The God issue
Your editorial espousing “the new science of religion” uses the words secularist and atheist as if they are synonyms (17 March, p 3). They are not, and the distinction is important.
Secularism is about maintaining a distinction between religious faiths and their ruling bodies and the structures of government and law. This is well understood in the US and France.
In the UK, those who wish to keep bishops in Parliament, retain state funding of faith schools and have the prime minister choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury – the most senior religious figure in the Church of England – have every interest in confusing the two terms, to imply that secularists are against all aspects of religion.
From A.C. Grayling
It is disappointing to see the articles in your God issue engaging in the customary muddled claims about a “god-shaped space” in the mind (17 March, p 38), and following the archaeological reflex interpretation of any large building from long ago as a “temple of worship” with all that this implies (p 42).
Plenty of people, atheists for example, have no god-shaped spaces. Most humans in history believed in many gods answering many interests, which would seem to require the existence of many differently shaped holes.
Religion survives for historical and social reasons. Humanity is at an early stage; if we survive the (mainly religious) fanatics among us, we might, in a few millennia, leave behind the superstitions that soothed our ignorance of long ago.
London, UK
From Michael Poole,
I find myself in disagreement with your editorial comment that “religious claims still wither under rational scrutiny”. There are scholarly societies dedicated to the academic study of issues of science and religion, none of which would encourage sloppy or irrational thinking.
I had most difficulty with “The God hypothesis” (); its multiple assertions would take a book to address. My book, The New Atheism: Ten arguments that don’t hold water (Lion Hudson, 2009), is an attempt to tackle some of the issues.
London, UK
From David Bennett
You failed to mention the main tools used by the world’s most successful religions to keep and enhance their dominance: force and violence. The dominance of Christianity is the result of centuries of colonialism and imperialism. The spread of Islam was the result of conquest rather than conversion.
Force and violence are not only a way of gaining new adherents, but also stop critical examination of the preached religion. Bullying and intimidation have proved, and still prove, capable of silencing opponents. The ongoing history of inquisitions, oppressive fatwas and executions bears testimony to this.
New Malden, Surrey, UK
How do we know?
I think Daniel Everett’s big idea in his excellent article “The social instinct” is in fact bigger than he says (10 March, p 32). It sheds light on the way languages shape our thinking and thus our views of what is real.
The Pirahã’s culture limits what they can express, in a way that clarifies it, by demanding that assertions are qualified as hearsay, deduction or direct observation. It is as though there is a sense of the scientific approach built into their culture. Our less-restricted languages let us think and speak nonsense without realising it.
American linguist Benjamin Whorf’s work on Hopi and other native American languages, in which time and space are inseparable and the speaker’s perspective is built into the grammar, has similar implications. If such cultures investigated advanced physics, it might be that some concepts we consider counter-intuitive, because they conflict with the way our language shapes the world, would be the starting points.
Worse could happen
Don Higson says the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine is “the worst that could happen” (17 March, p 26). I disagree.
At Chernobyl and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, one safety system worked successfully to limit the scale of the disaster: people. Without those workers on site, the Chernobyl reactor fire would have continued until it burned itself out, and the reactors and spent fuel storage ponds at Fukushima would not have had their water replenished. Without intervention, more radiation would have been released.
If Chernobyl is 7 on the nuclear incident scale of 0 to 7, perhaps there ought to be an 8 for disasters in which there is no one to help. Some will say it is unreasonable to postulate a scenario with no intervention in time to make a difference. But we are talking about extreme events. Natural disasters, war and civil disorder could create such conditions.
From David Smythe
Like Don Higson, I have been advocating a revision of the higher levels of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s scale for nuclear accidents. Under my proposal, Chernobyl would be magnitude 8.0 and Fukushima 7.5.
I originally estimated the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania as magnitude 7.9, but I shall probably revise that down to 7.0 after looking at more precise data.
Ventenac-en-Minervois, France
Pursuit of youth
It seems an argument can be made that middle age in humans was shaped by powerful evolutionary forces, and that the middle years and their unique characteristics are a vital part of the human story, since they allow the passing on of accumulated skill and wisdom (10 March, p 48).
So what are we to make of contemporary society’s obsession with youth and the expectation that everyone will strive to keep a youthful appearance? Will the midlifers be so busy competing with the young that they have no time or inclination to assist them?
Before the flood
Ara Norenzayan writes that “up until about 12,000 years ago all humans lived in relatively small bands” (17 March, p 42). How could we know that? Global sea level was around 50 metres below present levels from 60,000 to 20,000 years ago, and much lower by . Shorelines were many kilometres seaward of where they are now.
People would have lived near coasts and estuaries just as they do now, so any evidence of settlements, sizeable or otherwise, is under tens of metres of alluvial deposits and water.
Large blinkers?
It worries me that the only “results” recorded during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, are those fitting the standard model (17 March, p 8).
I do appreciate the cost implications of recording everything, but surely this means that the two results (so far) that suggest the existence of the Higgs have been isolated in such a way that anything that might provide another explanation is lost.
Science can get things wrong by looking only at data that “proves” a theory. For example, J.B. Rhine and Karl Zener “proved” the existence of extrasensory perception in a few individuals asking people to identify cards they could not see. Anyone scoring below average was excluded from subsequent tests, until someone who had consistently scored above average emerged, to be labelled “super-psychic”.
The chances are that if we keep banging protons together the existence of the Higgs will be taken as proved, even if the readings are the result of something different.
Super silk
Silk garments protecting soldiers from shrapnel are hardly novel (4 February, p 36). In the 13th century, Mongolian soldiers wore raw silk shirts for exactly the same reason: if they were wounded, the silk made it easier to pull the arrow out.
Nominative case
Your editorial mentions discussions on renaming the Higgs boson as the Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble particle (17 March, p 3). Those hoping to do so should take note of history.
The scientific community made it clear that “X-rays” should be replaced by the official . That went well.
Biological language
I am often surprised by the turn of phrase used, or at least reported, when discussing physical and behavioural adaptations in animals. Given that the thrust of the Darwinist argument is that evolution is blind, random and value-free, I find it odd that language which is almost anthropomorphic is sometimes used to describe the result of evolutionary change.
The most recent example is in your story on snails that survive inside bird guts. Casper van Leeuwen at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology is reported as saying: “I don’t think the snail wants to be eaten, it just makes the best of a bad thing” (17 March, p 15). But how could the result of random mutations be clever or “strategic”, as this quote implies?
I suspect that scientists, exposed daily to the overwhelming beauty of creatures and their adaptations, find that they cannot restrict themselves to precise scientific expression.
Ubiquitous remedy
Feedback readers’ concerns about homeopathic treatments for sick fish (25 February) made me realise why homeopathic medicines seldom appear to work.
Most are based on natural products and all are, by definition, soluble. That makes it likely they are already present in the environment in very dilute and therefore highly effective, according to homeopathy, quantities. The reason the treatments sold are so ineffective is that they are already present at maximum effectiveness. We are simply overdosing.
For the record
• We omitted from our story on early feathers (24 March, p 8) a reference to Paläontologische Zeitschrift, .
• Evan Eichler works on genes and human evolution at the University of Washington in Seattle; Washington State University is 500 kilometres away in Pullman (24 March, p 34).