THINGS
THAT DO
MAKE SENSE
DEC 07 2010
I read about 3 books a year on average, usually out of necessity rather
than enjoyment, rather like I read The Sun and the Daily Mail every so
often
to see what people are
being told. Sometimes, however, it is also a pleasure. The greatest
pleasure I had this year came when I opened up Michael Brooks' 2010 paperback 13 THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE. http://www.13thingsthatdontmakesense.com/
I was prepared to be disappointed
but instead I enjoyed every moment because Michael Brooks really does
make sense. He is also extraordinarily diligent. Admittedly he has the
advantage of access through his professional career to resources and
contacts that are beyond the reach of the average individual on which
to base his research, but he is not part of any herd of thought or
prisoner of current orthodoxy. He is a true scientist and a brilliant
writer.
This is not so much a review of his work, which I rate as perfection,
as an attempt to share the view available by standing on his shoulders.
I believe Michael Brooks solid work in analysis of the evidence,
ranging from the most rigorously controlled laboratory results to
statistical generalities and even anecdotal and individual experiences,
weighing each accordingly, succeeds in several instances in pointing
the way to understanding what, in the subtitle to his book, are
described as The Most Intriguing
Scientific Mysteries of Our Time.
I intend to show that, contrary to the implication
of his title, THEY DO MAKE SENSE.
To appreciate what I am going to write here you should first of all get
hold of his book and read it from cover to cover. There are no caveats,
I leave you in the safest of hands. Read the prologue, all the chapters
in order and the epilogue. I am not going to take things in the same
order though, as I hope to achieve the most progress as quickly as
possible thanks to the work Michael has done.
I am going to start with the last two chapters: THE PLACEBO EFFECT and
HOMEOPATHY. It is logical to take them in that order and they happen to
be items in the current political agenda on which we need to reach a
majority agreement.
THE PLACEBO EFFECT
I have in the past for the sake of brevity referred to the Placebo
Effect as a known and accepted fact, to be taken into account when
analysing a great many human conditions, medical treatments,
psychosomatic diseases and homeopathic practice. Brooks quite correctly
urges caution in classifying the Placebo Effect as a 'known' until we
have come up with a usable definition for it. After taking the reader
through an extensive list of experiments, analysis and meta-analysis
from which some contradictory conclusions emerge, it is possible to
share with Brooks the opinion that the Placebo Effect is indeed real
but confined to the brain and (my own words here) to the
consciousness, with the proviso that to the extent the conscious and
unconscious mind are intimately connected and the latter exercises
control of hormones that work throughout the body, it can be said to
affect physical body conditions.
That puts a limit on what a placebo can do - a limit within which the actual effect must be
patient dependent in the same way that the effect of hypnosis is
dependent on the suggestibility of the subject. The limits are not
known, however, because the full potential of any individual mind-body
combination to cure malfunction or regenerate or extinguish its parts
is not known - all we know is what is usual, recorded, reviewed and
generally accepted.
There is also the complication that a reduction of perceived pain in
the brain could reduce the supply of chemicals produced by the body and
sent to the area of inflammation. The inflammation which is often
though of as damage or malfunction may well be part of a protection and
healing process. If it has done its job, the speeded recovery and
reduction of inflammation may be entirely beneficial. If the absence of
perceived pain is on the other hand premature and leads to the patient
resuming too early full exercise of a body part that should be rested,
both active chemical agent and placebo are potentially unhelpful. We
could compare the wish to reduce a 'temperature' in a a child when in
fact the rise in temperature plays a vital part in in making conditions
hostile to a virus or bacteria.
Brooks notes a 1985 estimate from the Oregon Health Sciences University
that between 35 and 45 percent of all medical prescriptions, including
diazepam (Valium) are placebos. That is to say that if they are
administered without the knowledge and appreciation of the patient they
have no effect at all; however you should read the whole chapter
carefully to get a handle on the issues. It is important to note that
the use of placebos is usually associated to issues of physical pain or
mental anxiety.
Brooks has for that reason, I assume, avoided any discussion of
placebos administered to animals because like many scientists he does
not consider it possible to speculate on animal consciousness or pain
in the absence of animal language. It would have needlessly complicated
an already difficult task of analysis of data referring to humans. I am
under no such restriction, however, and with some experience of animals
I can say without doubt that the language barrier is greatly
overestimated. In the case of animals that have developed a close
relationship with a particular human it is non-existent. The same
issues of trust, authority and expectation apply in spades. I will call
in aid another extract from Brooks:
A 1954 paper in The Lancet declared that the Placebo Effect is only
useful "in treating some unintelligent or inadequate patients"; that
seems almost laughable now.
