Editor's pick: How is health info protected?
You report Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind having access to a “huge haul” of NHS patient data (7 May, p 22). I have read its agreement with London’s Royal Free Hospital () and I am concerned.
The document insists that identifiable personal information, such as name, address, NHS number, date of birth, telephone number and email address, must be encrypted while in transit to a facility in the European Economic Area for Google’s use. But it does not prohibit that data being held unencrypted there.
To mask patients’ identities it is usual to pseudonymise such data. But this agreement explicitly states: “as this data is being held for direct patient care purposes, pseudonymisation is not required”. As a result, there is a risk that personal data could be accessed at the non-NHS location.
If the researchers do not intend to contact patients themselves, why can’t they just use a unique number for each 鈥� plus, say, gender, date of birth and postal region? That would comply with the “data protection principle”, stated in the agreement, that the data processor will “use the minimum that is required”.
London, UK
Morality in history, life and religion
Nicolas Baumard says that the elite were the ones promoting new religions to protect their interests (30 April, p 35). In Christianity, the elite were the ones who wanted Jesus dead. The Pharaoh tried to stop Moses from spreading Judaism. In Islam it was the rich traders and leaders who wanted to stop the Prophet.
Throughout history the poor have been the early adopters of moralising religions and the rich have tried to stop them.
Morality in history, life and religion
Pre-Christian religions did concern themselves with morality. Egyptians believed over 4000 years ago that the soul would be judged. Prehistoric hunter-gatherer religions did not concern themselves with sexual morality, since for them the paternity of a child did not matter.
When people settled, men amassed goods and assets – which they wanted to benefit their true offspring, not a potential cuckoo in the nest. Women then had to be forced into monogamy. Hence honour killings, child marriage, female genital mutilation… all in the name of religion. Morality-based religions were invented by men to control women. If it ever happens, true male-female equality, not evolution, will cause moralising religions to vanish.
Morality in history, life and religion
The philosopher Montesquieu addressed Baumard's subject in his 1716 essay on Roman politics in religion. He wrote that “when the Roman legislators established religion, they were not thinking at all of the reformation of customs, nor of laying down moral principles; they had no wish to inconvenience a people whom they hardly knew any more. They had from the very first but one general aim, which was to inspire in a people who feared nothing, fear of the gods, and to make use of this fear…”
Morality in history, life and religion
Over 17 centuries before Jesus, the Babylonian king Hammurabi : “Anum and Enlil named me… to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, that the strong might not oppress the weak.”
Morality in history, life and religion
Baumard's “life history theory”, like sociobiology before it, seems to fail to distinguish between cause and effect – the two merge into “strategy”. Distressed starlings lose weight – an effect of distress, not a “fast life strategy”. Affluent women have fewer babies not because they have “switched” to “slow life”, but because they usually have careers.
The claim that disapproving of behaviour that threatens your interest is a “general principle of human moral cognition” does not take seriously the idea of holding principles. These may benefit us in the long term, but quite often disadvantage us in the short term.
You could build a plausible evolutionary theory on that. But to argue that morality is only a means by which elites hold down the masses, to deny them sexual opportunity, revenge, and having “fun” sounds like the old stories about what the poor would get up to if “we” don't stop them.
First class post
A platform simply for the collection and analysis of data is being instantly written off as biased
Rohan Talbot knee-jerk denunciation of the Forensic Architecture project on Facebook (7 May, p 42)
Politics must migrate to reason
Your comments on migration were excellent but your plea for an intergovernmental agency to “promote research” and “make and defend evidence-based decisions”, while eminently sensible, flies in the face of long-established political reality (9 April, p 5). It is not just an immigration agency that is “long overdue”: it is the use of reason by politicians generally, on any topic you care to mention.
I suggest that you focus your efforts on determining how we might coax our representatives into rational problem-solving – most of us “plain folk” manage it most of the time. Given reasoning politicians, many of the problems we face, from immigration to real horrors like climate change and antibiotic resistance, will be in with a chance of being solved, and setting an example to other governments can only do good.
