Editor's pick: Science involves belief but not faith
I was intrigued by your claim that science is not a belief system (4 April, p 5). Surely what it is not is a faith system. Science is belief based on evidence: faith, on the other hand, is belief irrespective of evidence.
Science gives rise to beliefs that fit the existing evidence, allowing for them to change should new evidence make that sensible.
Faith takes beliefs and puts them on an untouchable pedestal where they remain, no matter what contradictory evidence there is.
Most of us frequently employ a fairly scientific belief system. Take the simple example of the day of the week. When I woke up this morning, I believed it to be Thursday, based on the evidence of my memory. Had I then looked at my computer, my phone and a newspaper and seen the day given as Friday, I would have changed my belief, trusting the evidence of the computer, phone and newspaper over my memory. However, if I applied a faith-based belief system, I would have refused to take note of the contrary evidence and insisted that the day was Thursday, no matter what.
It is lack of faith, not lack of belief, that makes science so special and so wonderful.
London, UK
Voting for empathy or for negativity
The article “We are what we vote” may have missed a disturbing aspect of populist politics (4 April, p 24). Brain scans appear to show very clear differences between psychopaths and people who feel empathy. But when normal people were led to believe that they were observing a person suffering and that this person was a cheat, or not part of “our tribe”, their scans looked the same as those of the psychopaths, with no sign of any empathy: see, for example, “Dehumanizing the lowest of the low” by Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske ().
The traditional strategies of populist politics appear to create the very distinctions that switch off our ability to feel empathy. When politicians and media call the unemployed and people with disabilities “benefit cheats” and “scroungers”, does it turn off voters’ ability to feel empathy for the members of society hit hardest by benefits “sanctions” and cutbacks?
Perhaps this might also explain one of the biggest riddles about populism. Why has it so often turned murderous in the past, and why can ordinary, decent, caring people be led into committing atrocities? Is it because it turns attitudes to outsiders psychopathic?
Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, UK
Voting for empathy or for negativity
The negativity bias associated with voting may also explain why two-party politics in the UK has declined over several decades. The Politician’s Dilemma, as I call it, is that negative campaigning is effective in the short term but counterproductive in the long term. When party A attacks party B, B has to retaliate to reduce support for A.
They would be predicted to each retain a higher share of the votes if only they agreed not to attack. Each would, however, then be vulnerable to the other party “defecting” from the agreement by resuming attacks. So they never agree and both suffer. Each election forms the reference point for the next: so the vote total for the pair inexorably falls over many elections towards the tipping point at which other parties affect the outcome.
Nottingham, UK
<b>Weekly social</b>
“If there’s one thing I look for in champagne it’s the taste of wet hair!”
Toby Hawkins on a tasting of bubbly preserved undersea for 170 years (25 April, p 20)
Butterflies, causes and hurricanes
Stuart Leslie’s letter makes several correct statements about the butterfly effect (4 April). But it is more informative to understand the sense in which this metaphor is true, instead of demolishing one interpretation in which it is false. It is not true that events of the magnitude of a butterfly flapping its wings do not affect major events such as hurricanes. Indeed, weather forecasters have had to grapple with this problem since they became aware of chaos theory. Very tiny changes to the current state of the weather, put into the equations that predict future weather, lead to large-scale changes in the forecast.
The “butterfly effect” in this sense is what we mathematicians call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. The physical laws that govern the weather are such that, if we could run the Earth’s weather twice with the only initial difference being flap or no flap, the results would diverge exponentially.
Even though in reality there are innumerable “butterflies”, each causes the end result to vary unpredictably. What one flap really causes is the difference between the two “runs”, in the context of the rest of the weather system. A different flap, in this sense, might “cause” a tornado in the Philippines, compensated for by snowstorms over Siberia. It is impossible in practice to cause a specific hurricane by employing suitably trained butterflies. Nevertheless, in other contexts, such as electrically nudging heartbeats, such “chaotic control” provides an efficient route to desired dynamic behaviour.
