Editor's pick: Birth risks and biome benefits
I was initially shocked by your article about warning women of the risks of all births (9 July, p 8). Then I remembered my experience of two “normal” vaginal deliveries: the excruciating pain with poor analgesia, the exhaustion, the sensation of sitting on straw for a week from stitches and 40 years of mild but inconvenient incontinence.
The human infant's head has outgrown a woman's pelvis. When I was in Uganda in the 1960s, rural midwives were being taught to perform C-sections because in some areas 1 in 10 births was complicated by the baby's head being too big to fit through the mother's pelvis.
But the article did not mention the infant's microbiome, largely acquired from the mother's vaginal passage. Research is needed to establish where babies delivered by caesarean section get their microbiomes. It has been suggested that they should be given their mothers' vaginal secretions.
Conversely, C-sections may present therapeutic opportunities. There is evidence of an association between obesity and the microbiome. If an obese mother had an abnormal microbiome, the infant could be prevented from acquiring it.
We can see brains randomising choice
Nial Wareing speculates that the brain might make its decisions probabilistically, and that in some circumstances it might deliberately randomise its actions (Letters, 2 July). It has long been known that this is what it does.
Recordings show that neurons in the brain encode probability and run races with each other to make decisions. A good deal of randomness is gratuitously injected into this process. To an outside observer, the resultant unpredictable responses look like “free will”, and would indeed be highly desirable in predator/prey interactions.
To the owner of the brain, the crucial difference between those responses that we recognise as unconscious – like reflexes – and those that we think we have “willed”, is that we experience the latter being prepared in advance, but not the former. But both are equally mechanistic. Free will is a pretty meaningless expression.
First class post
As an undergraduate 40 years ago I found the same with pigeons: nobody would believe my data
Susan Finsen in the report of ducklings recognising abstractions (23 July, p 15)
Life at the corners of personality
Your story on narcissism (9 July, p 27) brought to mind an image I use to illustrate the balance of human qualities. On a pair of X-Y axes I plot individuals' confidence against competence, scaling each from 0 to 100 per cent lacking more precise quantification.
The vast majority of us would fall within a central circle with a radius of 30 or 40 per cent. The interesting groups appear in the corners. The unfortunate people near 0,0 would be those incapable of coping with our modern society and those in need of intensive support, while high-flyers at 100 per cent competence and 100 per cent confidence might be exemplified by sports stars.
What of the other two corners? Do you know of self-effacing, retiring, bushel-hiding geniuses? And many of our current national politicians might find themselves in the 100,0 corner.
Your article has prompted a modification to this simple model; clearly a third axis needs to be added to represent empathy. I propose that most of us would now fall within the central sphere of radius 30 to 40. There are now eight unusual “corner” groups. Who, for example, would score near 100 per cent for competence, confidence and empathy? And as for the other combinations…
Life at the corners of personality
Emma Young tries to convince us that a degree of narcissism is a good thing. This is rather like arguing that because war is good for business, every business venture could do with a bit of war. Narcissists have a fixed delusion of superiority that blinds them to negative feedback.
Free will, pleasure, pain and drives
I agree with Denise Taylor that “the freedom of will is a misleading term and what we actually have is the freedom to choose” (Letters, 11 June). This has an elegant grip on logic, reality and the meaning of words – but does not go far enough.
Assuming that we are free to choose, what drives us to choose one option over another? It is our perception of which gives us most pleasure and least pain. I struggle to find an example of a free choice explainable in any other way.
The pleasure/pain dichotomy drives all of life and its evolution.
No Nobel prize for that GM letter
You report over 100 Nobel laureates signing a letter about GM crops saying that “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption” (9 July, p 7). Most of these laureates have no training or experience in medical research, so they are speaking outside of their area of expertise.
And no studies have been done on people, so we don't yet know what effects there may be. Absence of evidence of harm is not the same as evidence of absence of harm.
No Nobel prize for that GM letter
It would have been more useful to the general population had these Nobel prizewinners suggested a testing protocol that would establish the health outcomes of GM foods. For example, a GM food for human consumption could be regarded and tested in the same way as a new drug.
For example, let 10,000 families be chosen to consume a given GM food as part of their daily diet. A matched set of 10,000 families would consume the equivalent non-GM food, with neither set knowing which food they were eating.
Of course, all this will take time and cost. But if such testing is appropriate for a drug that may be taken by millions, then surely it should be appropriate for a food that will be eaten by millions.
If staying buried is hard to do…
Why ascribe benign motives to those who will defrost the “de-animated” (2 July, p 26)? I can easily imagine zoos where re-animated 21st-century “neuros” provide entertainment. My own claim to the future is to be staked by my genes. My time-travelling will be in honoured fashion as my children lay me securely – and permanently – in my grave.
If staying buried is hard to do…
Helen Thomson mentions the challenge of designing a building to survive a century with minimal human input, protected from natural or human disasters and without a consistent power supply. Since “no building in the world currently satisfies” this, must we not question the sanity of building nuclear power plants, where similar demands extend to thousands of years?
Watch for the signs of curved space
Anil Ananthaswamy reports the hypothesis of a “backreaction” between matter and space-time that could obviate the need for dark energy through the effects of negatively curved space in voids (18 June, p 28). I suggest there is an observational test for this.
Light from supernovae and galaxies that passes through voids should be different from light that passes through regions of high density and positive curvature. For example, supernovae seen through a void could appear fainter and further away than expected, and those observed through a region of high density brighter and closer. It is possible that existing surveys of distant objects may already have the data needed to carry out the test.
Work, work, work, always the same
Your consideration of the future of work reminds me that there remains a fundamental condition (25 June, p 30). What has changed with apparent “progress”?
Slaves were (or are) owned by their masters or mistresses and forced to work for their livelihood. Serfs are seen as less oppressed than slaves, but their homes and property were owned by their lord and in return for their work they were allowed to live on the land.
When serfs were freed their homes were still owned by their previous masters: they became indentured labourers.
With “freedom for the workers”, obtaining a house and the goods that people believe they need has raised household debt to levels where work is essential to meet these obligations. Mortgages and hire purchase agreements seem very similar to the contract of the indentured labourer, the serf's obligations to their lord and the slave's servitude to their owner.
Turing you, Turing me, in my head
Jonathon Keats makes what seems to me an extraordinary assertion in his excellent review of Turing's Vision (2 July, p 42). He writes: “Turing noted that people are really Turing machines.”
While my mathematical skills are not even modest, and some may assert that “thinking is computing”, I have difficulty accepting this. I would appreciate a breakdown of the caveats that allow this assertion to be true.
As I understand it, a Turing machine is based on a finite set of symbols. Turing's insight was to show how manipulating them could prove that some problems are just not solvable.
Turing accepted the behaviours of human “computers” of his era as a model for his insight; I accept that people can emulate Turing machines.
Yet people are capable of visualising what does not exist, of inventing that which has never before been imagined. Was Turing's insight and publication itself necessarily the product of a Turing machine? And, if so, how did that Turing machine evolve?
For the record
鈥� The Pew Research Center that 62 per cent of US adults sometimes get news from social media, and 18 per cent often (16 July, p 20).
鈥� Peter Piot was a member of a collaboration that investigated the Ebola outbreak in what was then Zaire: it was Karl Johnson’s team at the US Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that confirmed Ebola was a new virus (23 July, cover).
鈥� The Patagonian Toothfish is not an invasive species (9 July, p 43).