Editor's pick: Mining sea and space for whom?
I read with interest the articles on space mining (9 July, p 32), mining in international waters (30 July, p 38) and its prohibition in the Antarctic (12 October 1991, p 17). Beyond the legal question of who has rights to these resources is an obvious answer: all humanity should benefit from the profits of this mining.
Norway reserves a percentage of the profits of North Sea oil extraction in a fund for its people. Hence, inequality is less of an issue there and Norwegians are happier than people in other countries where the mining companies keep most of the profits.
Similarly, a large percentage of any profits gained from international or space-mined resources should be reserved for the entire human population. Why should the rich benefit from resources that should belong to all of humanity? Maybe the United Nations could manage a fund to deal with international issues such as climate change, inequality and space travel.
I firmly believe that any resources mined off-world should stay there and be used for further space travel, exploration and migration. For example, use mined hydrogen to provide fuel for further space travel, creating foundries in space to process minerals to make spacecraft. We will need these to prepare for our inevitable migration when the Earth's uninhabitability becomes imminent.
Dignity is not just for humans
Your Leader article on human dignity says “If there's nothing special about us, why should we treat people any better than we do other animals?” (6 August, p 5).
Instead we could ask: if there's nothing special about us, why should we treat other animals any worse than we do people?
Thorpe Salvin, South Yorkshire, UK
The editor writes:
• Why, indeed? Much depends on our definition of “personhood”, as discussed in our pages recently (2 July, p 16).
First class post
From the advertiser's point of view, lack of meaning is not a bug, it's a feature
Mary Thomson of our plea to stop using the meaningless term ‘superfood’ (6 August, p 5)
Queer quantum query in the quad
Again you mention the idea that an “observer” is required for the collapse of a quantum wave function (16 July, p 30). Nine years ago I wrote that this made no sense (Letters, 9 June 2007). The wave function collapses whenever a quantum particle interacts with something. If this were not so there could be no chemistry, and with no chemistry there could be no observers. The only possible observer is a god, and I do sometimes wonder whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is a religious belief. It has its roots in Bishop George Berkeley's 18th-century concept of “immaterialism”, long before Heisenberg (and I am not the first to point this out).
If humans are supreme, why should the world exist if we aren't looking at it?
Queer quantum query in the quad
I am glad to read that, as an Anglican priest, I may not be wholly redundant after all. Jon Cartwright's article makes me think that Bishop Berkeley's theory of immateriality may not have been so far from the mark after all. Ronald Knox's sums it up neatly: “There was a young man who said, ‘God, / must think it exceedingly odd / if he finds that the tree / continues to be / when there's no one about in the quad.’ REPLY: ‘Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd. / I am always about in the quad. / And that's why the tree / continues to be / since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.'”
Mysteries of the sleep of ages
Clare Wilson reports research suggesting that sleep helps to consolidate new memories and make room for fresh ones (16 July, p 8). Sadly, my wife has dementia and now has no short-term memory. She remembers old basic skills, nursery rhymes and music, but cannot sign her name, only print it rather badly. She seems to have a good night's sleep: but what is her brain doing in that time if she has no new memories to process?
Mysteries of the sleep of ages
Wilson notes that one of the reasons we sleep is to help us consolidate new memories. Older people get far less sleep than the young (28 May, p 32). I wonder whether this partly accounts for short-term memory loss?
Would you go for optogene therapy?
Teal Burrell reports developments in using “optogenetics” to treat Parkinson's disease, pain and some kinds of blindness (25 June, p 38). But the name appears to be quite inappropriate, since the work has nothing to do with genetics, the study of heritability.
There would be no need to write about “optogenetics without genetics” if we simply used the obvious term: optogene therapy. Or was the term invented to avoid criticism by anti-gene-therapy activists?
Balanced genetic engineering
Michael Le Page suggests curing male infertility could be what makes germline gene editing acceptable (2 July, p 19). I suggest it would be twice as acceptable if the same treatment also cured a uniquely female ailment.
Could we, for example, work to address disabling premenstrual syndrome or premenstrual dysphoric disorder? Its causes in genes controlling interactions of a neurosteroid, allopregnanolone, with the neurotransmitter system are being studied at Sweden's Umea University – which is also where Emmanuelle Charpentier made her big discovery of using “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” in DNA as the basis of the CRISPR gene-editing technique.
Banking needs more than a rule
Mark Buchanan's analysis of bad behaviour in the banking system is welcome, but does not go far enough (6 August, p 18). I suspect the Basel 3 rules introducing risk analysis into the system in 2019 are not only too little and too late, but wrong-headed. They are just more of the same oxymoronic “self-regulation” that has wrecked aspects of the world economy since the big crash in 2008. Banks are a vessel in which personally risk-free bad behaviour can take place. Nice work if you can get it.
It is not a coincidence that the professions of law, teaching, medicine and architecture are the least prone to corruption. The members of these professions have a code of practice to which they must personally adhere, or be excluded from practicing it. Better behaviour than the mere lawful is required.
It may grate and be counter-intuitive, but banking needs to be made a profession.
If an orangutan could speak…
I was delighted to see your report that an orangutan named Rocky had been helped or trained to produce “word-like” utterances in a “conversational context” (6 August, p 14). This vindicates the view of 18th-century linguist Lord Monboddo that an orangutan “might be taught to speak”. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson later ridiculed this notion, as recorded in James Boswell's . Johnson should have been more open-minded.
Narcissus and talk of healthiness
Emma Young asks whether some degree of narcissism is essential for success or health (9 July, p 27). In Greek mythology, Narcissus so loved himself that he fell in love with his own reflection, not even realising what it was. This seems a form of madness.
Healthy self-regard is a quite different phenomenon: to call it “moderate narcissism” is misleading. It is anchored in genuine experience, not a self-image. Learning to distinguish genuine from false self-esteem is critical, and not easy. We mainly learn from Narcissus what not to do. Advising people to become more selfish, entitled or envious is an unnecessarily negative approach to what should be positive experiences.
Ideas of evolution evolve too
John van Wyhe describes the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution, which was in fact set in stone by Darwin's more utopian successors (16 July, p 35). Darwin had no knowledge of genes. He thought elements called “gemmules” circulated in the blood, absorbing environmental influences, before travelling to the reproductive organs and passing the influences to the next generation as a blend of acquired characteristics.
The monk Gregor Mendel demonstrated that inherited characteristics do not “blend”, but are inherited discretely with dominant or recessive effects. Research into epigenetics has changed the evolution landscape once again by demonstrating that influences outside the nucleus switch genes on and off, tweak their effects and reposition them within the genome. It is living organisms, constrained by and exploiting each other within their context, not inanimate genes, that drive evolution. Epigenetics is the true “evolution revolution” – as many of your contributors have attested. The successful treatment of cancer, via the stimulation of reluctant immune cells, is the most recent achievement of this fascinating technology.
Oxhey, Hertfordshire, UK
The editor writes:
• We will deal with these themes in parts 2 and 3 of our guide to evolution: part 2 is due next week.
A truly cosmic insurance excess
Paul Marks gives a detailed summary of legal problems arising from the mining of asteroids (9 July, p 32). But what about the potential to alter the flight path of an asteroid when a portion of its mass is mined? The last thing we need is an impact from a large asteroid on Earth.
For the record
鈥� Slow motion: the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is still in the north-east Pacific ocean (30 July, p 32).