Natural born belief
Michael Brooks asks whether children raised in isolation would invent a religion (7 February, p 30). They might: but without knowledge of the Prophet, they would not reinvent Islam; without knowledge of Jesus, they would not reinvent Christianity; and without knowledge of Abraham and Moses they could not reinvent Judaism.
By contrast, given sufficient time, their descendants would rediscover evolution through natural selection, without knowledge of Darwin. Newtonian dynamics does not require knowledge of Newton; and relativity could be rediscovered without knowledge of Einstein.
In such a society, I would be interested to see whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics would be reproduced.
From Aidan Hancock
Another interesting aspect of our in-built tendency to believe in religion is the increasingly widespread belief in conspiracy theories. These present the same aspects as gods 鈥� agencies more powerful than normal men, acting in mysterious ways. And is the tendency to religious belief simply the dark side of Occam’s razor? Religion tends to give much simpler answers than reality, which many people prefer.
London, UK
From Llewelyn Storey
It’s strange that Brooks pays so little attention to the possible role of dreams: when people die, they don’t just disappear, but stick around in our dreams.
Unless you knew better you might think they were alive somewhere and you’d better do things to placate them.
And what sort of community would they live in? You might well assume it’s like ours, and since we have a chief, they must have one too. If we placate him, maybe he’ll keep his subjects in order. So now we have beliefs in life after death, in the power of ritual, and in the existence of a god: a religion.
Cucuron, Vaucluse, France
From Paul Wilson
It is hardly surprising that religion arises, when humans have evolved the characteristics that lead to cooperation and social cohesion, the desire to attribute intention and design, as well as instincts for unquestioning trust in authority and following the herd. Perhaps we should conclude that religion will inevitably be with us, and all we can do is encourage the development of those varieties with the most tolerant and constructive outcomes, while minimising their influence in broader education and government.
Kelvedon, Essex, UK
Stashing carbon
Beware of the law of unintended consequences when calling for charcoal to be buried (14 February, p 26). Carbon credits sound sensible, but smallholder farmers in India have very little economic power. So, as the value of credits increases, large agribusinesses could assemble land and displace the smallholders. James Lovelock is right: the solution is for farmers to use charcoal for moisture retention and increased nutrition (24 January, p 30). Direct investment is necessary to develop appropriate equipment and to demonstrate the benefits.
From Robert Alcock
So “burying crop waste deep in the ocean” at a cost of $95 per tonne “is likely to be competitive with other methods, such as storing [carbon dioxide] in empty aquifers” (7 February, p 16). Well, yes, in that both are impractical, hare-brained notions. Doesn’t most crop waste float, for starters?
There are less costly ways to lock up carbon from the atmosphere, as Lovelock points out. Crop wastes can also be used in construction, for structure and for insulation. When complete, my straw-bale house will contain over 10 tonnes of wheat straw, which would otherwise be rotting in a field. The materials are cheap and easy to build with.
Fixing atmospheric carbon doesn’t require elaborate schemes and outlandish ideas. What it takes is a change of mentality 鈥� seeing “waste” as a resource.
Llanez, Cantabria, Spain
Jim Giles writes:
鈥� Using straw for building might not be any cheaper than sinking it since the packing and transport costs would probably be about the same. As to whether crop waste would float 鈥� it would be packed into dense bales before sinking.
Biofuel limitations
Nicholas Stern calls for support for the development and “scaling-up” of second-generation biofuels, “which do not directly affect food production” (24 January, p 26). Assuming such biofuels were only made from crop and forestry wastes and sundry biomass crops, this is in most cases a gross misuse of woody biomass compared with direct burning, for example, as a substitute for coal.
Doing this usually abates far more emissions and does so more cost-effectively. Most second-generation biofuels would stand no chance in the free carbon market that he advocates, even less than would most of the first-generation biofuels.
Has Stern read the OECD’s 2008
The human and ecological harm now arising through the exploitation of marginal lands for biofuels could make last century’s World Bank-funded dams look like millponds.
We could rig subsidies in favour of “second-generation” biofuels 鈥� and hope to lessen the damaging externalities 鈥� or we can abolish mandated levels of biofuel use altogether for the common good of the environment, the poor and the economy.
Welcome comfort
I was touched by your interview with Irene Scheimberg on her work as a paediatric pathologist (31 January, p 26).
