In the red
Frans de Waal asks “Why do humans blush?”, and states that we are the only primate to do so (31 January, p 41).
How does he know? Would blushing be visible in hairy primates or, for that matter, in dark-skinned humans? Maybe research has answered these questions. If so, it would be interesting to know what methods were used.
From Gwilym Colman
Frans de Waal asks why humans blush visibly when embarrassed or caught in a lie when this gives away their true feelings and makes it harder to manipulate others. In both cases the facts of the situation have already become apparent so dishonesty at this stage is unlikely to help matters.
It might, though, be worthwhile to try to limit the possible unpleasant consequences by another form of manipulation 鈥� could blushing have evolved as an appeasement display?
Rochester, Kent, UK
Anaesthetic mystery
I read with interest the letter from Douglas Kell regarding the Meyer-Overton hypothesis and the mode of action of anaesthetics (7 February, p 18). While the work of Paul Dobson and others is ground-breaking and certainly goes a long way to providing explanation of the long-held mysteries of anaesthetic action, it cannot be the whole story. The actions of more modern anaesthetics such as propfol and thiopentone sodium are well documented now: but what of the older agents such as alpha chloralose, or chloral hydrate?
I am unaware of anyone having demonstrated activity related to the neurotransmitter GABA by these agents: it would help to complete the picture if a non-Meyer-Overton mode of action could be found for them.
This might suggest why it is near impossible to induce anaesthesia with alpha chloralose yet, once induced, insensibility can be maintained.
Immoral advances
Most people who resist things like genetically-modified organisms are not doing it because they think scientists should not play God (10 January, p 29). They resist because they perceive a danger to themselves, to other organisms and the environment.
I live in a country whose rivers are degraded and whose land is increasingly salinated because farmers in the past followed the advice of accredited scientists about how to increase yield. The arguments for GMOs are very similar, it seems to me, to the arguments for land clearance, pesticides, superphosphates, irrigation and so on. The scientists were giving the best advice available at the time, but it was the wrong advice for a sustainable future.
Much resistance to scientific innovation is based on rational caution rooted in the knowledge of past mistakes. 杏吧原创s need to accept that their work may have serious unintended consequences. As Lewis Wolpert says in the article, “It’s a safety issue, not an ethical issue.”
Instant annihilation
Mark Buchanan’s article pointing to the implications of the minuscule possibility of the Large Hadron Collider producing a black hole is no doubt right to consider the difficulty of understanding the mathematical probability in realistic terms (24 January, p 32). But he barely considers the significance of the consequences.
If it does result in an all-earth-enveloping black hole, I assume that this will happen effectively instantaneously. Hence we will not suffer for any period of time and we shall know nothing about it 鈥� we shall simply cease to exist.
From Dave Prichard
Mark Buchanan gives some cause for comfort. That the possibility appears to be so remote means we can all relax. In addition, what little I know about black holes suggests we’ll not know much about it if it does happen; and there’ll be no one around to say “I told you so.”
More important to me is the morality of it all. Having insulted Pluto by demoting it to a dwarf planet (something Ceres can’t be too pleased about) we risk compounding the insult by creating a black hole that will annihilate it. Remote extraterrestrials of the future will view such behaviour as irresponsible.
Bluff Point, Western Australia
Wrong heretic wrong
Sorry, Robert Scopes, but Copernicus is also the wrong heretic (24 January, p 29). History usually gives Galileo the credit for explaining why the sun rises every morning 鈥� hence Steve Jones’s choice, (20/27 December 2008, p 71). I would give it to Johannes Kepler.
Copernicus won’t wash because, briefly, his theory was wrong, it didn’t work, it was qualitatively not much better than Ptolemy’s, and it contradicted the known (Aristotelian) physics of the time. It was not widely accepted by anybody.
Final acceptance of a heliocentric theory would depend upon a number of factors coming together over the next hundred years, including the collection of consistent and accurate data (by Tycho Brahe) which allowed the development of a simple and elegant theory (Johannes Kepler), the development of an alternative physics to Aristotle’s (Galileo Galilei) which resolved some of the physical contradictions in such a theory, the use of the telescope to provide evidence for the new theory (Galileo), and wide acceptance by their peers over time because of the new theory’s predictive power (for example in Kepler’s Rudolphine tables). It is this last factor which is probably the most important, both for Kepler and against Copernicus; the (scientific) proof of the pudding is always in the eating.
Truth or pare
It was with some d茅j脿 vu that I read A. C. Grayling’s proposal to establish a clerical elite to pronounce a canon of websites deemed acceptable for use in schools and other public institutions (17 January, p 44).
