Multiversality
Amanda Gefter contends that we are being offered a choice between God and a multiverse as explanations for our existence (6 December 2008, p 48). Consider a third possibility: that our universe is an artefact created by an advanced species and contained within the universe in which that species exists. It would be difficult to test this hypothesis, but at least it avoids invoking the supernatural.
I sometimes suspect that our universe is some cosmic engineering undergraduate’s final-year project 鈥� though, if so, it’s probably not worth more than a second-class degree.
From Mark Vernon
Amanda Gefter is surely right when she says that an explanation for anthropic effects is not a straight choice between two explanations: multiverse or divinity. However, it is far from obvious that the notion that observation creates the universe 鈥� so-called top-down cosmology 鈥� can straightforwardly be called science.
In his recent book The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies admits that such a “self-explaining universe”, containing a “life principle”, will seem crypto-religious to many 鈥� though he is quite clear that he is not appealing to any supernatural agency. What it would necessitate, though, is a way of integrating into physics the elements that make for human observation: namely, life, mind and purpose. That sounds a lot like making an appeal to metaphysics, or at least as the physicist Roger Penrose would have it, a very different concept of science from that which exists today.
London, UK
From Helen Logan
Of course our universe appears finely tuned for our existence. Altering any number of variables would mean we could not exist. But surely all we are observing is that we exist within the current conditions.
If those conditions were to change might not another conscious being appear and assume in turn that those conditions were finely tuned for its existence? This observation doesn’t seem to me to require a multiverse or a deity.
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK
The editor writes:
鈥� Most of the universes we can imagine would not support any sort of complex structures, which we assume are necessary for any sort of life, even something completely different from any life we might imagine.
Something for nothing
Lawrence Krauss seems to have strayed into the foothills of metaphysics without realising that he hasn’t brought the proper equipment (22 November 2008, p 53). He starts with the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” and claims that physics has largely answered this question by “reframing” it as “how” rather than “why”. This is not reframing 鈥� this is just a different question.
Physics can create a partial description of how the universe came into being, and that can be a useful thing, but it does not advance our understanding of why any more than a mapping of the human genome tells us why human beings exist.
Krauss concludes that “science has once again altered the playing field for such metaphysical speculations in a dramatic and beautiful way”, whereas in fact it is he who has altered the playing field in a blatant and predictable way by ignoring the difference between a question of causation and a question of meaning.
Mathematics is hard
Marcus du Sautoy declares that we can all do mathematics because we are naturally programmed to do so (29 November 2008, p 44). Being able to survive by moving around in the world and manipulating objects in it with speed and precision has nothing whatever to do with mathematics.
The survival skills he alludes to are achieved through the natural acquisition and use of perceptual-motor schemata developed over many thousands of hours of practice. Being necessary for our continued existence, it is what humans are generally very good at.
Mathematics, on the other hand, is the description of such activities using an unnaturally acquired formal system of symbol notation and manipulation. It is a different skill with different aims, employing different types of knowledge and using different parts of the brain. Being unnecessary for survival, it is what humans are generally very poor at.
There is nothing more irritating and off-putting than some expert airily declaring that it’s all very simple really, when it self-evidently isn’t.
If du Sautoy wants to meet his brief of furthering public understanding of science, he should start by coming clean on these matters.
Sex, lies and surveys
Prompted by the article on sexual strategies (29 November 2008, p 32), I took a small informal poll at the school where I work.
Seventeen out of 20 boys and six out of 10 girls said they would probably lie on a questionnaire about their sex life, even if they completed it anonymously. If it was not anonymous, all 20 boys said they would have lied, as did eight of the girls.
Of course, they might have been telling lies.
From Rupert Vidion, Department of Urology, Wellington Hospital
You quote Anne Campbell from Durham University as saying that where there are fewer males than females “men can call the shots, and what men usually want is casual sex”. I feel this misses an important point.
While a stable partnership may be desirable for raising a child, it is not essential to producing the next generation. When there are fewer males, it is also to females’ advantage, assuming they wish to procreate, for relationships to be less stable. With stable relationships, the limiting factor is the number of males in the population. If less-stable relationships predominate, females have a greater likelihood of finding a mate, however temporary, and reproducing.
Wellington, New Zealand
From Andrew D. Carothers
In considering optimal sexual strategies we should bear in mind that evolutionary pressures act to maximise the number of genes passed on to posterity, and not simply to the generation immediately following (29 November 2008, p 32). So the advantage to a female of choosing a promiscuous mate is that the male offspring of such a mating may themselves inherit promiscuous genes, and thereby pass on more of the mother’s genes to the grandchildren and subsequent generations.
Better still, if she can deceive her “regular” partner she gains his support to maximise the children’s chances of surviving to reproduce. Of course, this is risky 鈥� he may find out and abandon her. It is precisely because different reproductive strategies have such finely balanced pros and cons that so many exist in human societies. How boring our television, literature and theatre would be without them…
Edinburgh, UK
Menstrual chaos
Caroline Williams writes of the menstrual synchrony effect in humans, first described by Martha McClintock in the 1970s, that, “McClintock’s conclusions remain contentious because nobody has yet isolated the actual chemicals that cause the effect” (6 December 2008, p 38). They remain contentious because of much more than that.
Others have tried and failed to find the effect. In 2006, for example, Zhengwei Yang of the North Sichuan Medical College in Nanchong, China, and Jeffrey Schank of the University of California, Davis, studied the phenomenon in two ways.
