How will the virus affect our evolutionary path? (1)
While viruses themselves evolve, they have also long driven our physical evolution, and the new coronavirus looks set to influence our social evolution too (23 May, p 41).
It has highlighted the fragility of social systems and the dangers posed by present lifestyles. Hopefully the “new normal” will increase our chances of being around to learn to live with the virus’s successors. The rush to return to business as normal doesn’t fill me with hope, however, and neither do the politicians who are hell-bent on pursuing that return.
How will the virus affect our evolutionary path? (2)
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde seems to have predicted these confusing times of covid-19. 快猫短视频s are searching for the means to forge the way ahead through collaborative and verified research. They admit to the gaps in their knowledge.
Yet this doesn’t appear to prevent politicians, industrialists and the media from filling in these gaps with abridged interpretations, and making misleading or dangerous decisions aimed at solving financial and social problems. As a consequence, we blunder into the unknown and take a chance.
Greening the seas may not be so easy
Marine algae have undoubtedly brought many benefits to humankind and their cultivation could potentially play a greater role in a more sustainable future, as Michael Marshall describes (16 May, p 36). Unfortunately, the immense scaling-up of cultivation required to even begin approaching levels that would help prevent climate change will face substantial limitations.
There are reasons why aquaculture operations are concentrated in sheltered and accessible waters. Doing big stuff at sea is difficult, expensive and resource-hungry; it needs offshore and onshore infrastructure, plus continuous maintenance.
Furthermore, the non-trivial task of persuading anything deployed in the open ocean or exposed coastal waters to stay roughly where it was put is always a huge challenge, hence the much higher capital cost of offshore versus onshore wind power.
“All it takes is weighted lines seeded with seaweed floating a few metres below the surface, attached to buoys” is quite an understatement in the context of millions of square kilometres of the high seas. Achieving such large scales of cultivation, for instance of 9 per cent of the oceans, would present stupendous challenges.
Consider dietary advice, preferably well-studied
The premise that people will overeat carbohydrates and fats in a protein-poor but energy-rich food environment is described in your article as a hypothesis (23 May, p 30). Fair enough, but the end of the piece says that all you need to do to achieve a healthy, satisfying diet is eat enough protein and top up with wholefoods, mostly plant-based. That sounds like Michael Pollan’s “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” advice, with a dollop of protein to take care of the “not too much” part.
To justify such prescriptive advice, the dietary hypothesis put forward by the authors will need long-term, prospective, comparative studies.
It seems Neanderthals were humans too
You say that “before humans arrived, Neanderthals lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years (16 May, p 14). When the two met, they interbred.” I beg to differ. Humans interbreeding with non-humans surely makes no biological sense whatsoever. I am forced to conclude that Neanderthals were human and that humans were therefore already there when Homo sapiens sapiens arrived.
The editor writes:
Such confusions underline ongoing debates on how to define species (26 January 2019, p 36)
We'll never get to grips with consciousness
Regarding the hunt for an understanding of consciousness, I have to quote the late Stuart Sutherland’s astute observation and warning in The International Dictionary of Psychology: “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved (2 May, p 40). Nothing worth reading has been written about it.”
Can we use AI to build a better lie detector?
It is good and probably useful to detect camouflaged frogs or soldiers with artificial intelligence (16 May, p 17). But I kept hoping your article would suggest that detecting hidden visual objects might be a good metaphor for detecting camouflaged verbal facts, like the ones that exist in the language of those who lie.
Attempts to build lie detectors based on physiological responses like heart rate, skin conductance and inaudible, high-frequency lip sounds don’t pass validity and reliability checks. So let’s have some proposals for detecting verbal cognitive inconsistencies using these kind of AI systems. Plenty of verbiage is available in court transcripts for training such technologies.
We're going to need a bigger computer
I agree with the string of readers who suggest there are signs that we live in a simulation (Letters, 25 April). Fortunately, Moore’s law, which says that computing power tends to double every two years, also applies in some form to the creator or creators of our simulation, so they can keep adding memory and computing power to it. They eventually had to introduce the curvature of Earth. Then, they must have scrambled to put much more detail on the moon when Galileo pointed his telescope at it.
Just imagine adding all those galaxies (and later exoplanets) once we launched Hubble. Unfortunately, they must have had a small problem with delivery of extra memory and so made the Hubble mirror slightly wrong, giving them some breathing space. And not so long ago, they had to make the simulation even more complex with the introduction of the Higgs boson.
Still, it was quite clever of them to set the speed-of-light limit 鈥� from which we must be able to deduce the factor of their version of Moore’s law.