Editor's pick: The more likely consequences of Brexit?
Chris Leigh of the pro-Brexit 快猫短视频s for Britain group forgets to mention that the UK currently pays €1 billion per year into the and programmes such as , but receives €1.6 billion per year because of our leading role in writing and preparing grant proposals (1 April, p 24). The UK government hasn't offered to underwrite that difference. No wonder universities and other research establishments are worried.
Editor's pick: The more likely consequences of Brexit?
Leigh says he supports Brexit but that scientists and “genuine” students should not be subject to immigration controls that will be part of us leaving the single market. The same argument is used by the National Health Service, the agricultural industry, hoteliers and restaurateurs, the financial sector and others that have come to rely on EU immigrants to keep them running. All believe that theirs is a special case.
This flies in the face of a main plank of the “leave” campaign – that it was the only way immigration could be cut.
But why have we never filled up a brain?
We don't know the limit on how much an individual brain can know, writes Sean O'Neill, because “we have never filled one up” (1 April, p 39). That statement should set off alarms with evolutionary biologists.
The human brain is a very expensive luxury: it makes childbirth painful and dangerous, ties us to an extended vulnerable childhood and consumes as much as 20 per cent of our total energy expenditure. Evolution wouldn't preserve such a burden without some payback.
So what is all that capacity for if it can't be filled with knowledge? Might the brain have developed for another purpose? It is intriguing to note that the volume of the human brain appears to have been shrinking for the past 28,000 years. Have we been shedding brain that is no longer needed now its purpose has turned to knowledge?
Of course, given that the article appeared on 1 April, we could also reconsider Aristotle's belief that the original purpose of the brain was to cool the blood…
But why have we never filled up a brain?
I was disappointed that you didn't answer the question of how much one person can know. I have been musing upon this while building a digital knowledge base.
We each know many concepts – such as person, house, atoms – and very many facts that connect them, such as that a person lives in a house and a house is made from atoms. Has anyone tried to estimate how many facts one person could know, perhaps based upon surveys of what percentage of encyclopaedia concepts individuals know?
First class post
They also spend a lot of time wondering why humans can't work out how to unlock boxes
chimps, bonobos and orangutans in theory of mind experiments (8 April, p 10)
Asking the right question may lead to wisdom
Your fascinating articles on knowledge referred to the prevailing problem of post-truth, fake news and antipathy towards “experts” (1 April, p 5 and p 36). The most frightening current effect is climate change denial.
We can all think of simplistic minds that deny the possibility of climate change because, in their world view, it is an inconvenient possible truth. They promote that position by decrying experts as not knowing facts, only guessing. They accuse anyone promoting the prediction of peddling “fake news”. None of these steps can be easily countered by science since even the best climatologist can say only that “all the evidence we have suggests…”
But there is a question that can be effective and demonstrates that it is indeed knowledge that is the key. What does Donald Trump, for example, want on his tombstone: “The man who saved the world” or “The man who denied his great-grandchildren a future”? The point of knowledge and experts is that taking notice of what they say is wiser than ignoring or denying them.
Good hydrations on our farm and antioxidants
Your article on drinks states that all mammals make milk, “but humans are the only ones to drink it beyond their early years” (11 March, p 32). Our cats sit and wait for us to finish our breakfast cereal so they can lick the bowl. Our dog goes into the milk shed after the cows have left to lap up the milk flushed from the machines. If an adult cow is in with the feeding calves, someone has to stand by the feeder and chase it away. Some adult cows will drink milk from other cows in the herd. I've even seen a cow drinking from her own udder.
Good hydrations on our farm and antioxidants
Your articles on hydration make repeated reference to the benefits of antioxidants. But you have in the past reported these as being debunked (24 August 2013, p 32).
The editor writes:
• That earlier article was mainly about antioxidant supplements. It seems pretty settled that these do no good. In food and drink, though, antioxidants have no ill effect and may even be beneficial.
This mammal may have echolocation too
Gwydion Williams asks whether echolocation may once have been found in all animals (Letters, 25 March). There are reports that it's possible for humans to reacquire this skill – especially if they are visually impaired (11 April 2009, p 31).
The truth of the tragedy of the commons
Fred Pearce describes approaches to Garrett Hardin’s “” that can’t see the wood for the trees (11 March, p 44). The general pattern of some actors pursuing their own interests to the detriment of the collective interest applies to nearly all environmental problems, including climate change, overfishing, deforestation and biodiversity loss.
These are widely recognised as entailing “market failures” but few, even among economists, believe that solutions lie in privatisation. Jointly agreed and enforced regulation is clearly necessary. A clear analysis of the conflicting interests of the actors is essential to effective policies.
The truth of the tragedy of the commons
Pearce describes a view that the lesson of the “” is that “the only way to prevent this tragedy was to turn common land into private property… privatising the planet is the key to conservation”.
But in his article putting forward the idea, Hardin observed that the economist Adam Smith “contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society.” He notes that many “commons” don't work well as private property: “the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means.”
In the end he recommends “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected” – in other words, the social contract of democratic government.
Tracking what foxes eat in Australia
Guy Cox discusses foxes' tastes in food and whether they are a threat to koalas (Letters, 11 March). An operation in Western Australia, , keeps tabs on stomach contents of dead foxes. In 2015 the list, from 152 foxes, was “Sheep carrion, spiders, racehorse goanna, canola, wheat, oats, mice, grasshoppers, unidentified bird, rabbits, parrots, wool, beetles, lizard, kangaroo, maggots, blowfly pupae, frog, chook, centipede, hair, sheep feedlot mix, sheep afterbirth, crickets, unidentified insect, earwigs, water beetles, figs, mulberries”.
In 2016 it was very similar. But there are no koalas in Western Australia, so we don't yet have a conclusive answer.
Artificial intelligence and natural stupidity
Progress in artificial intelligence has depended on computational speed and increasing algorithmic complexity. Some classes or type of problem are acknowledged where an AI's inhuman speeds can prosper (for example, by Daniel Dennett, 11 February, p 42).
But the human consequences of real world AI haven't been addressed. Modelling “subjective experience” will mean going from the real world to analogue measurements to digital models to logical outputs. But as any undergraduate studying computing discovers, problems arise from converting analogue measurements to digital values: there is always a “quantisation” error. And chaos theorists demonstrate how small changes have substantial effects on output from iterative computations. Multiple conversions would lead to multiple stages of quantisation and data compression. And as system complexity increases, system understanding decreases.
When personal loyalty or self-esteem bonds some people to the AI, what will become of those who distrust it? The real problems will arise in how humans react.
The emotion of life, the universe and everything
Like Lisa Barrett I have felt “chiplessness”, an emotion felt after overindulging on a bag of chips (11 March, p 40). She is onto something with her call to give names to such emotions of the modern era. Fortunately, there is already a reference guide naming hundreds of them: by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. Is it coincidence that you highlight this concept on page 42 of your magazine?
For the record
• Dig for victory: the interval between abandonment of one Channel Tunnel project in 1975 and the opening of the next in 1994 was of course 19 years (Old 快猫短视频, 1 April).