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Forget free will
Letters– Save the bonobo From Ian Redmond, UN Great Ape Survival Project I enjoyed Matt Kaplan’s idea that we should tackle global warming by getting in touch with our inner bonobo (2 December, p 40), but the statement that “at most there are a few hundred thousand bonobos left in the wild” is just wishful thinking. Estimates of bonobo numbers range from 10,000 to 100,000. Most fieldworkers are convinced that the true number will turn out to be nearer the lower figure, but whatever the actual number of individuals, everyone agrees that the trend in almost every great ape population is downwards. Given that primates are keystone species in tropical forests, critical to the structure of the community, and that we now appreciate the important role these forests play in climate stability, surely the time has come to recognise that bonobos and other primates are not just cute ornaments or objects of academic study. We should value the ecological services they provide and radically increase the funding available to ensure their survival for the benefit of all. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK
Where’s the evidence? From Steve Welch I can’t believe there were so many letters attacking the scientists who spoke up so eloquently for rationality at the “Beyond belief” conference (9 December, p 24).
26 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2006
The letter writers seem to think they are being even-handed, but you can just imagine the conversation with them… “I don’t believe in an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky seeing everything, but there must be something else, something more to life.” But we evolved, humans were not created in situ. “I accept that we evolved, but still there must be something more, some sort of essence in the universe.” Why, what evidence do you have? “None, but there must be something, I just feel it.” I find it tiresome that people claim moral superiority just because they have a “feeling”. Folkestone, Kent, UK From Shane Caldwell Thank you for the article. I am one scientist who is worried by the trend toward scientific fundamentalism, and I am heartened to see New Scientist take a more objective look at it than we usually get from the cheerleading section of the scientific community. Bravo. Chicago, Illinois, US
Bioweapons for all? From Taras Wolansky John Steinbruner argues that the US should not engage in defensive biowarfare research because this might “encourage other countries to do the same” (25 November, p 20). It is curious that American leftists (like Steinbruner) and conservatives (like George W. Bush) share the same delusion: that everything that happens in the world is about the US. China developed nuclear weapons because the USSR had them; and then India because China had them; and then Pakistan because India had them. Not even unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US would have stopped this process. In the bilateral world of the cold war, the hope that the Soviets would give up bioweapons if the US did was at least plausible, even if we now know the Soviets did
just the opposite. In today’s multilateral world, however, countries (and possibly terrorist groups) will certainly continue to develop biological weapons, regardless of what the US does. Kerhonkson, New York, US
The lice seekers
host, and Reed believes this might have been Homo erectus, with Homo sapiens acquiring this line through contact in Asia around 50,000 years ago. Further research has compared the genome of human lice with that of chimp lice, and found that they split from each other around 5 million years ago, supporting other estimates of the date when chimp ancestors split from those of humans. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Gender trap
From Ian Simmons Patricia Finney suggests that lice genetics could tell us a lot about when humans started wearing clothes (2 December, p 21). This also occurred to Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in 1999, and he went on to collect head and body lice from people in 12 countries from across the world, analyse their DNA, and calculate how their family tree branched. From this he found that the body louse first evolved from the head louse around 72,000 years ago. As the body louse has to have the shelter of clothes to survive on humans, and so could not have preceded them, he reasoned that it must have been about then that we took to wearing clothes. David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville has looked at the body louse genome in greater detail, and found its mitochondrial DNA falls into two clusters. One of these matches human mitochondrial DNA in its date and geographical distribution, suggesting that they evolved alongside their human host. The second cluster doesn’t, suggesting it probably evolved on a different
From Fiona Hamilton Lucy Middleton, reviewing a book entitled The Science of Orgasm, asked “whether transsexual men with surgically created vaginas” can have orgasms (18 November, p 80). I must point out that a transsexual man is born with a vagina and seeks from a very early age to rectify the position. Likewise a transsexual woman such as myself is born without a vagina, but from an early age also seeks to rectify this divergence of anatomy from brain perception of self. After my two years are up I will be able to have my birth certificate changed to reflect my true birth gender, thanks to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004. London, UK
Forget free will From Jim Haigh Hurrah for Patricia Churchland (18 November, p 42). Facing up to the fact that we lack free will seems to be so difficult that the subject is usually regarded as either taboo, or way beyond our current neurological knowledge. But it seems to me that in essence free will is a simple matter and it was encouraging to see Churchland criticising philosophers for claiming that “in some unexplained fashion, the will – a thing that allegedly stands aloof from brain-based causality – makes an unconstrained choice”. www.newscientist.com
SEE OUR WEBSITE FOR LETTERS ON: ● How now brown cloud? ● Give me a child…