Laughable indeed but possibly enlightening too. I indicates a fear
amongst the medical profession of the time that the placebo effect
could not only work on everybody but might be an ingredient in the
effective action of medicines that in 1954 had not been subjected to
double-blind testing we are used to these days. It could well be that
when testing new medicines on human guinea-pigs, those with a higher
education required some plausible explanation of how the substance was
supposed to work. The absence of a satisfactory explanation would
totally undermine the placebo effect. A less inquisitive patient would
not put the authority of the administering agent at risk.
It would therefore be a matter of education and the habit of
questioning authority, not intelligence or 'adequacy' that gave rise to
the lazy assumption of the 1954 Lancet paper that only stupid people
could be treated by placebo. If issues of trust, authority, confidence
and expectation are behind the placebo effect, an intelligent animal
receiving a medicament and attention from its owner would be a perfect
candidate for placebo treatment and the more the animal is observed and
cared for after treatment the more it would be reinforced.
PLACEBO EFFECT SUMMARY
Putting together the work that Brooks has assembled and weighing it
carefully I think we can say that although we do not know every detail
of the process as it functions in any one individual, and neither are
we
able to predict accurately the results of any individual treatment, the
Placebo Effect is far from being a mystery in some important respects:
1. it would be more strange of there was no such effect. The
Placebo Effect explains what would otherwise be mysterious. A world
without it would be difficult to imagine in view of what we know now
about biology and the human metabolism. In my opinion it could also be
demonstrated in animals but the recording of results when it comes to
perceived pain would be difficult.
2. Aspects of it are consistent with what we know of
psychosomatic processes and Classical conditioning (also called
Pavlovian or respondent conditioning, Pavlovian
reinforcement). There is no anomaly in its existence, only some
apparent anomalies in the results of investigations that can now be
explained.
3. Since it plays a complementary role in conjunction with even
the accepted allopathic chemical medicaments, it can at least be
expected to play a part in homeopathic treatments to which I will now
turn.
HOMEOPATHY
In http://revelstoke.org.uk/altmedicine.html
I have already set out my views on Homeopathy and I did not anticipate
learning anything new from Michael Brooks, but I was wrong. First of
all a quick run-through of important issues on which Brooks and I
agreed already:
1. It has been claimed by critics of homeopathy that if ultradilute
solutions can have an effect in biology it would 'send science back to
the drawing board'. This is clearly not the case as our scientific
knowledge at the microscopic level is in no way sufficiently extensive
that it could be threatened or invalidated if the suggested properties
of such solutions turned out to be true.
2. The structure of a material, not its composition, controls its
properties. This is a truth of such significance that I will not
enlarge on it here. It is key to the whole of inorganic evolution from
the first assembly of matter and gains in significance with the
emergence of organic evolution. Suffice to say it might have relevance
to the properties of water-based ultradilute solutions.
However, I have never sought to advocate the validity of homeopathic
theory; my scepticism has been reserved for the critics, just as it was
for the critics of theories of extra-terrestrial life. I was on the
other hand interested in supporting homeopathy as evidence-based
medicine independent of any particular theory. To this end I have
argued that its practice by medically qualified doctors, whose belief
in homeopathy is based on experience, is at the very least the
unwittingly honest application of the placebo effect, not to mention an
effective way to avoid chemical dependency on more expensive drugs with
possible side effects.
I followed with interest at the time the saga of Jaques Benveniste,
whose son was of assistance to me on conferencing systems in the early
days of extending the proto-Internet to eastern Europe and Russia. I
was saddened by the way he was treated when Maddox and his team of
examiners ran for cover when after pressurised tests they thought his
lab assistant had somehow cherry-picked the data and refused to persist
in further examinations. But I never thought of questioning the most
obvious aspect of homeopathy that goes right back to its origin: the
reason for the ultra-dilution.
At the end of his well recorded account of the history and
investigations into homeopathy, during which he shows how homeopathic
practice, whether based on fact or fiction, is in as big or bigger mess
as much of conventional medicine (that is my comparison, he does not
'knock' orthodox practice) due to the idiosyncrasies of its
practitioners, Brooks suggests by implication that we separate the
objections to the ultradilution from the homeopathic principle. He is
right, and I would
suggest we now take this further.
The bombshell comes toward the end of the chapter when the work of
Vilma Bharatran and Richard Hughes on the chemical roots of homeopathy
is discussed and we are reminded that Hahnemann, who started with
plant-based treatments that were NOT diluted, had unwanted side-effects
which led to the need to dilute them. The original reason for the ultra-dilution
is
cited
now
as
'unknown'
by
supporters
and
critics
alike,
and
even
by
those
who
doubt
its
necessity.
