Henge bodge
Mike Parker Pearson suggests Stonehenge was built, or rebuilt, to revere the dead (7 June, p 11). I suppose that there is no possibility that the buried ashes were the result of industrial accidents during its construction?
Such losses would be likely in such a major operation 鈥� and this would be consistent with the dating of the remains. Perhaps there were hasty cremations before the health and safety executive of the day came round?
What price more food?
You report problems with food supply (14 June, p 28). In recent years UK farmers have been encouraged by governments to turn farming land to “leisure pursuits” and been paid not to grow food, in order to reduce food surpluses. Such policies need changing. The public could be encouraged to grow their own vegetables if they want to, as they used to in wartime 鈥� even a window-box or pot can grow tomatoes and herbs.
Locust lunch
Sally Palmer’s fascinating and somewhat ghoulish account of vast cannibalistic locust swarms (31 May, p 42) makes one realise how nature is ever full of surprises. But the spectacle of vast hordes of these little winged Hannibal Lecters should evoke more than morbid fascination or dread: here is a possible opportunity.
Insects are a neglected but quite feasible source of food protein, one that we do not exploit merely because of a squeamish prejudice. Surely it would be easy to scoop up vast numbers of locusts from massive swarms for use either as human food or animal feed. It’s as if nature is providing home delivery.
Farmers' forty factor
You edited my letter on food and fuel (31 May, p 23), perhaps thinking that my statement “A farmer using liquid fuels is at least forty times as productive…” must be exaggerated. Let me expand.
Before about 1750, when the Industrial Revolution began, farmers depended on human and animal muscle. Now, in all but backward societies, diesel-powered tractors and mains electricity have taken over. The increase in efficiency, thanks to fossil fuels, is colossal.
Over the hedge from my garden is a hay meadow 7 acres (2.8 hectares) in area. Mowing it by tractor takes about 1.5 hours. This compares to the full day, including breaks for food and cider, that a man with a scythe traditionally took to cut 1 acre. The tractor is roughly 40 times as efficient in terms of man-hours.
The next two procedures in modern haymaking, tedding the cut grass to dry it, and then baling it, each take the tractor about 1.5 hours. Before 1750 the farm workers, men and women, used rakes to aerate and dry the hay, then loaded it into carts with pitchforks. Again the efficiency ratio is something like 40:1.
A giant combine harvester with its satellite tractors and trailers may be 100 times as effective as the peasants with their sickles, flails and threshing floors in recovering the grain from large acreages of cereals.
Medieval woodcutters harvested energy with sharp axes. Several of them would have taken a day to load their cart with logs and haul it from the forest to the village. Thanks to my chainsaw I can fill my car with logs cut to size and bring them home, a mile from the wood, in two hours.
Only 60 years ago, before piped water reached the streamless limestone plateau of the Mendip Hills, my neighbour’s cattle were supplied in summer by a horse and cart that carried a few large churns of water up the hill from the farm to a tank on the plateau 150 metres higher. The horse and driver managed 2 journeys a day to water the little herd of about 10 animals. Now there is no limit to the number of cattle that can be watered.
Picture the dairymaid on her three-legged stool, milking about five cows every hour by hand a century ago. Now, only the capacity of the milking parlour limits the size of the herd, sometimes as many as 400, that can be processed in two or three hours.
Whether it be ploughing the fields, hedging and ditching, clearing out ponds, or raising livestock, few modern agricultural procedures are less than 40 times as productive as they were when the work was done by humans, with or without farm animals.
The significance of this “40 Factor” cannot be exaggerated. How long do we have before fossil fuels are so scarce that global food production begins its shrinkage to about one-fortieth of present capacity?
The editor writes:
鈥� Checking the factor of 40 simply produced too many complex and competing answers.
Saving savants
Marc Thioux has a good point that in certain cases savant skills need some developmental honing (7 June, p 10).
In the case of the musical savant Derek Paravicini, the music teacher Adam Ockelford, of the then Royal National Institute for the Blind, spent 18 years as his mentor to develop his astounding musical genius. Paravicini benefited from his parents’ recognition, and the appreciation of his particular innate musical ability.
It is a shame that the 18-year-old girl “AVK” studied by Thioux was prevented by her mother from developing her savant calendar skills.
The music world would be a sadder place if Derek Paravicini’s parents stopped him from playing the piano, just because he was using his elbows, fists and nose to play it with.
You're so special
It is true, of course, that we possess nothing unique anatomically, physiologically or biochemically (24 May, p 28). What we do enjoy is a unique combination of features: our brain, capable of invention, deception and confabulation; our hands with their amazingly dextrous opposable thumbs; and our voice boxes with all the possibilities that Christine Kenneally identified in her article.
