Editor's pick: Community building isn't enough to make morality
Patricia Churchland’s account of how our moral behaviour evolved to promote the well-being of human communities appears plausible, but she leaves two major issues out of her reckoning (28 September, p 44).
The first is that these community-building behaviours apply only to our own community or nation. In relation to other communities, we may be prejudiced and, in extreme cases, regard the “others” as subhuman. Such prejudices can lead to conflict and even genocide. The second issue is that for all of history, women have almost universally been regarded by men as inferior beings to be kept subordinate.
These two aspects of human behaviour have evolved just as the community-building behaviours have evolved. We can’t use evolution to distinguish between them. If we regard one set of behaviours as morally good and the other as morally bad, we must be using some other criterion.
If we don’t have some standard of morality, independent of our evolved behaviour, against which we can assess our behaviour, we have no reason to say that any behaviour is morally right or wrong. So what is this standard of morality and where does it come from? Or are we simply wrong to think in moral terms about our behaviour?
I wonder about another role of female orgasm
The female orgasm may originate in a reflex that makes some female mammals ovulate during intercourse, Clare Wilson reports (5 October, p 8). In humans, clitoral stimulation is better at eliciting orgasm than penetration. In 2005, Helen O’Connell and her colleagues “the anatomy of the clitoris has not been stable with time” 鈥� it has been written in and out of anatomy textbooks according to current medical fashion.
They concluded that, like an iceberg, most of the clitoris is hidden inside the body. This work led me to wonder whether the clitoris has a role to play in birth, with the passage of the fetal head triggering orgasm. It would thus provide a handy cushion of engorged tissue, a shot of the hormone oxytocin and both vaginal and uterine contractions to help complete the birth.
Some women report birth to be orgasmic. I, alas, am not one of them, but I certainly benefited from the oxytocin rush.
Unfounded apocalyptic claims harm climate action
Graham Lawton describes the oft-repeated “fact” that we have 11 years to save the planet as “a subtle misrepresentation of the science” (12 October, p 22). Other misrepresentations are less subtle. For example, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam claimed in August that “science predicts” that 6 billion people will die this century because of climate change if we continue on our current trajectory. This claim was audited by Climate Feedback, a worldwide network of scientists that sorts fact from fiction in climate change media coverage. It concluded that Hallam’s assertion was “not supported by published research” ().
I agree with Lawton that the current surge in activism around climate change is “a long-overdue outbreak of sanity”. But unfounded, apocalyptic claims risk undermining the long-term health of these movements.
We need better incentives for renewable energy (1)
Digging up coal may well be a “strange decision” for a country such as Botswana that has vast solar resources, as Joeri Rogelj at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria says (5 October, p 7). But we should also be concerned by countries such as Greece, which also has vast solar resources but is mining The EU needs to persuade the Greek government to implement a solar power revolution and reject support for a coal sector that campaigners describe as a backdoor subsidy, in violation of EU electricity market rules.
We need better incentives for renewable energy (2)
The failure to give developing countries an incentive to transform their energy systems is a major stumbling block to meeting the targets of the Paris climate agreement. Renewable technology is ready for deployment in countries such as Botswana.
Population and limits to Earth's life support
Fred Pearce asks Johan Rockstr枚m whether human population size should be added to his list of “planetary boundaries” (14 September, p 39). Rockstr枚m responds that Earth’s life-support systems aren’t defined by human activity. Really? The extraordinarily rapid growth of the human population, particularly over the past two centuries, is surely the major influence on all of those boundaries.
Were these succulent berries down to the wire?
Research into the effects of electric fields on plant growth has resumed in China (24 August, p 42). A number of years ago, we owned an old summer house in Charlevoix, east of Quebec city. An activity that we enjoyed there was picking the wild blueberries that were abundant not too far away.
Sometimes we hiked for a couple of miles to the swathe of power lines carrying electricity down from hydroelectric plants in Labrador.