We might make better progress if we started with the proposition that free will cannot exist and then waited to see how people attempted to refute it. Computers make decisions based on data drawn from their input devices and their memory. It is often stressed that brains work very differently from computers, but I find it hard to see how they can be different in this respect. We, as other animals, use data drawn from our environment, our memory and our conditioning to make decisions. Of course, this is all counter-intuitive and we may need to consider how disbelief in free will might affect everyday life. I suggest living as if we have free will but other people do not. It is sometimes hard to remember but worth the effort. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Don’t talk to the trees From Richard Lewis Thank you, Mark Buchanan, for saving my sanity by describing the strange things dynamics can do (2 December, p 44). For the last three years I have been fighting off the creeping feeling that the trees in my train station were trying to communicate. I know I have probably read too much science fiction, but the phenomenon was certainly unusual enough to defy all simple explanations and occurred over and over again, in all kinds of weather, wind and emotional states, in spring, summer and fall. The down platform at the station in question, Mount Kisco on the Harlem line out of Grand Central Station in New York, faces a fine bank of tall trees, all carefully pruned into a vertical bank of leaves. I like to arrive early and have a coffee, so I have plenty of time to look, mainly blankly in thought, in the direction of this huge screen with leaves as pixels. These leaves behave very strangely. One begins to shake violently and continues to do so for many minutes at a time. www.newscientist.com
All the others remain limp and still. In the bank of thousands of lifeless leaves before me I see perhaps a dozen dancers. It is, apparently, human nature to look for patterns in these active pixels. What was making these dancers dance? Who or what was semaphoring these signals to me? Thank you for enlightening me that the leaves were “breathers”, that is “not on speaking terms with the rest of the lattice”. I was just an innocent bystander who can now drop his primitive attempts to communicate with the trees of Mount Kisco. New York, US
Do I know that voice? From Kate Hopkinson Face blindness appears to be much more common than is generally appreciated (25 November, p 34). On reading the article, it immediately occurred to me that I suffer from “voice blindness”. I have a lifelong phobia of phone conversations, which I always assumed must be due to marginal deafness
out there, I hereby designate voice blindness as Hopkinson’s syndrome. I’d love to hear from fellow-sufferers – just don’t phone to tell me about it. London, UK From David Fine I see a face as clearly as any other object, but I cannot hold the image and register it against a bank of remembered faces. I recognise faces down to the level of types (a round-faced, red-bearded man for instance) but often I can’t tell whether that particular round-faced red-beard is my colleague or a stranger. I describe the condition as “facial dyslexia”. As people with dyslexia have difficulty recognising words, I have problems with faces. If I can “spell out” the face by analysing the individual features I may deduce who the person is, but the process is deliberate and takes time compared with the instant recognition described by normal people. My interpretation, as a sufferer, of the failure of the fusiform face area of the brain to “adapt” is that to prosopagnosics every face is a new one Timsbury, Hampshire, UK
Logical leaps
(although there was no other evidence to suggest I am deaf at all). I now realise it is not that I cannot hear the voice at the other end, it is that I am not confident of being able to recognise it. This is especially embarrassing with people I know extremely well. I can’t even be sure to recognise the voices of family members. Long-term colleagues pose another painful problem. Is this a well-known phenomenon? If not, and if there others like me
From Eric Norton As one might expect, David Deutsch has some sensible things to say on the subject of quantum computation (9 December, p 50). Unfortunately, in answer to the question “How does quantum computation shed light on the existence of many worlds?” his logical train leaps off the tracks not once, but twice. First, he maintains that since “there isn’t enough computing power in this universe to obtain the answer” to the factorisation of a 10,000-digit product of two primes, “something more is going on than what we can directly see. At that point, logically, we have already accepted the many-worlds structure.” This is a decidedly illogical leap of astonishing
proportions. Certainly there must be a mechanism that is not accessed by the brute-force computation of a digital computer, but that’s a long way from requiring us to invoke countless extra universes. Secondly, he claims that “anyone who denies the existence of parallel universes has to explain how the factorisation process works”. While I don’t actually deny their existence, I strongly doubt it, and I reserve the right to do so without having any clue as to how quantum computation actually works. His logical position here is analogous to my claiming that dark matter is actually large numbers of interstellar penguins that instinctively keep their backs to the Earth, and that anyone who denies the existence of those penguins has to explain what dark matter really is. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK
Is the universe lazy? From Michael Hamilton Nick Bostrom asks whether we live in a computer simulation (18 November, p 38). What would that run on, then? The class of programming languages called functional languages – and their close relative Lisp – often make use of a technique called “lazy evaluation”: they defer computing a result until it is actually needed. Perhaps the developers of our simulation are using such a functional language, and the wave-particle duality is visible evidence of their choice of development tools. Wellington, New Zealand
Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
23/30 December 2006 | NewScientist | 27
Where’s the evidence? From Steve Welch I can’t believe there were so many letters attacking the scientists who spoke up so eloquently for rationality at the “Beyond belief” conference (9 December, p 24).