Coventry, West Midlands, UK
Butterflies, causes and hurricanes
Leslie’s letter on the butterfly effect also implies a question on the efficacy of those butterflies. If one assumes a billion butterflies (that’s just 50,000 per species) flapping their little wings three times a second for a couple of hours a day during a hurricane season of 100 days, and all we see is 100 or so hurricanes and cyclones worth the mention, then that’s 20 trillion wing flaps per achieved hurricane.
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
We believe these are not delusions
快猫短视频 has often presented arguments that free will is an illusion. So why is the belief that “your thoughts are not fully under your control” listed as a delusion (4 April, p 28)? Perhaps the deluded ones are the 66.4 per cent who believe that they have full control.
Paradoxically, my writing of this letter and the thoughts in it are not, at the deepest level, under my control, even if I sense that they are. But regular readers will know that both the workings of the mind and the nature of matter are riddled with paradoxes.
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK
We believe these are not delusions
I have delusion-like beliefs. If I were to be asked if I was in control of all of my actions, or all of my thoughts, I would answer “no”. My argument would be that I am clearly not in control of my actions 鈥� for example, when I respond to pain. I am not in control of my thoughts when worry keeps me awake at night…
This article as a whole makes a strong case for me not being fully in control of my thoughts, since these link into my belief system, over which I do not have conscious control.
I’m surprised that fewer than half the UK population hold these beliefs 鈥� or am I so delusional that I’m missing something here?
Neston, Cheshire, UK
We believe these are not delusions
If your belief system is, even in part, the outcome of evolutionary forces, then it is not a delusion to believe that you are not fully in control of your thoughts. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
The Big One still hangs over us
As a very old geologist, I could not agree more with Bill McGuire’s warning of the inevitability of catastrophic volcanic eruptions (28 March, p 26). We in California face a similar catastrophic natural event 鈥� a great quake along the San Andreas fault.
In 1964, before the plate tectonics revolution led to understanding of large-scale movements in Earth’s crust, I presented a paper to a Geological Society of America conference making the case that a 10-million-year-old formation is offset by 80 miles across the San Andreas fault. I was laughed off the stage.
Conventional wisdom at the time simply could not accept such enormous displacements. It is now pretty apparent that the San Andreas fault should produce a great quake every 50 to 100 years. Our last one was in 1906 and since then two great cities have been built on top of the fault 鈥� a recipe for the greatest natural disaster in the history of the US.
Thousands will die, freeways collapse, utilities, water and food sources will disappear 鈥� it is going to happen. Only two questions remain: how soon, and will it be northern or southern California?
Irvine, California, US
The Big One still hangs over us
McGuire both makes a point about the impact of disasters such as volcanic eruptions and misses the size of the question about human preparedness. In The Collapse of Western Civilization, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, imagine “The Great Collapse of 2093”, caused by disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. They that “the most astounding fact is that the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in detail precisely because they knew that fossil fuel consumption was to blame.” This is the process that McGuire is writing about.
Quincy, Massachusetts, US
Survival starting from when?
A bar graph with your article on growing cancers compares five-year survival rates for a variety of cancers from the 1970s against those of the 2000s (28 March, p 42). But since “five-year survival” starts from the date of diagnosis rather than the cancer’s inception, it reflects timing of detection as much as patient longevity. For instance, the 30 per cent increase in five-year survival for breast cancer may simply mean that cancers are being diagnosed earlier in their development, so even though patients survive longer after their initial diagnosis, they could be dying at the same stage in the progress of their disease as they did in the 1970s.
Long Island City, New York, US
Scepticism sours sexting statistic
Douglas Heaven asserts that “sexting is as common among teens as texting a decade ago” (28 March, p 46). Really? I suspect that most teens are too sensible.
Edinburgh, UK
Scepticism sours sexting statistic
鈥� Surveys report that about a third of US kids in their upper teens have sexted.
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� We meant to write that the 103 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity added by renewables worldwide equals the capacity provided by nuclear power plant reactors in the US (4 April, p 7).
鈥� We failed to react to an invasive meme. Macrophages are immune cells, not molecules (18 April, p 32).