Here are three names from the past: Nupedia, Google Answers, and Best of the Web. Their histories are easily found through Google. If Grayling has not heard of them, that reflects not so much on his knowledge of internet history but on the worth of the projects.
They were all intended to index or create quality information on the web. They all failed. They created nothing of value, and left nothing of value behind them. The websites are today respectively disappeared, defunct, and a zombie.
They failed because no one has any reason to contribute to them, and no one has any reason to consult them. The same goes for Grayling’s index 鈥� unless perhaps teachers in public employment are required to do so. One must also wonder whether a stamp of official approval will in reality enhance or impair the credibility of a site.
Meanwhile, there is a successful market in site-blockers for parents to supervise their children’s net access, a process that the great and the good had very little to do with, and Wikipedia, that easy target of lazy criticism, continues to thrive despite its impossibility.
What is needed is for people to learn to make such judgements themselves: how to read a text, how to judge its accuracy and reasoning, how to make an argument and write a text yourself. How to know what you are looking at, whether you are looking at a web page, or at a politician, a teacher, a columnist, or the natural world.
It’s called getting an education, which is what people are supposed to be doing at schools and universities.
From Andrew Philips
How Grayling can use the term “quantum leap” to describe “significant change” is beyond me.
San Francisco, CA
Darwin was right
What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?
First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. The subtitle, “cutting down the tree of life”, made matters worse. The cover story is about recent discoveries of horizontal gene transfer, chimeras, and endosymbiosis: but since Darwin knew nothing of genes, he could hardly have been wrong on any of those topics. (Would you title a story about microwaves “Newton was wrong”?)
Besides, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure 鈥� but about evolution.
In spite of a few quotations of dubious hype by protagonists, nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification, by natural selection and other factors.
The problem is not the content of the article, which is interesting science: it’s the “golly gee” way it is presented.
Evolution’s base is heredity; heredity generates hierarchy, hence evolution generates hierarchy. Of course there’s a tree; it’s just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled organism base.
And sure, humans hybridised with closely-related Neanderthals, but they don’t hybridise with giraffes. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we derive by sequencing their DNA.
The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students, and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology. It fairly chortles in anticipation of the damage that will be done by creationists parlaying your reputation into propaganda.
And indeed, this has happened: within hours of publication, members of the Texas State Board of Education were citing the article as evidence that teachers needed to teach creationist-inspired “weaknesses of evolution”, claiming: “Darwin’s tree of life is wrong”.
Whatever the motive, this was irresponsible journalism. For an example of responsible journalism, see the National Geographic‘s cover for February 2009, which read “What Darwin Didn’t Know”. If you get a reputation for sensationalism, people will begin to mistrust more sober stories about striking new developments.
You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public. We all now have to go out and try to correct all the misapprehensions your cover has engendered.
鈥� Jerry Coyne is blogging his new book at .
For the record
鈥� The correct DOI for the paper by Caroline Ummenhofer and colleagues on El Ni帽o (7 February, p 16) is
Whither the wit?
Pedro Ferreira, reviewing Graham Farmelo’s biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, says “he comes across as a truly unpleasant man. I am surprised that people put up with him” (10 January, p 43). To me, Dirac came across as hilarious. His “When I say ‘Yes’, it does not mean that I agree; it means that you should go on” is a barb worthy of Oscar Wilde.
I applaud a bloke who doesn’t gossip about matters terrifying to all: scientists of the day were releasing the energy of the atom.
I think the dry-witted Paul Dirac would have made an honoured guest at any Australian gathering.
Darwin was right
What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?
First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution.
Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
Of course there’s a tree; it’s just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.
The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology. Indeed, within hours of publication members of the Texas State Board of Education were citing the article as evidence that teachers needed to teach creationist-inspired “weaknesses of evolution”, claiming: “Darwin’s tree of life is wrong”.
You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public. We all now have to try to correct all the misapprehensions your cover has engendered.
Find a longer version of this letter online
Cyberbeasties
Dan Jones writes that people often find scientific research ethically objectionable due to fear of the unknown or the “yuk response” (10 January, p 29). I had a yuk response of my own. I couldn’t believe he made no mention of a very recent, morally repugnant invention: the cyborg animal.
These are animals whose movements are controlled via electrodes in their brains, effectively turning them into robots (8 March, p 40). Surely to completely nullify a living creature’s will in this way is to attain a new level of evil?