This combination has enabled humans to develop something that can truly be regarded as unique: it can fairly neatly be described as “civilisation”. No other animal is capable of planning its surroundings in the way that we can; no other asks such questions nor provides such answers that we do; and no other has ever developed to the point where it consciously changes the ecosystems of the planet.
You're so special
If nothing else, Christine Kenneally’s article “So you think you’re unique” (24 May, p 28) demonstrates our unique ability to assume that we are unique, and that the others, to their credit, overlap us in some degree.
But suppose that this inquiry had been undertaken by geese.
They would find that although humans can swim, they are not nearly as accomplished as the paddling geese. Diving under the water to catch a meal in a beak is quite out of our range. As individuals, we cannot fly.
We fail miserably on goose measures of uniqueness.
Each species can only be judged with respect to its own niche and its own ability to survive. Most do quite well, thanks; they just have different goals, and have no need for our specialisations.
From Tim Wells
I find it laughable that because chimps and crows use bits of stick and grass as tools, some conclude that humans are less special or no longer unique. Show me a chimp which has designed, made and used a pair of pliers, and I will have more respect for this view.
It is not the lumping together of all these things as “tools” which makes us similar, but the huge gap in technological capability and sheer brainpower that makes us different.
Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, UK
From Fransje van Riel
With regard to religion and the assumption that non-human animals do not have the capacity to believe in the supernatural, I suggest that religious teachers try to instil one specific theme: that human beings can effectively still the mind and live in the here and now. Peace prevails when these teachings are adopted.
What these wise leaders are in fact telling us is to adopt an attitude to life like that of animals. Surrendering to the moment and living in the present, without fear, worry or incessant thought preoccupying a large part of our lives, is most certainly unique to non-human animals. They therefore do not need religion. They really are so much more advanced.
Cape Town, South Africa
Sailing into harm's way
Paul Marks points out the significant risks posed by the US fitting many more naval ships with highly enriched uranium-fuelled reactors in response to the rising cost of oil (14 June, p 24). But there is a third way. Naval vessels can be powered quite effectively using very low enriched uranium fuel, and run for over 15 years without refuelling, as shown in a paper entitled “An Integrated PWR for Marine Propulsion”, presented in June at the .
This promises to be safer, much more affordable and a less attractive target for terrorists.
For better or worse
A. C. Grayling identifies contradictory human endeavours, such as constructing weapons of war and rescue work (31 May, p 52). The underlying difficulty is that research in one field can often be put to “good” or “bad” uses: in microbiology, for example, to warn us of an influenza epidemic or to produce organisms for biological warfare.
This led the late Joseph Rotblat to propose the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath for scientists. Martin Rees, in Our Final Century, suggests that there should be constraints on scientific research.
But it is surely not a contradiction to look forward to humankind as a global society. It will need a well-educated and stable population (lower than today’s) with adequate food and housing 鈥� and much less inequality. There must be universal access to healthcare, and to modern methods of contraception in particular.
As Grayling notes, this can only be achieved by small steps over many years, but it is achievable. It does not need armies but does need education 鈥� and learning from experience 鈥� to change attitudes.
What price more food?
I was very interested and pleased to read Debora MacKenzie’s informative article on the global food crisis (14 June, p 28). I do feel, though, that she overstates the case against biofuels as a technology for the future.
Crops such as wheat and rice produce over 3 tonnes of straw per hectare 鈥� which we could put to many carbon-efficient uses, for example, as packaging or as a source of waxes, given time and resources to research them.
There is vast potential to increase production of crops such as sugar cane and sugar beet for bioethanol production. In Europe for the past 50 years sugar beet has been grown under a quota system to limit production.
From Catriona Millican
Your article contained a statement I have often seen before, that to produce 1 kilogram of beef you need 6 kg of grain; for 1 kg of chicken you need around 2 kg of grain; and so on.
The implication is that if everyone would only stop eating beef, we would have six times as much food in its place, and if those pesky people in developing countries would stop supplementing the tortillas, chapattis and rice, which have always made up the bulk of their diet, with unnecessary meat, we would all be better off.
Of course most westerners eat too much protein, but many people around the world don’t get enough. The desire to replace a nutritionally poor diet with one which contains enough protein to thrive hardly qualifies as destructive greed.
To replace meat with grain would be to invite malnutrition. Surely the comparison should be like for like 鈥� meat for pulses. It seems that yields per hectare of pulses are around one-third those of grain, so 1 kg of beef is equivalent to 2 kg of pulses and 1 kg of chicken is equivalent to just 700 grams of pulses. Suddenly, giving up meat doesn’t look like such an easy solution.
