Getting to the heart of what makes us human (1)
Colin Barras correctly concluded that the line between human and non-human tends to be as much philosophical as biological. I am reminded of a subtle behavioural distinction made by physicist Brian Greene when he noted that humans transcend their timeline. This parallels something a philosophy professor told me long ago: humans ask what came before their forebears. This inspires oral histories, myths and legends. Then humans unavoidably inquire: what happens after our deaths, both personally and to our society? “We know we are going to die,” Greene starkly summarised it. Regardless of cerebral cranial capacity, tool-making skills or limb dimensions, those criteria comport with our humanity (3 August, p 32).
Getting to the heart of what makes us human (2)
When did we become human? When we got language. Everything distinctively human 鈥� art, philosophy, technology, religion and so on 鈥� is predicated upon it. But its arrival has always been a conundrum for human evolution.
First, there is nothing close to our sophisticated language in the animal world. Second, why did we need such an incredible tool? We could have been successful and dominant with a signalling system only slightly more refined than that of the other primates.
As for hard evolutionary evidence of when language began, you can look at bones all you like, but, with rare exceptions, brains don’t fossilise. We can, perhaps, look at the development of early human-like culture, but the dating there is imprecise. The arrival of language is a problem that, as Noam Chomsky has observed, may be forever a mystery.
Should horses be in the Olympics at all?
Christa Lest茅-Lasserre discusses the furore over a horse being whipped while training for dressage events, but doesn’t address the major concern: why make a horse dance to order? If animals are unwelcome in circuses, why make a horse dance carrying a rider and call it a sport? Why “train” a horse to jump a very high fence for events like showjumping when an “untrained” one would be happy with no more than 2 or 3 feet? Why are horses in the Olympics at all(10 August, p 21)?
Lunar repository could store frozen bodies, too
You report on a proposal to put a frozen backup of Earth’s life on the moon. The idea of off-planet reserves for life, albeit not frozen, isn’t new. In the 1972 movie Silent Running, forests are kept in giant greenhouses beyond the orbit of Saturn. In any event, any lunar repository could be financed by wealthy people who wish to have their bodies cryogenically frozen (10 August, p 14).
Painful memories of impact force physics
Alex Wilkins reports that a slight curve on the surface of a rock helps it make the biggest splash. I am of a generation that received corporal punishment. It was well known that the more charitable disciplinarians used an absolutely flat instrument. We, the recipients, could feel the reason suggested in the research: the flat surface formed an air cushion at the point of impact. By contrast, even slight curvature of the impact surface transmitted much more force (10 August, p 18).
Running errands once kept children active
With reference to childhood exercise, an additional factor struck me. As a child in a car-less household, I was frequently presented with a purse and a shopping bag and told to run and fetch whatever was needed from the local shops, thus clocking up both aerobic and weight-bearing benefits. My own children, however, just pop in the car to the supermarket while the grandchildren sit on the sofa, so maybe lifestyle has a significant impact on how much exercise children really get (27 July, p 42).
Could unlikely galaxies be from another universe?
I read your article on attempts to detect very early structures in the universe with interest, and was taken by the line “the further back into cosmic history we have looked, the more astounded we have been to see nigh-on fully formed galaxies and supermassive black holes that shouldn’t exist because there hasn’t been enough time for them to form”. Can we rule out that what we are seeing isn’t a sign of another, earlier universe into which we are expanding, which had time to form such features(3 August, p 36)?
Perhaps American settlers butchered thawed meat
You report that butchered bones hint at earlier human arrival in South America. But could the butchered glyptodont, which has been dated to the last glacial maximum period, have become frozen after death, like a Siberian mammoth, and likewise thawed thousands of years later and been butchered then(27 July, p 18)?
Unfair advantages in other contests
You speak of doping in sports as an unfair advantage. I agree. But a few pages later in the same issue (p 11) you report that a Google AI has achieved a silver medal score in a human mathematics competition (Leader, 3 August).
Considering that a computer uses much more energy than a human brain, could you call that doping? And should the AI be disqualified or at least banned from competing until it uses as little energy as my brain does?
Mathematical poetry taken to the next level
As a bit of a poet and a bit of a mathematician (and no great shakes at either), I found Peter Rowlett’s piece on mathematics and rhyme entertaining, especially the notion of the pi-ku, a haiku variant with syllables based on 3.14 for its three lines, i.e. 3, 1 and 4. Why stop there, when there are many other mathematical constants? How about a phi-ku using phi (1.68) or an e-ku using e (2.72)(10 August, p 44)?
One of my pi-kus: For circles / 蟺 / vital constant. And a phi-ku: Gosh! / 1 subtracted from phi / is the same as 1 over phi.