26 | NewScientist | 23/30 December 2006
The letter writers seem to think they are being even-handed, but you can just imagine the conversation with them… “I don’t believe in an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky seeing everything, but there must be something else, something more to life.” But we evolved, humans were not created in situ. “I accept that we evolved, but still there must be something more, some sort of essence in the universe.” Why, what evidence do you have? “None, but there must be something, I just feel it.” I find it tiresome that people claim moral superiority just because they have a “feeling”. Folkestone, Kent, UK From Shane Caldwell Thank you for the article. I am one scientist who is worried by the trend toward scientific fundamentalism, and I am heartened to see New Scientist take a more objective look at it than we usually get from the cheerleading section of the scientific community. Bravo. Chicago, Illinois, US
Bioweapons for all? From Taras Wolansky John Steinbruner argues that the US should not engage in defensive biowarfare research because this might “encourage other countries to do the same” (25 November, p 20). It is curious that American leftists (like Steinbruner) and conservatives (like George W. Bush) share the same delusion: that everything that happens in the world is about the US. China developed nuclear weapons because the USSR had them; and then India because China had them; and then Pakistan because India had them. Not even unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US would have stopped this process. In the bilateral world of the cold war, the hope that the Soviets would give up bioweapons if the US did was at least plausible, even if we now know the Soviets did
just the opposite. In today’s multilateral world, however, countries (and possibly terrorist groups) will certainly continue to develop biological weapons, regardless of what the US does. Kerhonkson, New York, US
The lice seekers
host, and Reed believes this might have been Homo erectus, with Homo sapiens acquiring this line through contact in Asia around 50,000 years ago. Further research has compared the genome of human lice with that of chimp lice, and found that they split from each other around 5 million years ago, supporting other estimates of the date when chimp ancestors split from those of humans. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Gender trap
From Ian Simmons Patricia Finney suggests that lice genetics could tell us a lot about when humans started wearing clothes (2 December, p 21). This also occurred to Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in 1999, and he went on to collect head and body lice from people in 12 countries from across the world, analyse their DNA, and calculate how their family tree branched. From this he found that the body louse first evolved from the head louse around 72,000 years ago. As the body louse has to have the shelter of clothes to survive on humans, and so could not have preceded them, he reasoned that it must have been about then that we took to wearing clothes. David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville has looked at the body louse genome in greater detail, and found its mitochondrial DNA falls into two clusters. One of these matches human mitochondrial DNA in its date and geographical distribution, suggesting that they evolved alongside their human host. The second cluster doesn’t, suggesting it probably evolved on a different
From Fiona Hamilton Lucy Middleton, reviewing a book entitled The Science of Orgasm, asked “whether transsexual men with surgically created vaginas” can have orgasms (18 November, p 80). I must point out that a transsexual man is born with a vagina and seeks from a very early age to rectify the position. Likewise a transsexual woman such as myself is born without a vagina, but from an early age also seeks to rectify this divergence of anatomy from brain perception of self. After my two years are up I will be able to have my birth certificate changed to reflect my true birth gender, thanks to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004. London, UK
Forget free will From Jim Haigh Hurrah for Patricia Churchland (18 November, p 42). Facing up to the fact that we lack free will seems to be so difficult that the subject is usually regarded as either taboo, or way beyond our current neurological knowledge. But it seems to me that in essence free will is a simple matter and it was encouraging to see Churchland criticising philosophers for claiming that “in some unexplained fashion, the will – a thing that allegedly stands aloof from brain-based causality – makes an unconstrained choice”. www.newscientist.com
SEE OUR WEBSITE FOR LETTERS ON: ● How now brown cloud? ● Give me a child…
We might make better progress if we started with the proposition that free will cannot exist and then waited to see how people attempted to refute it. Computers make decisions based on data drawn from their input devices and their memory. It is often stressed that brains work very differently from computers, but I find it hard to see how they can be different in this respect. We, as other animals, use data drawn from our environment, our memory and our conditioning to make decisions. Of course, this is all counter-intuitive and we may need to consider how disbelief in free will might affect everyday life. I suggest living as if we have free will but other people do not. It is sometimes hard to remember but worth the effort. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Don’t talk to the trees From Richard Lewis Thank you, Mark Buchanan, for saving my sanity by describing the strange things dynamics can do (2 December, p 44). For the last three years I have been fighting off the creeping feeling that the trees in my train station were trying to communicate. I know I have probably read too much science fiction, but the phenomenon was certainly unusual enough to defy all simple explanations and occurred over and over again, in all kinds of weather, wind and emotional states, in spring, summer and fall. The down platform at the station in question, Mount Kisco on the Harlem line out of Grand Central Station in New York, faces a fine bank of tall trees, all carefully pruned into a vertical bank of leaves. I like to arrive early and have a coffee, so I have plenty of time to look, mainly blankly in thought, in the direction of this huge screen with leaves as pixels. These leaves behave very strangely. One begins to shake violently and continues to do so for many minutes at a time. www.newscientist.com
All the others remain limp and still. In the bank of thousands of lifeless leaves before me I see perhaps a dozen dancers. It is, apparently, human nature to look for patterns in these active pixels. What was making these dancers dance? Who or what was semaphoring these signals to me? Thank you for enlightening me that the leaves were “breathers”, that is “not on speaking terms with the rest of the lattice”. I was just an innocent bystander who can now drop his primitive attempts to communicate with the trees of Mount Kisco. New York, US
Do I know that voice? From Kate Hopkinson Face blindness appears to be much more common than is generally appreciated (25 November, p 34). On reading the article, it immediately occurred to me that I suffer from “voice blindness”. I have a lifelong phobia of phone conversations, which I always assumed must be due to marginal deafness
out there, I hereby designate voice blindness as Hopkinson’s syndrome. I’d love to hear from fellow-sufferers – just don’t phone to tell me about it. London, UK From David Fine I see a face as clearly as any other object, but I cannot hold the image and register it against a bank of remembered faces. I recognise faces down to the level of types (a round-faced, red-bearded man for instance) but often I can’t tell whether that particular round-faced red-beard is my colleague or a stranger. I describe the condition as “facial dyslexia”. As people with dyslexia have difficulty recognising words, I have problems with faces. If I can “spell out” the face by analysing the individual features I may deduce who the person is, but the process is deliberate and takes time compared with the instant recognition described by normal people. My interpretation, as a sufferer, of the failure of the fusiform face area of the brain to “adapt” is that to prosopagnosics every face is a new one Timsbury, Hampshire, UK
Logical leaps
(although there was no other evidence to suggest I am deaf at all). I now realise it is not that I cannot hear the voice at the other end, it is that I am not confident of being able to recognise it. This is especially embarrassing with people I know extremely well. I can’t even be sure to recognise the voices of family members. Long-term colleagues pose another painful problem. Is this a well-known phenomenon? If not, and if there others like me
From Eric Norton As one might expect, David Deutsch has some sensible things to say on the subject of quantum computation (9 December, p 50). Unfortunately, in answer to the question “How does quantum computation shed light on the existence of many worlds?” his logical train leaps off the tracks not once, but twice. First, he maintains that since “there isn’t enough computing power in this universe to obtain the answer” to the factorisation of a 10,000-digit product of two primes, “something more is going on than what we can directly see. At that point, logically, we have already accepted the many-worlds structure.” This is a decidedly illogical leap of astonishing
proportions. Certainly there must be a mechanism that is not accessed by the brute-force computation of a digital computer, but that’s a long way from requiring us to invoke countless extra universes. Secondly, he claims that “anyone who denies the existence of parallel universes has to explain how the factorisation process works”. While I don’t actually deny their existence, I strongly doubt it, and I reserve the right to do so without having any clue as to how quantum computation actually works. His logical position here is analogous to my claiming that dark matter is actually large numbers of interstellar penguins that instinctively keep their backs to the Earth, and that anyone who denies the existence of those penguins has to explain what dark matter really is. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK
Is the universe lazy? From Michael Hamilton Nick Bostrom asks whether we live in a computer simulation (18 November, p 38). What would that run on, then? The class of programming languages called functional languages – and their close relative Lisp – often make use of a technique called “lazy evaluation”: they defer computing a result until it is actually needed. Perhaps the developers of our simulation are using such a functional language, and the wave-particle duality is visible evidence of their choice of development tools. Wellington, New Zealand
Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8NS Fax: +44 (0) 20 7611 1280 Email: [email protected] Include your address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. Reed Business Information reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
23/30 December 2006 | NewScientist | 27