Under the lines, the blueberries were much bigger and juicier than they were close to our home. We jokingly commented that it was the “juice” from the wires above that had enhanced them.
I insist that thought does depend on language
People with severe aphasia – the loss of ability to understand or express speech – may be unimpaired in other thinking abilities, such as chess or spatial navigation, Peter White argues (Letters, 7 September). And Martin Greenwood suggests that composers use non-verbal thinking, and cites mathematical physicist Roger Penrose's claim that much scientific and mathematical thought isnon-verbal (Letters, 31 August).
A composer may internally hear a melody, hum the tune and have a second person hum it too. But developing it for an instrument or an entire orchestra requires much thought, and that thought requires language. Penrose may think he can purely conceptualise without any words, but the mathematics he uses is a language in itself.
Aphasia is caused by brain damage. Those with a severe form are unable to navigate their way down a hospital corridor and require help with feeding, because they can't conceptualise the corridor, the dining room or that the fork or spoon in front of them are to be used as a means of transporting food.
Language skills, words and grammars are so subtly accessed in most of our pursuits that we are often unaware of them lying just below the surface of our actions.
Insight on the information rate of language perhaps
You report experiments appearing to show that the rate at which speech conveys information is about the same in different languages, despite them having varying densities of information per syllable (14 September, p 17). This reminded me of evaluating the accessibility of an online product's user interface with a tester who was blind and used screen-reader software.
We found it very difficult to keep up with him, as he set the speech rate of the reader to what seemed like three or four times the rate of normal speech. This included reading instructions and checking prose, such as legal agreements, as well as page navigation. We joked that he must get really bored and impatient with our slow speech.
Exploring such scenarios may shed light on the phenomenon. Signing is another example that could help distinguish auditory from semantic content information processing.
Refit your kitchen for heat transfer between fluids
Dinah Sage comments on the relative inefficiencies of ovens and microwaves, inviting us to reconsider our use of domestic appliances (Letters, 14 September). A new approach to services within the home could create opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Typically, a house in a developed country contains a washing machine, a dishwasher, a tumble dryer, a fridge, a freezer and room heating, with or without air-conditioning. These are installed as discrete units, incorporating duplicated components such as pumps, compressors, heat exchangers, valves and controls.
But the key functions of each system involve heat transfer between fluids. They could be designed as an integrated whole, creating a more efficient and robust building services unit. Heat that is discarded in conventional systems could be recovered and used elsewhere.
It would be straightforward to give the homeowner options in terms of the style, size and cost of the domestic appliances built into such a unit.
The principle could be extended to include water recycling, rain water and grey water recovery, heat recovery from cooking appliances and inputs from renewable energy sources.
Such an approach could improve comfort in homes while helping meet targets to reduce environmental damage.
We don't need evolution to explain religion's origins
In his interview with Richard Dawkins, Graham Lawton refers to the idea in evolutionary biology that human brains are naturally receptive to religious ideas (21 September, p 38). I am not sure we need an evolutionary explanation for religious belief.
Like many animals, we can see patterns and relations in geography, time and behaviour. These are essential for survival, helping us learn where to find prey or ripe fruit, how to obtain water in very dry seasons and which areas we need to be careful in.
But humans also have the ability to find explanations of how the world works and, indeed, a need to find them and a pleasure in doing so. For most of our existence, we have lacked the basic knowledge required to answer many important questions.
Why are some years bountiful while others bring droughts or floods? Why does an epidemic take some children and not others? What are thunder, lightning and volcanoes? What made the world and what can destroy it?
Answers to these questions have been attributed to spirits and gods: that makes sense if you have no real science or technology. The gods and spirits must then be praised and placated. A priest caste develops, with doctrines and rituals, and defined rights and wrongs. These become part of human cultures, often developed far beyond the original teachings.
A broader perspective on annoying teenagers
Dean Burnett says “far from being a constant annoyance, teenagers may be the reason humanity is as smart and successful as it is” (14 September, p 56). Can't they be both?