First, they collected data from 186 Chinese women who had been living in dormitories for more than a year. They found no evidence of menstrual synchrony. Second, they reviewed McClintock’s original data, and found that group synchrony was at the level of chance. “We then show that cycle variability produces convergences and subsequent divergences of cycle onsets and may explain perceptions of synchrony,” they wrote in the journal Human Nature ().
Dog standard
Weimaraner Club members were disappointed to read Paul McGreevy saying that the breed standard for Weimaraner dogs 鈥� which demands that the chest is “well developed, deep” while the abdomen is “firmly held” and the flank is “moderately tucked-up” 鈥� “may help to make Weimaraners appear athletic, but puts them at risk of gastric dilation and torsion” (11 October 2008, p 18).
The cause of bloat and gastric torsion is not known and most breeders consider that bloat can be linked to many triggers, not least diet and stress. If there were a proven link between a well-developed chest and bloat, breeders would be at the forefront in taking action against this dreaded condition.
One word crops up time and time again in the standard description of the breed 鈥� “moderate”. Any moves towards exaggeration have been resisted.
McGreevy raises the issue of a closed stud book. In many breeds, variants such as long hair or wire hair have been separated from the main breed: the Weimaraner breed club decided against this to maximise the gene pool.
Animal welfare
I was thrilled to read A. C. Grayling on our duty towards fellow animals (29 November 2008, p 50). Severe restrictions on invasive animal research are long overdue, and the European Union’s proposal to ban all but behavioural research on great apes is an important step forward.
Those who think “good welfare” is good enough need only know that in the US alone in 2006 there were more than 2100 known violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act 鈥� even though more than 99 per cent of animals used in research are not protected by this legislation. Over the past five years, violations have increased by more than 90 per cent: see
The private brain
Douglas Fox describes work that seems to imply that the conscious brain needs to be inactive for the subconscious one to work (8 November 2008, p 28). I would say that the requirement is that it should be inactive only on the topic of concern and that activity on unrelated topics is a necessary distraction.
Nearly 30 years ago, I decided that my subconscious mind had a greater capacity and was often more useful than my conscious mind. This arose from the experience 鈥� one that many of us have 鈥� of unsuccessfully trying to remember something, only for it to pop up into my consciousness out of the blue while I was engaged in an unrelated activity.
Since then, I have often consciously handed over decision-making and problem-solving to my subconscious, giving it a deadline of anything from two hours to two months. On most occasions it has come up with something useful that my conscious mind hadn’t thought of. I always make sure that the conscious does not address the matter again before the set deadline, for fear that it would mess things up.
Eco-charging
In your eco-questions and answers, your discussion of how best to charge a laptop left a major topic unanswered: what if you use the laptop as a main computer, normally just plugged into the mains 鈥� or “to the wall” as we say in the US (15 November 2008, p 36)? Is it better to keep unplugging it and using it until the battery runs down, or to leave it plugged in all day, or even for weeks on end?
The editor writes:
鈥� To minimise bills, charge the battery and use it until it’s empty.
Tamed, who?
Piers Bizony says “recent military events in Georgia have reminded [the European Space Agency] that Russia may not yet be a fully tamed member of the international community” (15 November 2008, p 22). The way the UK and the US go rampaging round the world, bombing at will, raises an obvious question.
Multiversality
Amanda Gefter may have inadvertently answered her own question in posing her third option for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe to our existence: “we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation” (6 December 2008, p 48). For observation presupposes consciousness, and in eastern philosophies god is consciousness 鈥� not an external creator or magician. She ends by saying: “If we in some sense created the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us. This is speculative, but at least it’s science.” Really? Let’s hope so. It is high time science studied consciousness per se, not as some assumed derivative of the brain, or of some other aspect of physiology.
From Hamid Aziz
The question of the cause of the arising of the universe, the big bang and time and space is not solved by doubtful theories about the existence of a multiverse or parallel universes. There are forces and constants that define all these universes. Even if we find a unified field theory the mystery about why that exists remains: why would the multiverse conform to such an equation?
Llanwrtyd Wells, Powys, UK
Something for nothing
A something-for-nothing universe epitomises the hubris that is one feature of the contemporary science scene. Krauss outlines Alan Guth’s inflation, which describes a flat universe which trades off the positive energy of particles for the negative energy of gravity to provide a “free lunch” (22 November 2008, p 53). According to Krauss, this resolves Thomas Aquinas’s theological question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Logically, it does not.
Krauss further believes this is a new idea, whereas a zero-based universe can be found in “cosmological science” dating back at least 5000 years in, for example, Indian and Persian ideas. So science has not “altered the playing field for metaphysical speculations in a dramatic and beautiful way”. It has simply rediscovered or reframed an old idea, one which has been the backbone of many metaphysical speculations.
This is one of a number of examples of straying from science to home-cooked and half-baked philosophy, although this is not amongst the extreme examples (try, “How Einstein kept it simple”, 5 July 2008, p 50) and he is far from alone. I do not belong to any church, but I value the real rigour of science. What the majority believe and do has nothing to do with science or “truth”, so there is no need to fight against it. Furthermore, if New 杏吧原创 and similar journals are going to allow half-baked anti-religious sentiment, why not allow half-baked pro-religious sentiment?
After all, the Enlightenment’s stance aimed to isolate science from religion and politics and fight for tolerance and diversity.