will never run out of space.
Until he gets this organised, I will continue with my age-old practice of heating my house by burning the wood in a stove.
From Chris McCoy
What on Earth, quite literally, are people thinking of? Burying half of the planet’s wood underground so that it does not rot, in order to clear up, but not cure or even address, our species’ excesses? Dangerous thinking.
Biochar does have promise, in moderation, but it only delays carbon dioxide re-release to a future time. What is needed is for humanity to grow up and curb its endless desires.
Cambridge, UK
From Anthony Higham
Growing trees and then burying them surely misses a trick. Why not convert them to charcoal which could replace coal burned in power stations and result in electricity produced with zero net production of carbon dioxide? The University of Hawaii is developing an efficient charcoal (biocarbon) production system called “Flash Carbonization” and has demonstrated many other benefits from burning charcoal in preference to coal.
Cowden, Kent, UK
Mental health in school
In response to James Wright’s astonishment at the lack of education on mental health issues in schools (12 April, p 18) I would like to point out that there is a wealth of support available to teachers to assist in presenting this issue. I use, for example, materials from the Young People’s Unit of and the .
I have been involved in educating teenagers about mental illness for several years, and have found that they respond very positively.
They are far more open to an understanding of psychotic illnesses than adults. An awareness of how frightening, yet possibly also creative and even funny, the experience may be will, I hope, assist in dispelling the fear and stigma around this subject.
No to nuclear power
At last, a study which would appear to prove conclusively that living near nuclear power plants is a hazard to human health, particularly where children are concerned (26 April, p 18).
For over 20 years government scientists have led the public to believe that clusters of leukaemia around power stations were inexplicable, just coincidence, or perhaps a virus. Anything but radiation, as the levels of radionuclides emitted were declared “too small”.
Nuclear power, nuclear weapons and, more recently, the use of depleted uranium have all been so important to multinational corporations and the military that their real impact has been constantly shrouded in deceit and half-truths.
The German government deserves congratulations for its acceptance of the findings of the new “KiKK” studies of childhood cancer near nuclear power plants that Ian Fairlie reports.
In the regions most contaminated by the 1986 accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, thyroid cancer has risen a hundredfold, a statistic which could not be ignored.
But there are rises in many other cancers, immune system diseases and in the numbers of children born with genetic disorders, which are long overdue for more research.
The widespread use of depleted uranium in the Iraq wars of 1990 and 2003 has left a deadly legacy of disease which is damaging and killing children today and will continue to afflict the Iraqi people for many generations to come.
It is time for the insidious effects of long-term low-level radiation to be properly examined and acknowledged as one of the major drawbacks to the expansion of nuclear power.
Add in the problems of high cost, waste disposal, vulnerability to terrorist attack or accident caused by human error, and its close links with nuclear weapons proliferation, and the risk which nuclear energy production poses daily to children living nearby is simply unacceptable.
Chips not quite down
Alice Friedemann does her argument about the fragility of the electronics industry (3 May, p 20) no good with statements such as “computer chips are so fragile that most fail or degrade within four years”.
If that were true, civilisation would probably have collapsed already. In normal use it is not usually failure of chips that causes systems to fail.
There are still aircraft in daily service with systems based on chips designed in the 60s and 70s, and even older military systems are still deployed.
Rhythm of the seers
Feedback finds the peak in web searches for “mitochondria” in October/November (3 May) “inexplicable”. That’s pretty much the start of the academic year, so isn’t it likely that the peak is caused by PhD, MSc and undergraduate students embarking on their projects?
That, or the new academic year elicits a level of guilt in academics that makes them try to do some research.
Neurons mirror what?
Though a daunting prospect, I wish to take issue with A. C. Grayling’s reasoning regarding the biology of moral absolutism (3 May, p 50).
All individuals are genetically predetermined to lie somewhere on a spectrum (sometimes called the autistic spectrum) from extreme empathisers at one end (stuffed as they are with mirror neurons) to extreme systemisers at the other (who devote their cognitive functioning to other things). I propose that natural selection has seen to it that this distribution has remained in existence over the aeons to safeguard the survival of the species from the perils of both extreme empathising (which might run the risk of everyone empathically and uncritically following each other off a cliff) and extreme systemising (which might prevent procreative pairing in the first place!).
Mirror neurons do indeed “underwrite the ability to recognise what others suffer.” To possess them is sometimes a healthy thing, sometimes not. But empathically derived morality does not trump morality produced by other means.