Politics must migrate to reason
Deborah MacKenzie gives us many new ways to understand migration and to review our often stereotyped responses to immigrants and refugees (9 April, p 29). I would like to see a follow-up article examining the effects, both positive and negative, of migration on countries and regions from which people have migrated or fled, particularly in recent times.
Mother Earth, father comet
Current theories on the origin of life on Earth are based either on life developing in isolation here, or on it arriving from comets. I suggest that the answer may be both. Earth provides the bulk of the ingredients 鈥� relatively heavy elements such as sulphur, chlorine, phosphorous and metals 鈥� as well as sustained energy sources and a stable environment. Comets provide the strongly reactive but volatile substances such as alcohols, aldehydes, amines, organic acids and simple esters. For example, Joshua Sokol reports successful efforts to create ribose, a key ingredient of RNA, on simulated interstellar ice grains (16 April, p 12). There is plenty of supporting evidence about comet chemistry as found on comets 67P, Lovejoy, and Hale-Bopp.
Life doesn’t work without both components. Bizarrely, this idea seems analogous to mammalian fertilisation…
Turning nightmares off and on again
I cannot resist the urge to report how Michelle Carr's article on nightmares speaks to my experience (30 April, p 36). I had a recurring nightmare throughout my childhood that both terrified and fascinated me.
The details are unimportant, but imagine an endless rubber sheet, flat and motionless, slowly beginning to undulate. It accelerates until it consists of crashing waves and shattering eggshells and then suddenly all is still and in a while the process begins again. It is associated with a taste or smell, undescribable because it relates to nothing else.
It woke me frequently during childhood, but as adolescence proceeded, lucid dreaming enabled me to end it before it became terrifying. One night I decided not to end the experience but, in full awareness, to allow it to play out. The undulations became especially violent but then bright lights pervaded the scene and everything became calm and peaceful. The dream has never returned.
I suppose if I were a religious person I might be claiming all kinds of spiritual significances.
Turning nightmares off and on again
I miss one side of dreaming here: what effect does food have on our nightly imaginings? I know several people, apart from myself, who report exceedingly vivid dreams whenever they eat cheese before bedtime. How common is this? This should be part of any research worth its name.
Cudworth, Somerset, UK
The editor writes:
• We had extra information online reporting that food may have an effect (newscientist.com/article/2086358), though in a very small experiment in this office those of us who ate cheese before sleeping had less-vivid dreams (19/26 December 2015, p 69).
What really affects raccoons' fear?
William Handley suggests that bold urban raccoons represent a behavioural subculture that differs from the more cautious animals of British Colombia's Gulf Islands (Letters, 23 April). Subcultures are more likely to develop in long-lived, highly intelligent animals with strong social structures: there are other explanations for why island raccoons appear more afraid when they hear a recording of dogs barking. They may not have had time to get used to what is, after all, an empty threat. Or urban raccoons may have evolved bold behaviour. They breed annually with litters of up to five, and live on average less than four years. Natural selection can work rapidly on short-lived prolific animals.
Probably fewer wild pigs than that
Stephen Ornes highlighted many aspects of the impacts and control of wild pigs (2 April, p 40). But there are probably not “23 million feral pigs in Australia”. The paper “How many are there? The use and misuse of continental-scale wildlife abundance estimates” in Wildlife Research reports with 95 per cent confidence that the number is between 3.5 million and 23.5 million, around an estimate of 13.5 million ().
For the record
• War in heaven. Titan is a moon of Saturn (7 May, p 31).
• Not that axis of evil: the is a project (30 April, p 30).
• , who suggested throwing AIs at role-playing games, is at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo (19 March, p 5).
• The acidity of seawater fell by the desired amount when adding olivine: the pH rose (14 May, p 10).