Glasgow, UK
From Susan Lees
I find it astonishing that neither your editorial (14 June, p 3), nor Debora MacKenzie’s article, mentions encouraging family planning as one part of the solution, to slow the growth of population.
London, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� The population bomb has already gone off. If every woman now of fertile age has only two children on average, we’re still headed for 9 billion people in 2050. The issues now are unemployment and hunger, not contraception, although many people still need easier access to the contraception they want. Reproductive rates are already declining fast: if this trend continues, population will fall after 2050. The only ways to slow it further would be an even more rapid fall in birth rates 鈥� which would need impossibly rapid cultural change 鈥� or a massive rise in mortality.
It's a wonderful cosmos
As another atheist without qualms, it worries me that Lawrence Krauss so badly misses the point in his diatribe against religious belief (7 June, p 50). It does no good to caricature the “intellectually lazy creations of fundamentally ignorant minds”. Religious people don’t merely see the heavens as “more intimate and more magical”; they see them as more meaningful than we do.
It is lazy to underestimate the true horror science and especially Darwinism presents to the religious: that the universe can be sensibly understood to be without purpose. They take this to mean that life has no meaning.
We face today an urgent practical need to reposition ethics and a good deal of the law within an amoral universe. This inherently philosophical project is arcane, highly technical and inaccessible to most, including scientists. Krauss is not going to redress the yearning for meaning with his appeal to squillions of beautiful supernovae.
From Merle Arrowsmith
I am usually a great fan of Lawrence Krauss’s commentary 鈥� except when it comes to his pitiful attempts at denigrating religion. What you consider to be the representatives of faith worldwide are, statistically speaking, a loud but shrinking minority of (mainly American) fundamentalists who think they have to be afraid of science 鈥� as if science could ever threaten anyone’s faith! How is it that scientists who are usually so careful to make statistically significant claims in their own field never bother to do so when speaking about religion?
Christianity has to a great extent moved beyond the Middle Ages and incorporated modern thinking. I am a Christian and a scientist. I can think of plenty of brilliant Christian scientific minds 鈥� not to mention the medieval Muslim scientists without whom we would not, for example, even have zero.
Krauss’s argument that faith prevents religious people from tackling climate change is appallingly mean and unfounded. The proof of human-induced climate change is so very obvious that no Christian would dare deny it. On the contrary, we see preservation of nature as an urgent duty.
Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK
From Richard Kubiak
Lawrence Krauss’s brilliantly succinct, cogent and intelligent statement of the facts regarding the contrast between the breathtaking wonder of the universe we live in, and the limited, parochial and frankly self-obsessed view peddled by all the major religions (and political groups) was inspirational, if not radically new. I say this as someone baptised into the Catholic faith at the age of a few weeks 鈥� clearly at a time when my intellectual and spiritual development were at their height.
When the world and humanity are facing unprecedented problems of global warming, overpopulation, inadequate food provision, AIDS, and the burgeoning capabilities of science to improve our lot or do it terminal harm, we need clear, rational, moral and scientifically informed thought of the kind Krauss promotes. We do not need doctrinal imperatives imposed from “above” (whether human or divine).
Usk, Gwent, UK
Visceral politics
Owen Flanagan’s description of my book The Political Mind: Why you can’t understand 21st-century American politics with an 18th-century brain, (31 May, p 48) left much to be desired. The book has two parts: one scientific and one pointing out the political consequences of the science.
There is a received view of mind, absorbed into popular culture and similar to that of the philosopher Ren茅 Descartes, that I refer to as “Enlightenment reason”. It goes like this: reason is conscious, disembodied, dispassionate, literal (it fits the world directly), logical (it leads from facts to correct conclusions), universal and serves self-interest.
This is widely taken as defining “rationality”. I surveyed results from neuroscience and the cognitive sciences that contradict all these supposed properties.
Reason is mostly unconscious and physical 鈥� it uses the brain. It requires emotion and uses frames, metaphors and melodramatic narratives. It also varies depending on world view and is used at least as much in the service of empathy as self-interest.
This is real reason, how people really think, and it requires a new account of rationality that calls for a New Enlightenment.
Each of these results is crucial for understanding politics. Conservatives, using marketing techniques taken from psychology, have marketed their big ideas effectively: the nature of national security, government, the market, taxes, responsibility, family values, religion, and so on.
Progressives have failed to build institutions (such as think tanks) to get their big ideas out in public honestly. An awareness of brain mechanisms could help map effective communication.
The Political Mind is an exercise in the democratisation of knowledge.
It opens up the cognitive science of politics for all to see. Journalists, policy-makers, most economists, and even many academics are stuck on the old view of reason, which leads them to fall prey to effective political marketing, mostly from the conservative side.