It
is
not
guessed
at by Brooks himself.
I suggest it is obvious and has nothing to do with physics or
chemistry. It is a question of legal liability and economics. I picked
this para off the web just now:
'In his early years of practice
Hahnemann used doses comparable to those of his colleagues: 5-50 grams
of Antimony, 20-70 grams of Jalap Root…his 1796 Essay mentions
'moderate' doses. In 1799 he
first announced the principle of the infinitesimal dose, and after 1800
his dose sizes were gradually reduced…' [Coulter, p.400]
and...
The Avogadro constant, NA, is a fundamental physical
constant that relates any quantity at the atomic scale to its
corresponding macroscopic scale. Inspired by the kinetic gas theory
Avogadro proposed his hypothesis in 1811,
in
order
to
describe
chemical
reactions
as
an
atomic
process
between
atoms
or
molecules.
[Author Peter Becker]
So we can see that at the start of the 19th century the science of
molecular mathematics was reaching the stage where it could be shown
that beyond a certain level of dilution the presence of a substance
could not be attributed to its previous presence in the source.
In the interests of economy, legal liability and the avoidance of
chemical dependency, Hahnemann would have experimented by reducing his
dose and the rest is history.
Perhaps now it is time, if criticism of homeopathy is based on the
claimed irreality of the effects of ultradiluted doses, and that this
criticism is to be used in an attempt to destroy homeopathic medicine
in the UK National Health Service, that research should be pursued in
highly dilute, as opposed to ultradilute doses. This does not 'blur the
lines' between homeopathy to the extent claimed by purists though it
does remove the absolute protection of legal liability for chemically
produced side effects. In view of the acknowledged risks from
allopathic treatments at undiluted doses this does not seem to me to be
a serious drawback. As things stand, homeopathy is evidence-based but
not science-based. Can we please try to get it together?
In
a
helpful
coincidence
three
days
after
I
wrote
the
above
the
BBC
broadcast
a
programme
to
mark
the
two
hundredth
anniversary
of
the publication of homeopathy's
founding text 'Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of Rational Medicine'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wdk90
NEXT: FREE WILL...
DEC 08 2010
FREE WILL
I have taken this next as although it is not unrelated to the
previous subjects it is one in which I shall use Michael Brooks' work
very differently. While there is nothing to disagree with in his
analysis (as I said, I am putting you in safe hands) he has no insights
or anything to say that points us in the direction of a solution. His
analysis makes sense but he is left at the end where he started. Having
shown on the neurological level that we think as we do because of what
we are, physically, i.e. brain in a given 'state', he sums up his
starting position:
"We do not have what we think of as free will. This inference can be
drawn from decades of entirely reproducible experiments, and yet it does not make sense".
10 pages later, when he has concluded that free will is an illusion,
Brooks concedes that it is an illusion it makes sense to retain on a
number of grounds, not least of moral responsibility. Harvard
University psychologist Steven Pinker probably put it best. "Free will
is a fictional construction," he said. "But it has applications in the
real world."
Well, thank you for the spade-work. Now to serious business.
On the neurological level we can accept the reality of external
interference in natural processes. Experimental electronic and magnetic
devices have proved we can induce limb movement, the desire to move,
mood changes that could affect judgement and decisions. Chemicals can
alter our perceptions of reality. Brain damage caused by physical
intrusion or shock or malignant growth can affect the basic mentality.
The extent to which any of this has a bearing on an individual's
'freedom of choice' is a matter of degree and its value, when society
has to make a judgement, is a matter for considered opinion. Such a
considered opinion is reached every day in courts of law. If an
individual is the subject of alcoholic inebriation against their will
or without their knowledge, they will not usually be blamed for
inappropriate or dangerous behaviour unless it be needlessly violent.
If they knowingly indulge in drugs or drink which results in harm or
risk to others they will, on the other hand, be judged responsible on
the grounds of free will when they indulged and again when they
proceeded, knowing they had indulged. This would be Pinker's
'application in the real world'.
Unfortunately a few experimenters wanting to make a name for themselves
have tried to make something significant out of the simple fact that it
takes us time to make up our minds, even at the most instant and basic
level. A series of experiments have proved that processes start in the
brain about half a second before the individual being tested decides on
a course if action. The originator of such experiments did not have any
intention of challenging the reality of free will and it is unfortunate
that others have attributed any significance to this time-lapse, and
that Michael Brooks should have fallen into the same trap.
For the truth is that it would not matter of it was more or less in a
given case than the 350 millisecond average. It could be 10 seconds and
still have no bearing on the argument for or against free will. The
only point worth making is that is not zero and never could be when it
come to the taking of a decision by a conscious human being, because
consciousness itself is not a fixed or a timeless state. It is a
dynamic conversation. So it will take about half a second for anyone to
reach a conscious choice of any sort, maybe a week or more for a high
court judge to decide on a sentence, and anything in between for the
millions of decisions and choices that humans make and take every day.
