Science sceptics
From Michael Duff, Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London
I enjoyed Milena Wazeck’s analysis of the thought processes of those who denied Einstein’s relativity (13 November, p 48). Yet it all sounded eerily familiar.
Phrases such as “when people don’t like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience” and “the increasingly mathematical approach of theoretical physics collided with the then widely held view that science is essentially simple mechanics, comprehensible to every educated layperson” call to mind the modern-day ramshackle alliance between unqualified scientists, the blogosphere and many science journalists when confronted with the academic consensus of superstrings and M-theory as the most promising candidates for unifying gravity with the other forces of nature. These people are quick to cry “this is not science”, while themselves resorting to pseudoscientific alternatives.
From Cameron Christie, Douglas, Isle of Man
In your editorial on the need to win over hearts and minds to rational thinking as opposed to the norm, which seems to be irrational beliefs, you appeal for “the rational case for irrational thinking” (13 November, p 5). Surely this rather misses the point of Milena Wazeck’s article on opposition to Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was that irrationality proved to be more persuasive. Perhaps we should use irrational arguments to win people over to rationality.
From Stephen Wilson, London, UK
Laura Spinney shows that there are other ways of thinking than the modern western norm (13 November, p 42), but the lessons she gives were not learned in the editorial piece “Applied rationality” (p 5). To malign “magical thinking” by assuming it is in opposition to a superior rational approach ignores a great deal of modern science. Magical thinking assumes connection rather than separation, something that has been out of fashion since Descartes but which quantum inseparability has proven.
Magical thinking also assumes that number, of itself, has power to order the way the universe behaves. This may have offended 19th-century mathematicians,but the appearance of such theoretical constructs as the Fibonacci sequence and fractal structures in nature suggests otherwise.
Far from being irrational, magical thinking constantly comes up trumps and is simply a starting point, like rationalism, from which reason and experiment can progress.
Improbable progress
Simon Williams waxes sniffily about the arbitrarily set “fiddle factor” in Petr Horava’s theory on how to unify quantum theory and relativity (18 September, p 27).
Copernicus came up with a passable theory of the movements of the solar system. Would Williams scoff at the fact that this, too, is full of fiddle factors, namely the orbital diameters of all the heavenly bodies. The ultimate goal of science may well be a theory of everything that needs no non-calculable “constants of nature”. However, if we reject any theory that falls short of this ideal, science will have to progress in quantum leaps, each with infinitesimal probability.
Future of the story
John Bickle and Sean Keating ponder the implications of digital technology on our internal narrative, and thus our sense of self (13 November, p 52). However, their arguments rest on two interlinked fallacies: that written narrative has always been the primary mode of storytelling; and that these narratives have always been linear and goal-oriented.
In fact, in his book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel shows that inner reading is historically recent and dependent on cultural and educational privilege: the first mention of the translation of the written page into an inner voice was made in around AD 397 by Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions, which is historically recent and culturally elitist.
Orature has primacy across the globe, and throughout history. Although common elements and apparent structures have been identified across cultures by notable folklorists such as Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp, oral traditions do not conform to the universal structure implied by Bickle and Keating. Anthropologists and performance theorists argue that orature is multilinear and participatory in many of its forms, often with an open-ended inflection towards action by the listener, as in the form of Zen ko艒ans.
Theorist of digital media Lev Manovich identifies the “database narrative” 鈥� which is de-centred, non-linear and interactive 鈥� as the product of digital tools. In fact there is a pervasive form of oral storytelling offline in which the teller draws a story from the database of cultural memory, personal knowledge and current events, which may be further inflected or altered by listener interjections.
Now you see it
Ben Haller dismisses as “silly and vacuous” the assertion that up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal (30 October, p 31). It is not.
Haller bases his criticism on his own assertion that “every second, I probably process more raw visual percepts than the number of words that go through my mind in an hour”. Whether these “raw visual percepts” amount to mental experiences is open to question.
Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has demonstrated that we are only ever conscious of a very small proportion of any visual field. We switch off our background consciousness of the bigger picture and are only aware of that upon which we focus attention. Of this very small amount we only actually “see” components such as edges. We add the notion of colour, for example, as labels to the data we receive: it does not exist anywhere in nature.
I suggest that we do this labelling through an essentially linguistic process.
Off colour
From the headline to the final quote, Helen Thomson’s article on auras was just sensationalism (20 November, p 14). As reported, the experiment lacked controls, which are especially important when the evidence comes through a subject’s report. If there were controls, they should have been reported.
If you choose to include the greatly overreaching claim that “those who see auras may have a form of synaesthesia”, you ought to have included comment from at least one sceptic. Do you really want to give self-styled psychics licence to claim justification from New 杏吧原创?
The editor writes:
鈥� We did report that a researcher not involved in the study said the results would be “hard to fake”. Though not mentioned in the article, control subjects were used in the study.
Human robots
Supposing that the concept of guilt is made obsolete by hard-wired brain functions, Bill Foster proposes that the purpose of judicial punishment is either deterrence or retribution (6 November, p 28). I think there is a third possibility.
If we humans are just very complex robots without genuine free will, we can punish and reward in order to correct or maintain certain behaviours. When a robot malfunctions the engineers will try to find the fault and correct it. If our human robot malfunctions, it is quite proper to take steps to correct him or her.
If putting someone in prison for the malfunction of having committed a crime will correct their behaviour, it should be done for their own sake and for the sake of society. Similarly, good behaviour in a human robot should be rewarded. Thus, we can bypass the idea of punishment as retribution.
Evolution of art
Valerio Cugia wonders whether preferences for different types of art may vary with geography (16 October, p 27). Jerome Kagan suggests in his book The Temperamental Thread: How genes, culture, time and luck make us who we are, which you reviewed this year (24 April, p 47), that the different preferences for styles of painting between people of European compared to Asian descent is related to differences in the alleles they inherit.
To quote: “More paintings and photographs by Asian artists, compared with European artists, depict many objects, plants or animals in the backgrounds of scenes that illustrate a central object. By contrast European and American artists place a person, animal, or object of significance in the foreground and add fewer other objects.” Kagan quotes supporting studies that show this preference holds true amongst American and Japanese students.
I personally prefer European art, but get most excited by cave paintings. Drawing together these threads with your report on the worldwide use of certain symbols in cave paintings (20 February, p 30) might lead to interesting leaps in the understanding of art appreciation from an evolutionary perspective.
Pest pets
Whatever the actual or perceived health benefits of pet ownership (6 November, p 30), a more comprehensive evaluation would consider the many costs borne by the rest of society, particularly as a result of dog and cat ownership.
Taxes are diverted from other worthwhile causes to pay for the infrastructure of pet ownership: dog-walking areas, dog-poo receptacles, stray-animal pounds 鈥� the list goes on. There are health costs to society incurred when treating bites and allergies.
Dogs and cats can also take a huge toll on nature. They spread diseases such as toxoplasmosis, attack vulnerable wildlife, and make habitats uninhabitable by their presence. Dogs can also threaten livestock.
Finally, carnivorous pets compete with humanity for food by requiring a diet rich in animal protein, further straining our agricultural production systems. It doesn’t sound like a very healthy trade-off to me.
For the record
鈥� The beetles pictured in our article on genetic inheritance were stag beetles, not broad-horned flour beetles as the article implied (13 November, p 17).