Views on vivisection
It is rare that the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, which exists to oppose animal experimentation, finds itself in broad agreement with Simon Festing, chief executive of Understanding Animal Research, a group which promotes acceptance of vivisection (5 June, p 22).
Festing discusses recent studies that have found that a significant amount of animal research into human disease is not published 鈥� presumably because the results are negative 鈥� and that experimental design, statistical analysis and reporting are often poor. As he recognises, all this has important implications for human health, quite apart from animal welfare.
The lack of relevance to people of animal studies is striking. Andrew Knight’s review of the efficacy of research using chimpanzees, genetically our closest cousins, found that less than 15 per cent of a statistically significant random sample of papers (14 out of 95) had been cited by subsequent papers with relevance to medical advancement (). Within these, chimpanzee research was not considered to play an essential part in the development of the human treatment. There is little point in animal studies being better designed if there is a fundamental problem with extrapolating data to humans.
Publication of negative results of animal studies along with registration and tracking of the studies, as is now compulsory with clinical trials, would reduce the duplication of animal suffering and provide a more complete scientific picture.
However, in the BUAV’s experience, pleas for transparency are likely to fall on deaf ears. In the past, researchers and government officials have used every trick in the book to stymie requests for freedom of information. Nonetheless, it is certainly time for greater openness 鈥� for everyone’s benefit.
From Richard Mountford
Even the best animal experiments for human medicine suffer from the problem that they are looking at artificially induced disease in the wrong species, living in unnatural conditions. Surely, it is time to focus our finite research funds on the many more reliable medical research methods now available: epidemiology, microdosing, computer modelling and tissue cultures. If the European Union were to set a date for ending animal experiments, then developing non-animal research methods will be taken far more seriously.
Hildenborough, Kent, UK
From Derek Williams
Mark Mattson warns that the unhealthy conditions in which lab animals are kept can detrimentally affect test results for new medicines (15 May, p 24). He fails to mention a fundamental characteristic of all the most commonly used animals (rats, guinea pigs and so on): coprophagia is part of their normal function. They also have a large caecum for fermentation of food on its second cycle through the gut.
Do researchers take into account the different digestive systems of the lab animals and the intended recipients of the medicines they test? I doubt it.
Donvale, Victoria, Australia
The coming dystopia
The conclusion to Henry Harpending’s review of Spencer Wells’s Pandora’s Seed was chilling: “governments should close international borders to migration and impose a draconian policy of family limitation like China” (5 June, p 42).
Sustainability and orderliness can be achieved through rational argument and consensus. Where they are imposed from above and raised to the level of absolute values, the result is sterility: the destruction of all individuality, creativity and self-determination. Such action would be the end of that which makes us human and makes life worth living.
I begin to wonder whether the scientific legacy of our own generation to our children will not be greater freedom and a better life, but rather an existence in a dystopia too awful to imagine.
In a word
Christine Kenneally’s provocative article is a welcome airing of scientific work on human language (29 May, p 32). However, it repeats an error from Evans and Levinson’s original paper: that the Native American language Kiowa has a suffix meaning “unexpected number of”. In 10 years’ work on the language, I have yet to find it. The Kiowa do use a suffix to say “three or more young men”, or “not-two hairs” (togul+dau; aul+dau). But if dau meant “unexpected number of”, Kiowas would have to think that teenagers don’t hang around in groups and hairs come in pairs.
My response, published with Evans and Levinson, pointed out this error, as well as showing that Kiowa strongly supports the Chomskian concept of a universal grammar ().
The editor writes:
鈥� Evans and Levinson have published a correction to the Kiowa example in the same issue of . The general point about plurals not being straightforward still stands, and can be exemplified with another language: Nen from Papua New Guinea 鈥� also cited in the original article. In Nen you take duals (for two) as the basic stem, with a derived non-dual (anything other than two), while the affixing system distinguishes singular versus non-singular (two or more). Plurals are then composed by combining non-singulars with non-duals (numbers for which there is neither one nor two). In a further twist, you get exhaustive plurals by combining the dual with the singular.
From Robert Morley
Kenneally refers to some 200 languages as “critically endangered”, lamenting the loss of 115 more. Natural scientists inevitably seem to see change as detrimental, but surely if we all spoke the same language it would be a very positive outcome for humankind.
Language differences inevitably contribute to tribal behaviour in international relations, and even within nations: consider the cultural divide and financial burden of maintaining bilingualism. One global language please, and the sooner the better.
London, UK
Rational optimist
In her article Liz Else claims that in The Rational Optimist, I “failed to recognise that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea” (12 June, p 28). Yet I state clearly in my book: “Take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient runoff and fishing”.
The five experts Else consulted, while critical of my conclusions, actually confirm the factual truth of my statements about corals. The single exception is where two claim that temperature is changing at an unprecedented rate. They must be unaware of the work of W. Dansgaard and others which points to estimates of warming at the end of the last ice age of 7 掳C in 50 years or less (), which is nine times as fast as the 0.161 掳C per decade recorded since 1975.
Since one of them accuses me of cherry-picking studies, he might be interested that an important new meta-analysis of 372 different experimental studies by Iris Hendriks and others ( concludes that marine ecosystems are “more resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions”, and that ocean acidification “may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century”.
A full response to their critique is on my website at .
Psychobubble
Stephen Lea’s argument that economics is incomplete unless psychology is taken into account (8 May, p 24) reminded me of something that I was taught several years ago. At the very beginning of the health economics part of a course in epidemiology, my tutor stated that “economics is a branch of psychology”. That seems to put into perspective the reliability of economists’ predictions and forecasts.
Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of the recent UK general election, sections of the media never tired of telling us that financiers and various economists were unhappy with the hung parliament in which no single political party was in charge. It seems that those views were more influenced by political preferences than economics.
All this serves as a reminder that much of economics is at least under the influence of politics 鈥� itself a branch of psychology, perhaps.
Evolving physics
Marcelo Gleiser seems to assume that either there is a single grand unified physical theory or there is fundamental asymmetry and lawlessness built into the universe (8 May, p 28). In doing so, he goes along with the implicit assumption in physics that laws extrapolated from observed effects in one corner of the universe will be valid everywhere and for all time.
This assumption is, however, unprovable, and might be wrong. Instead, the universe could have built into it the potential to update the physical laws that were needed to get it started in the first place.
Perhaps this hypothesis that the physical world has the capacity to modify the rules governing its behaviour is rejected because it smacks of vitalism 鈥� seemingly a much more serious scientific sin than mathematical Platonism, which asserts the immutable nature of mathematical entities. But given the dismal failure so far of grand unified theories and string theory, which Gleiser himself admits, maybe it is time for a new approach.
For the record
鈥� As noted in a recent article (19 June, p 24), common names can lead us into confusing territory. A fine example was our recent reference to the monarch butterfly (5 June, p 32), which is known as the wanderer in Australia.
鈥� The relief wells mentioned in our article on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (5 June, p 5) do not work by relieving the pressure inside the well. Rather, they allow engineers to pump a specialised heavy liquid into the flowing well . The liquid is denser than oil and so exerts pressure to stem the flow of oil. This makes it possible to pour cement in through the relief well to seal off the well for good.
鈥� We must have been asleep when we placed Victor Spoormaker in the Netherlands in our article on lucid dreaming. He is in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich (12 June, p 36).
鈥� To clarify, the prediction of a 0.3 掳C drop in temperature that may arise from solar activity is independent of, and would be dwarfed by, any increase in global temperature due to climate change (12 June, p 30).