From Diane Erwin
A. C. Grayling’s commentary on mirror neurons seems quite cogently argued until the last paragraph. His conclusions simply do not follow from his previous points. Although it appears that we use mirror neurons to empathise with others, this is never complete because the mirror neurons do not provide a direct experience of the rewards and penalties experienced by the other person. What they do provide is a way to perceive and learn the values of the other. Since those values clearly have a cultural element, they can’t be said to be “hard-wired”. Even if the mirror neurons are hard-wired, the way we interpret another’s emotions is not 鈥� it is also based on our own cultural, societal and family experiences.
Sunderland, UK
Carbon to go
The article “Carbon Lockdown” (3 May, p 32) refers to trees being buried, with all the uncertainties of eventual carbon release. Why not just bury paper? It will stand up to long-term storage in adverse conditions without toxic by-products. It is unlikely to give off gasses, or to decay into carbon dioxide in the near future.
In the UK, local councils mostly collect paper for recycling anyway, but the process involves toxic chemicals, is expensive and leads to a relatively inferior product. It is acceptable for newsprint, with some new material, but not good enough for magazines.
In 2005 world newsprint production was over 40 million tonnes. Assuming that magazines are similar, and that 3 tonnes of carbon produces 12 tonnes of CO2, then the total available for sequestration is 320 million tonnes: probably more than 1 per cent of all CO2 emissions.
It’s a low-cost, environmentally friendly solution with no obvious drawback.
From Chris Collins
Burying wood underground seems a pretty expensive way to sequester carbon. Perhaps there is a case for some urgent research to find a means of turning it into a stable substance which could not only lock in carbon in all sorts of environments but which could be put to practical use, such as thermal insulation for eco-homes, cheap crockery for picnic use, bits and bobs for car interiors, and so on. Any means of reducing the carbon load is only likely to find favour in the real world if someone can expect to make money out of it.
Llandrindod Wells, Powys, UK
Periodic fable
Feedback observes periodicity of searches for “mitochondria” on the Famous Web Search Engine (3 May): not only does the trend fit nicely with the academic year (with a break for Christmas holidays) but the same results appear for other basic science terms like “lysosome”, “nucleus” and “electron”. The fact that fewer searches are carried out as the year goes on suggests either that students are actually learning something, and I find this comforting, though the alternative explanation is that they are ceasing to care.
The trend is especially clear for “golgi apparatus”, which appears to be searched for almost entirely in Michaelmas term (autumn for normal people). Is this an unusually memorable organelle? Or one so dull that people don’t want to come back to it?
Interestingly, “standard deviation”, “t-test” and “variance” are present throughout term-time, but less so at Christmas or over the summer. This may be attributable, in part, to biologists such as myself who can never be bothered to learn their statistics properly and keep having to look the damn things up.
As a follow-up to this, if you search for trends using “electron” (a common term), and switch to just Australian users, the pattern shifts to match the Australian academic year, which starts in late January.
I’m sure you could have a lot of fun with this, and if I wasn’t having work-abandonment-related guilt I probably would do. How much different education systems lead to people needing to look particular topics up is an interesting question for people with some free time…
Shapeshifters
I was excited by the insight into research to produce shape shifting “sand” that can morph into any desired shape (26 April, p 36). It would seem obvious that the shape of individual modules would need to be more or less spherical, dodecahedron perhaps, so that they can interface with as many others as possible. Each module would have its own small computer processor that could be multifunctional, programmable to perform as part of the brain of the total form Some force to hold the modules together, probably magnetic as suggested, which could be altered to hold or release adjacent modules. Some way of transfering energy is also an obvious need.
It sounds so simple! But oh so difficult to produce! Science fiction often suggests the impossible but in this case I feel that the shape shifter of fiction may in fact become reality.
I applaud the researchers who are already making progress and wish them all the insight and good luck that these projects deserve.
What evolution?
Your interesting article on evolution (19 April, p 24) was unfortunately marred by a common problem. Evolution is an extremely broad topic. Stating that someone “rejects evolution” is therefore about as informative as stating that someone “rejects government”.
Even if people don’t believe that humans evolved from earlier animals, this doesn’t necessarily imply that they reject all aspects of evolutionary theory. I really don’t care whether the politician Mike Huckabee believes that he has apelike organisms in his ancestry. However, if he doesn’t believe that natural selection is responsible for antibiotic resistance in bacteria, I am truly worried.
I wish that scientists would stop using the word “evolution”. Instead, we should be much more specific. Are we talking about mutation? Natural selection? Speciation? Common ancestry? 杏吧原创s are forever coining, and using, precise terminology. Let’s do this with evolution.