It appears to me that in his desire to ensure that worthy scientific research isn’t stopped by faulty ethical arguments, Jones misrepresents what arguments do exist to make them appear weaker. Perhaps he needs to read his own quotation of Nick Bostrom: “It is very dangerous to try picking and choosing which truths we dare acknowledge.”
Gravities
The problem accounting for the anomalous motions of interplanetary probes under gravity could be resolved if there were more than one gravity (20 September 2008, p 38).
Until not very long ago, matter was considered as more or less one stuff, forming different elements. Now we know better. Baryons (protons and neutrons) can be thought of as a different kind of matter from leptons (electrons and positrons).
On top of that, the origin of gravity, the one-of-a-kind type, still defies explanation. So perhaps there is more than one gravity.
If baryon gravity and lepton gravity really differ on our planet, it would mean that our understanding of gravity was starting on the wrong footing, because the stuff that makes up the Earth is atypical of the mass in the universe.
The main mass in the universe, including our sun, is hydrogen. While the proportion of baryons to leptons in the sun is slightly more than 1, for our planet it is well above 2.
If baryon gravity and lepton gravity really differ, this may have subtle effects on the motion of interplanetary satellites.
Carbon-lined cloud
The New Zealand coal industry recently announced that it will cut production by 20 per cent due to a 30 per cent decrease in overseas steel manufacture. Is this part of a world trend? It will be interesting to see this year’s figures for the levels measured at the carbon dioxide sampling centre at Mauna Loa in Hawaii.
This little economic wrinkle just might give us the breathing space to get our act together in time to avoid an ecological crash that would make us look back on 2009 with nostalgia.
Groove to the beat
Your piece on babies’ sense of rhythm (31 January, p 15) made me wonder why rhythm is so attractive. Could it be connected to a fear of uncertainty?
When immersed in rhythmic music, the beat tantalises us with the illusion of near-certainty of what 鈥� in terms of sound 鈥� is about to happen in the next few moments.
For those few minutes the future holds no fear. Reacting to rhythm may be the only human activity that provides such a sense of precognition for an extended period.
Tetris to the rescue
I can confirm, from personal experience, that post-traumatic stress can be moderately alleviated by Tetris (17 January, p 12). Having had two nervous breakdowns in the last five years, I needed (and still need) to find some way of suppressing my thoughts, memories and flashbacks of trauma.
Not being a drinker and being too middle-class to have access to illegal drugs 鈥� and finding prescription drugs ineffective 鈥� I was fortunate to stumble across the distraction of Tetris 鈥� which I played day and night for many months. I played to the extent that I acquired repetitive strain injury. I find it requires such extensive spatial and visual brainpower that it disengages my capacity for verbal thought and brings relief from anxiety and flashbacks 鈥� until such time as exhaustion overtakes me.
Upon waking from my restless sleep, disturbed by nightmares borne of terrible memories, I turn immediately to the Tetris I keep on my bedside table, which provides further relief until I pass out once again.
Truth or pare
A. C. Grayling suggests that “an international consortium of universities should set up panels to audit the worth of websites” (17 January, p 44). Considering the volume of information online and its exponential growth, any such undertaking would be outdated before it could report.
We should not worry about the transcription errors that Grayling dwells on, so much as inadvertent misrepresentations of scientific information or the process of science, or deliberate attempts to hoodwink. People need tools to defend themselves against these 鈥� tools such as those I describe in my book Lies, Damned Lies, and Science: How to sort through the noise around global warming, the latest health claims, and other scientific controversies (FT Press Science, 2009).
To help people function in the information age, our education system needs to shift from an emphasis on memorising facts to an emphasis on equipping students with the tools they need to critique information.
Students need to learn about the tricky ways in which statistics are used; why there are legitimate reasons that scientists disagree; how media often misrepresent these disagreements; the importance of consulting multiple sources and seeking the original source when possible; and so on. Unlike a list of good and bad websites, these kinds of tools help people critique new information as it comes along.
Due credit
Richard Hammond discusses keeping children interested in science (3 January, p 14). The media have a vital role to play here. Their obsession with doctors and hospitals means that the scientists behind medical breakthroughs do not receive sufficient credit.
Witness the recent media frenzy over the birth of the first baby in the UK to be born free of a gene that would predispose her to breast and ovarian cancer, thanks to embryonic screening. All the credit was given to the “IVF doctor”; none to the laboratory team at University College London who made this advance possible through years of work.
There is always a team of scientists behind the scenes, whether the result is testing a single cell from an eight-cell embryo or developing gene therapy for blindness. If more prominence were given to them, youngsters might see a future for themselves in the biomedical sciences.