As a doctor in general practice, I would not have imagined that a post-mortem report could be a source of comfort for grieving parents. After the inexplicable stillbirth of our beautiful baby girl at full term in November, however, this was something I was forced to consider.
The decision to allow your baby to be taken for post-mortem examination goes against every protective nurturing instinct there is.
For me, the guilt of making that decision was only heightened by the small feeling of relief that came with knowing that I had done nothing “wrong”. Reading an interview with a sensitive pathologist who has such an understanding of the significance of her role for the parents and families of the babies she looks after is a source of comfort at a time when comfort is a difficult thing to find.
Robotic obedience
Jeff Hecht, in reviewing P. W. Singer’s book on robotic warfare, Wired for War, accepts the given examples of “picking the wrong target” 鈥� that a “high-tech radar” is incapable of discerning the different flight profiles of a slow-moving, large aircraft and a smaller, fast-moving F-14 Tomcat (24 January, p 57).
IranAir flight 655, an Airbus airliner travelling from Bandar Abbas on the Straits of Hormuz to Dubai, was on a steady climb at 319 knots when it was blown out of the sky on 3 July 1988 by missiles from the US Aegis class cruiser, the USS Vincennes.
The course, speed and radar signature should have in fact have indicated precisely what type of aircraft it was. Captain Will Rogers, commander of the Vincennes, was exonerated by a military board of inquiry in August 1988. Two years later the first President George Bush awarded Rogers the Legion of Merit medal 鈥� for “responding appropriately to a threat to his ship”.
Dignitas Darwinae
I was disappointed that after introducing the Catholic church’s recent report on bioethics, Dignitas Personae, Lawrence Krauss made it abundantly clear that he did not feel that any deep exploration of the Catholic church’s point of view was worthwhile (7 February, p 25).
So he went on to denigrate that church’s understanding of scientific progress and hence to reject any ethical conclusions it may have come to.
A fundamental principle of Catholicism is that all human life is sacred and that life begins at the moment the zygote has formed.
Krauss and others who plump for some other definition are entitled to their point of view, but no scientific discoveries have rendered the first one either invalid or meaningless.
Krauss appears to have misunderstood the church’s view. Its ethical problem with IVF is not that babies so conceived don’t have a soul, but that all the embryos destroyed do.
From Laurence Baker
Krauss rightly condemns religion as an obstacle to scientific truth. Worryingly, evolution appears to be following in the footsteps of religion.
Darwin’s home, , is a museum with artefacts once touched by the man himself. This is the modern equivalent of pilgrimages to see relics.
The Natural History Museum in London recently installed a marble statue of Darwin seated like some Greek god in the temple of life.
Perhaps in 2000 years’ time people will doubt whether Darwin really existed and will ascribe to him mythical and legendary status.
Brigg, Lincolnshire, UK
Edge of darkness
Amanda Gefter makes much of the idea that in “dark flow” we may be observing effects from beyond the observable universe (24 January, p 50).
Need I say more?
Hologravity
As a schoolboy I used to wonder why the law of gravitational attraction is an inverse-square law rather than an inverse-cube law. I now wonder whether there might be a connection between the holographic principle (17 January, p 24) and the fact that the gravitational attraction is an inverse-square law.
The editor writes:
鈥� You anticipate our next issue.
For the record
鈥� An Editorial discussed what would happen if the world were to warm by an average of just 4 掳C, which “some models predict could happen as soon as 2050” (28 February, p 3). It should rather have said, as did our cover story in that issue, that “some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050” (p 28).
鈥� A transcription error made it seem that James Lovelock said “the biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly” (24 January, p 30). That should have been 550 GT of carbon dioxide. Also several readers queried Lovelock saying “it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt” of wind power, since the British Wind Energy Assocation says 1 GW of installed wind generation capacity takes around 250 square kilometres. Lovelock stands by his figure, saying it is based on 1 MW turbines on land.
鈥� We unaccountably referred to San Francisco as “Cisco” (7 February, p 7). San Franciscans prefer it not be called “Frisco”, either.
Natural born belief
So “there’s now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired” (7 February, p 33).
But it is notoriously difficult to demonstrate that behaviour is genuinely innate or hard-wired. This is especially so for humans whose intensive parental care and social interactions mould their mind from birth. Consequently, it is naive to study the responses of young children without controlling for the beliefs and attitudes of their parents and families. By the time they can talk, children have a strong notion of what pleases their parents, and increasingly imitate them. Also children of that age have probably had stories told or read to them, many of which are full of fantasies, including thinking animals and inanimate objects with magical properties. So it’s hardly surprising that even young children respond in ways indicating that they have some supernatural beliefs.
