Taking a different view of human exceptionalism
I am a scientist who has studied wild baboons in Kenya for over 50 years. While I agree with much of what Christine Webb says in her book, The Arrogant Ape, looking at humans through what I call my “baboon glasses”, constructed over decades of research, shows just how exceptional humans are (15 November, p 25).
Recently, the weight of human infrastructure (concrete, glass, timber, metals, etc.) equalled the weight of all life on Earth. Because of this, I reach a different conclusion to Webb. We shouldn’t look to any non-human animal to find the origins of the best and worst human behaviours. These are of our own (human) making. Our muddle today is because humans are exceptional.
Cats and dogs aren't accessories
Eddie Clutton makes excellent points in condemning “fur babyism”, which reduces a dog or cat to a toy, accessory or infant. They aren’t any of these things 鈥� they are individuals of a species different from our own, in ways that we ignore to their detriment, e.g. crating them for our convenience, flattening their faces for a “look” so they can barely breathe, declawing them to save our furniture or reprimanding them for natural behaviours (6 December, p 22).
Weighing up the odds of alien life
Michel Brahic tells us that the formation of the last universal common ancestor from a soup of chemicals was “an extremely unlikely event, with a probability estimated at less than 1 in a billion” (6 December, p 30).
He then goes on to speculate that life elsewhere in the universe, if it exists, could be based on even more unlikely events. Surely, in the face of such massive adverse odds, if life has happened elsewhere, then it is most likely to be a duplication of what has happened here.
Understanding the psychology of driving
Anthony Laverty’s article “Running out of road”, struck a chord with me as someone who hasn’t had a car for most of my adult life and who now has a little Corsa that’s about 15 years old (22 November, p 19).
I think the psychology of driving is something that needs a lot more research, perhaps with an aim to making us less car-centric.
People change when they drive and become arrogant, aggressive and completely ignorant to the fact that they aren’t the best drivers in the world. For walkers and cyclists, it makes for high risk, and for small cars it’s intimidating at times. I’m not a car hater, and I do enjoy driving, but like it is often said, driving is a privilege, not a right.
Concern over the limits of medical research
Am I alone in finding highly distressing the report into how to achieve successful pup delivery in oxytocin-deprived mice? Many of these mice and their pups are reported to have died without the assistance of an experienced mouse midwife. Pain and distress must have accompanied these deaths (29 November, p 13).
While experiments using non-human animals may be required for medical research, there appears to be no such justification in this case. Proving that oxytocin-deprived mouse mothers and their pups need and attract the assistance of an experienced cage companion seems not to equal the distress likely to have been caused.
A better formula for setting goals
Working towards more than one goal usually means missing both.
A better formula is: your major goal is what you really want to be, and be remembered for. Periodically rededicating yourself to that lifetime goal often pulls you through tough times. That goal is your own, private matter (15 November, p 28).
As you grow and learn in your career, you might adjust or refine the goal, i.e. to be the best (title) in (location). Everything else is an objective, or perhaps minor goal. These are usually specific, measurable accomplishments, rewards, financial security, etc.
Listening out for the sound of the caves
I accept that ancient peoples may have selected sites for social and spiritual purposes because of unique soundscapes, but, for cave art, what if sound was mostly important to help find the right place? For an artist, tall ceilings would be good so smoke from a large light-giving fire would gather high up, allowing clear sight for painting and comfortable breathing; tall Victorian ceilings had the same purpose (22 November, p 34).
To find such height, the length of reverberation could be used as a proxy measurement by the artist. A dim torch would be useless for assessing this. Ancient peoples may have had a strong appreciation for sound signals and some people who are blind are said to have improved echolocation, so discovering this method may not have been difficult.
An answer to the simulation mystery?
I very much enjoyed Miriam Frankel’s article “Do we live in a simulation?”. But she inadvertently hints at an interesting theory and then ignores it. Just assume, as others have, that this is a simulation designed entirely as a time machine to study humanity. After setting the “internal” clock of the simulation to run many times faster than any external clock, the observers could see how, from an initial condition, this particular set of events would play out (13/20 December, p 54).
But they would only need to simulate our ability to observe the universe, not manifest every aspect of it until that point “in time” when the “thing” met with our observation. This deals with the “no computer or power source could be big enough to cope with the load of simultaneously simulating everything” problem.
For the record
Andrea Halpern is a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania (6 December, p 46)