The real deal
As a philosopher with a background in biological science, I applaud your recent special issue on reality (29 September, p 34) as a valuable marker of where we are, and aren’t, on this important topic.
The take-home message is that those parts of “reality” that are simply our human constructions – “objects” such that “if everyone stopped believing in them, they would cease to exist” – serve as obstacles preventing us from dealing with the actual realities of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other human-generated threats to our continued existence.
We linguistic primates create these “objects” and therefore we can change them, or even abolish them.
How about a special issue on reality, take two: our human social constructions and how they might be readjusted to fit within a functioning biosphere?
Some hard scientists believe that physical reality ultimately boils down to consciousness, while some softer scientists say that consciousness is ultimately an illusion. It would be interesting if both propositions were correct.
Dalguise, Perthshire, UK
After a fashion
I suggest an alternative to “truth decay” in explaining the half-life of citations (22 September, p 36). New lines of research that give hope of a breakthrough attract many researchers, who then publish on them. Over time, progress generally slows and the breakthrough fails to happen, so researchers switch in droves to the next hot topic.
The papers then cease to be cited, not because the results have been falsified, but because, like old pop songs no longer played on the radio, they have merely gone out of fashion.
Times are changing
In her letter, Susan Hall identifies many behavioural patterns that would have been socially acceptable in the past, but which we now find unacceptable, such as racism(13 October, p 31).
It is worth pointing out that various behavioural memes connected with rationality, fairness, altruism, propriety and egalitarianism have been growing and spreading in recent centuries, and at an accelerated pace in recent decades.
We can hope that this will lead humanity to support and work towards social and political structures that will enable us to survive climate or resource crises.
Reality made simple
Amanda Gefter endorsed physicist Eugene Wigner’s sentiments on “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” (29 September, p 38).
Perhaps there is a simple and straightforward explanation for the prescience of mathematics.
Think of mathematics as essentially the study and classification of all possible logical structures, of all possible patterns. The range is huge and includes the properties of integers, the pattern of prime numbers, the properties of geometries with curved space, and so on.
Looking at the natural world around us, we observe patterns: the structure of atoms, the motion of the moon, the time of eclipses, the tick-tock of a clock and so on. So it is no surprise that the patterns observed in nature are a subset of the patterns described by mathematics and that the order seen in the natural world is well described by the appropriate mathematics.
Sometimes we see part of a pattern and make a good guess at the complete structure. Consider the standard model of elementary particles, which predicted the Higgs boson. Mathematics is not making a prediction about the physical world; rather, we are making a guess at the correct complete pattern.
It follows that mathematics is less effective in subjects such as economics and the social sciences, where only limited order and structure are observed and the patterns are unclear.
Badger jabs
It is not the case that “farmers in England and Wales are keen to get on with the controversial cull” of badgers (20 October, p 8). No cull was planned in Wales: instead the Welsh government has opted for a trial vaccination program.
Genetically mollified
Michael Marshall’s article fails to address the major concerns of those of us who are alarmed at the roll-out of GM crops (13 October, p 8).
My summary of these concerns includes: the lack of real checks to counter the economic and political lobbying power of the large corporations that promote these technologies for profit; the “revolving door” between high officers of regulatory agencies and these corporations; the well-known drawbacks of industry testing its own products; the possible irretrievable loss of heritage seed stocks through contamination with patent-protected strains; and the huge reputational damage suffered by researchers whose tests indicate causes for concern about specific GM food products.
Many of these concerns could be described as sociopolitical, rather than purely scientific.
There are, specifically, worries that US government agencies have identified GM food technology as being “in the national interest”, and that as a result of this they are using aggressive diplomacy to coerce developing countries into accepting and promoting the technology, enforcing intellectual property rights which are counter to the spirit of traditional seed-saving practice.
When is will free?
I was struck by the relationship between the letters from Mike Pollard (6 October, p 30), who believes we need to accept carbon capture and storage as the pivotal technology to combat climate change, and Joe Muggs (p 30), who wonders whether we can identify those crucial decisions in life that define our future and in which free will can be said to truly apply.
Are the dire prospects for our global climate down to the free choice imperfectly expressed by “hanging chads” in Florida in the 2000 US presidential election?
Primate play plan
Your look at animal memory mentioned Santino the chimp, who collects and hides rocks to later throw at zoo visitors (6 October, p 34). This reminded me of a visit to a French zoo, where the chimps were in a glass enclosure, the glass panels held in place between steel columns, with small gaps between the two.
One chimp was poking a thin bamboo stick through the gap to entice visitors to grab it, whereupon he’d yank it away and cackle victoriously. My daughter had a go and beat the chimp at his own game. He ran around furiously before returning with a new stick. My daughter accepted the challenge, but discovered that the chimp had filled his mouth with water, which he spat through the gap. Honour restored, he cackled again.
I remember you
My autobiographical memories fit the general pattern described in your feature (6 October, p 36): I have few before the age of 5 or 6. But my wife has many memories before 5 and even one before 1. In 1980 she recounted for the first time a memory of being held in her mother’s arms and seeing a silver horse in the moonlight at the side of their house.
Her 81-year-old mother remembered the 1934 event – a horseman repaying a loan which had saved his house in the Depression – and was shocked, declaring: “You were only 10 months old.”
Sequencing loophole
You report the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues as concluding: “policies should protect individual privacy by prohibiting unauthorized whole genome sequencing without the consent of the individual from whom the sample came” (20 October, p 5). What, given a lawyerly reading of this, would stop sequencing of, say, 80 per cent of a genome without consent, or even just the key regions linked to known genetic disorders? Any future policies need to be worded very carefully to avoid loopholes being exploited.
Fragile knowledge
Back in the mid-1970s (yes, I am that old) I was involved with some iconoclastic engineers and scientists. One of the issues much discussed was an impending technological dark age caused by the disparity between focusing on “application” and “knowledge” about a technology – electronics, for example.
How many “computer” scientists or engineers, or indeed anyone else, have the knowledge to even begin to build a semiconductor technology from scratch? Oh, there’s lots of information around but, in today’s context (and extrapolating over the next decade or two), what happens when the world’s last CD drive fails? Look at the immense effort it took to “reconstruct” the Voyager space probe data in recent years.
Now, more than ever, we live in a market economy where science and technology are concerned.
As a result we are even more vulnerable to loss of knowledge than your article on the myth of technological progress suggests (29 September, p 30).
Vlad the infuser
So, infusions of young blood keep older brains healthy – in mice, at least (20 October, p 10). Would this suggest that Dracula, with his taste for the blood of young virgins, was on to a good thing?
For the record
• We got the title of Stephen Cave’s book wrong (20 October, p 40). It is in fact Immortality: The quest to live forever and how it drives civilisation.