That supernatural beliefs persist into adulthood is equally unsurprising, especially where children grow up in broadly religious societies having culturally prevalent ideas of “god”. It is certainly wishful thinking to conclude from such studies that “religious beliefs are hard-wired”.
The prevalence of “gods” and other religious beliefs in societies worldwide is likewise open to many interpretations other than hard-wiring of the human brain. For example, the ability of our brains to see patterns, learn cause and effect relationships, and look for explanations of observations are all clearly highly adaptive traits.
The studies reported in Michael Brooks’s article seem driven to a great extent by the wish to substantiate innate belief in “god(s)”. To start investigations with such an a priori objective leads to just the sort of uncritical interpretations reported in this article.
From Tony Faithfull
I find the idea of co-evolution useful when thinking about the evolution of religion.
Treat religion as a meme that has evolved from less complex predecessors and has adapted with humans as its host. It will survive either if it has some genuinely benefits for the host, or if it propagates successfully and is not excessively detrimental to the host.
Benefits to the host might include: methods of disease avoidance such as circumcision, monogamy, food preferences; methods for improving health such as eating fish on Fridays; and methods that encourage working together against the competition.
I speculate that a slightly detrimental meme that is good at its own reproduction will reduce the fitness of its host community and as a consequence gradually die out or evolve to become more beneficial to its hosts over time 鈥� just as diseases tend to do. Hosts attacked by detrimental memes evolve a resistance to being infected, which improves the fitness of the host community. Maybe a part of this evolving resistance is science.
East Brunswick, Victoria, Australia
From Fenton Robb
The article on “Natural born believers” seems to have missed the importance of the function gods perform. Creative gods provide First Causes to prevent explanatory recession into infinity 鈥� “so stop asking why”. As Architects of the Universe, they predestine some or all of their creation and so remove moral responsibility from mere humans. Gods provide otherwise helpless individuals and societies with the hope of controlling factors in their lives such as the weather or recovery from illness.
Perhaps most cogently, gods control the behaviour of individuals and societies by universal surveillance and inexorable justice at the end of life. So however feeble man-made systems of justice and retribution may be, there is always a supernatural judge in the afterlife to put things to right in the end.
Of course, gods also provide the moral support for just wars against the forces of evil.
And why do children so readily believing in supernatural beings? Surely because they are hard-wired to believe almost anything at all in their race to find out about the complexities of the world into which they have been catapulted.
Eyemouth, Berwickshire, UK
From Peter Wright
Michael Brooks asks whether a group of children left together would create a “creole” religion. Surely this has already been tested in human history?
There are many cases of new religions beginning where a native religious tradition has been suppressed, often from fusion of surviving traditional belief with features of an imposed religion as in voodoo, or the “talking cross” movement in Yucat谩n, or the John Frum cargo cults in the Pacific.
Polegate, East Sussex, UK
Darwin, Lincoln and emancipation
Your excellent selection of books on Darwin enhanced each other (7 February, p 48). If it is a coincidence that Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day, it is not without note that both men should be driven by the same “Sacred Cause” founded on a conviction of common humanity, nor that the two great ideas of the 19th century 鈥� democracy and evolution 鈥� should appear almost joined at the hip.
While Darwin was aboard the Beagle, the great struggle for parliamentary reform was shaking the foundation of the traditional social order in the UK. Theories of evolution and emancipation were seen as twin threats to this order. In America, the most virulent opposition to emancipation came from the same southern states that are now most vociferous in their opposition to evolution.
With the election of a black president, the success of one cause has been achieved. We live in hope for the success of the other.
Dan Dare was first, again
You report a proposed device that would detect a human heart beating, even through closed doors (24 January, p 45). This was suggested in a Dan Dare story serialised as The Man from Nowhere and its sequel Rogue Planet in the weekly The Eagle in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It was used by “the baddies” 鈥� I think these were the Phants in this instance. Of course in those days no technical specifics were provided.
For the record
鈥� When Catherine Brahic wrote that “the US could replace all its cars and trucks with electric cars powered by wind turbines taking up less than 3 square kilometres 鈥� in theory” she was referring to the area of the footings of the turbine towers (online, 14 January). On land, the area in between could still be farmed, for example.