Lay down your arms
Frank Jackson and Peggy Conroy point out that war is a profitable business, if not the most profitable business (25 July, p 26). The “military-congressional-industrial-complex” and the multinational banks that were arguably one of the driving forces behind the current financial meltdown, along with all corporate bodies in the western world, share one major flaw.
Their directors are legally obliged to put the interests of shareholders above everything else. While they may be required to pay lip service to the environment, customer well-being, sustainable strategies and the efficacy of their products, they are ultimately judged in the market by the return they offer investors, and can be held negligent if they do not put that return first.
I would suggest, rather than requiring scientists and technologists to sign a version of the Hippocratic oath, changing corporate law to include a “first do no harm” clause.
Ewa Bacon claims that war stimulates technological progress (1 August, p 24). Instead I suggest that the key progress in any “thread” of research actually occurs in peacetime.
What happens to research during any protracted war is the unfocused application of resources, which most often yields failure. If war ever stimulates success, this is primarily due to the temporary removal of patent restrictions.
War should be replaced by a version of the ritual war games found in the more civilised societies of New Guinea prior to contamination from the west.
Climate dialogue
I heartily support Bj酶rn Lomborg’s appeal for “a more reasoned, more constructive” dialogue on global warming, which you quoted in Viewfinder (27 June, p 25). A search for the phrase “save the planet” on New 杏吧原创‘s website turns up over 100 articles. While many may use it ironically, such an evocative phrase is surely not helpful given the prevailing level of ignorance. As far as I can tell, global warming is no danger to the planet, which can do very well without polar bears, us or even a biosphere.
So tackling global warming is not about saving the planet, nor about saving life on Earth. It’s not even about saving mammals as a class, or humans as a species. Surely all we can confidently say is that a lot of species are endangered, biodiversity is declining, and that there will be major upheavals even if we do take steps to reduce emissions.
The debate is really about preserving our way of life. In the worst case we will be trying to save enough civilisation not to have to start again from the Stone Age.
Saving the gorillas
Stephanie Pain reports that the bright spot in gorilla conservation is Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda and she mentions several conservationists and schemes that contributed to its success (25 July, p 34).
I’d like to add two more to the list of those who are helping to save the gorillas: keepers of stingless bees and collectors of medicinal plants. In 1987 a joint project between WWF, UNESCO, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, and CARE Uganda reduced tension between park authorities and local people by allowing controlled sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants and beekeeping in forest margins.
These harvesters became the “gorilla guardians” by reporting the illegal activities of poachers, who threatened not only gorillas, but harvesters’ income and forest access. Such projects, which allow consultation with local people, may be too slow to save gorillas elsewhere but may help prevent resentment over restricted access to their habitats. There are other necessary angles: the promotes enforcement of laws; the primary education; and veterinary help.
Prior to reading Stephanie Pain’s article, I had no idea that mining for the mineral coltan, which is used in cellphones, is one of the many reasons why the mountain gorilla, and especially the Cross river gorillas, are disappearing. I will ensure I recycle my cellphone. This article was a real wake-up call.
Elk Grove, California, US
Assault on battery
Michael Brooks’s optimistic picture of the future of battery-powered cars (18 July, p 42) omits a number of negative points.
Lithium-ion cells are fragile: they are easily damaged by overcharging, over-discharging, or charging at extremes of temperature. At least one battery-powered car, the Tesla Roadster, is equipped with a cooling system for the battery pack.
In many parts of the world a heater would also be required, as charging below 0 掳C is particularly damaging. Li-ion batteries also lose capacity with use, and are expensive to replace.
Charging takes hours. What happens if you need a car for an emergency and the battery is flat? Running out of power on the road would involve a tow home. Heating the car’s interior is also likely to consume a significant amount of power and degrade the range in winter.
Battery cars may come one day, but my bet is that the internal combustion engine will be with us for the foreseeable future.
In his article, Michael Brooks states that “where a battery might have held 150 watt-hours per kilogram, it would suddenly hold 500, making batteries a better option than gasoline or diesel for powering cars”.
This looks more than a little optimistic, given that gasoline or diesel have an energy density of nearly 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram. A petrol or diesel engine and transmission weigh a good deal more than equivalent electric motors, but nothing like enough to make up for the difference.
When discussing batteries with air electrodes, there is no mention of their overwhelming advantage: they are much safer than any other kind of battery. In the event of an accident, they can’t release all their energy explosively. Like a tankful of petrol, they can only release their energy as fast as air can get to them.
Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK
Cooperative crowds
The article by Michael Bond on the cooperative behaviour of people in crowds (18 July, p 38) reminded me of an unusual personal experience from 1945.
I was an engineer aboard the SS Papanui, and on VJ Day we docked in Melbourne. I went ashore to join the throng gathered in the city centre to watch the celebratory firework display.
After the display, those who had been watching it from the Royal Botanical Gardens began to pour out onto the surrounding streets. They joined the crowd in the street at a crossroads, and the situation immediately became serious. On either side, shop windows were being forced in by the mass of people.
My experience as a youngster in the UK of crowds, following rugby matches in Cardiff, stood me in good stead. I knew to stay in the middle of the crowd to avoid being crushed against walls, to keep my hands in my pockets to avoid injury, and to go with the crowd until it eventually decompressed.
Moving slowly along with the crush of people, I found myself near a woman who was on the point of going down. I put my arms around her and managed to steer her out of the crowd. Everybody helped, perhaps because of my uniform.
Once we reached a shop doorway she began to recover, but she was anxious for her sister who was still in the midst of the crowd, and begged me to find her. I went back in, and within minutes recognised the sister from the description I had been given of her hat, and led her to the same shop doorway, again with the help of the crowd. On being reunited, the second sister begged me to go in once more to find her son. Remarkably, I found the dazed young man, and navigated him out to the same doorway. The ladies couldn’t believe it, and neither could I. It was fantastic.
Sturgeon general
Michael Grounds makes the claim that bees are less primitive than fish on the grounds that they are more recent by about 400 million years (11 July, p 27). While the Apidae may have emerged long after the earliest fish, that doesn’t make today’s bees more evolved than today’s fish. All animals existing today have been evolving for the same amount of time.
I would also question the idea that bees have “social and working lives more complex than those of fish”. It may appear so to us, but to bees it is simply how the world works. A bee’s behaviour is all hard-wired into its genetics.
A worker bee exists purely to find pollen and tell other worker bees about it. A fish, like a human, is a generalist, expected to do everything required to make a functional organism. There may be no recorded example of a fish telling other fish where to find food, but this would not be necessary: for fish that live in groups, communication skills are focused on ensuring the shoal stays together. If one of them finds food, the rest are all present.
There is little point asking which is more or less advanced; they are just different.
Mostly primate
When discussing childhood development and its impact on human behaviour, Alison Gopnik twice makes an assertion that has become a commonplace: “We share almost all of our genes with our closest primate relatives, so where does our distinctively human intelligence come from?” and that we are “so startlingly different from our genetically similar primate relatives” (1 August, p 44).
In other places, we are told humans have 98 or 99 per cent commonality of genes with chimps. If you consider all the biochemistry and the kinds of structures humans and chimps have in common, then to suggest anything other than that we are almost identical is gross arrogance.
For the record
鈥� The fire on the Brooks mountain range in northern Alaska is estimated to have emitted 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, not 1.3 billion (8 August, p 15)
鈥� Our interview with Baruch Blumberg (8 August, p 23) suffered acronym crosstalk: the second appearance of “HBV” referred to the hepatitis B virus, not the vaccine