Now we have eliminated the significance of the actual time taken to
make a decision we can consider the appropriateness. Anyone forced to
make a decision in less time than
they would like to take over it may
well make
a decision they regret. Whether the time is curtailed by a second, a
minute, an hour, a day, or longer, the freedom of the individual is
restricted in proportion to the perceived inappropriateness of the time
allowed.
That is a relative measure, not an absolute one. The attentive reader
will see that already we are getting signals in this train if thought
that a big howler has been committed in the posing of the question: do
we
have
free
will? In requesting a yes or no answer we are making
as little sense as it would to ask the question: Do we play the
piano?
Everything is life is conditional. Can we run? Yes if we have legs
and have learned to walk first and are not paralysed. Do we have legs?
Yes if we are not damaged at birth or later. If we have what most would
consider mens sana in corpore sano we can, as we grow up and exchange
information with our environment, develop some control over our
behaviour. We learn to consider our choices. Our freedom can therefore
grow to the extent that we can accept or reject the constraints and
opportunities. Nevertheless there are many who will adopt or settle for
a demeanour that will categorize them in the minds of others and maybe
themselves. I have heard a psychologist on the radio today say "Some
people are risk takers, some are not". To the extent that this is true,
those who are embedded in such a category do not have as much free will
as those who are usually not risk takers but able to take risks if
their intelligent consideration concludes that they should break their
customary approach.
The educated, informed mind can exercise a veto over what might in an
animal be a natural reaction. It is this that defines the difference
between humans and their animal forebears, a difference that is not an
absolute drawn line precisely because of the points I have already
made: everything in life is conditional. Humans may revert or regress
to animal behaviour for a variety of reasons and in a number of ways.
This can be on the individual level, as we know, but it can also be on
a societal level. When the science of epigenetics is better understood
(I have just had to add it to this spell-checker) so will these issues
be. Animals act according to instinct unless trained to do
otherwise by atypical experience or human intervention. Humans can be
trained, train themselves, resist training, rebel against it later, or
be remarkably unaware of any of this. Free will demands awareness.
Religion can be a denial of free will in the form of a deliberate
subjugation of the individual to an orthodoxy, but that denial of free
will could be a free or an imposed choice, a knowingly imposed choice
or a 'brainwashing' achieved by indoctrination at an early age. Most of
the complications and contradictions that beset humanity in the 21st
century are the result, as ever, by the simple-mindedness of
authoritarian thinkers and the spasmodic behaviour of their followers.
Christianity at its origin was the ultimate championship of free will
and personal responsibility but its adoption by society called
inevitably for definitions, doctrine and dogma in the cause of social
harmony. The failure of these to evolve to be compatible with
scientific observation has been the ultimate absurdity of my own
lifetime, but catch-up time is here.
The exercise of free will by those released from constraint (be it
economic or religious) but untrained in social skills and uniformed or
misled in their appreciation of history is also a serious problem. It
was not without thought that Marx called religion the opium of the
masses, meaning it was both a comfort and a dependency. If the classic
dose is to be replaced it has to be with the equivalent of natural
chemicals and neurological structure within the brain that achieves a
dynamic mind-set that fosters social cohesion such as, in its day, did
the best of religious thought and practice.
A deliberate denial of free will is also common practice in a trained
and disciplined military organisation. This is the reverse of the
pseudo free-will of the lunatic or fanatic, who has no free will at
all. A modern soldier, if educated, trained and informed, is in a
really hot seat. He may have to refrain from self-preservation to judge
in a matter of milli-seconds if he should shoot or hold fire and, as we
have seen, half a second is needed anyway for a subconscious assessment
which will be taken according to his subconscious 'programming'. Only
if all the circumstances he is in have been pre-programmed has he a
chance of his decision being both instant and correct. For decisions
where he has time to think, his own free will must be exercised. If
necessary, in extremis, he can disobey orders, if he believes they are
mistaken, and
argue his case later. It is up to commanders to choose horses for
courses and arguie their case if it goes pearshaped.
We acknowledge that the free will of children is limited because,
though they may come trailing clouds of glory, they may also come
trailing clouds of shit and be unaware (because unassisted) at an early
age of right or wrong in the terms of the law or the norms of society.
They cannot be considered as 'free' even if they are well behaved until
they been able to develop that internal dialogue that is consciousness
to the point they have what we call a conscience. We are therefore
correct to limit the punishment of children, or any who cannot tell
right from wrong, while at the same time forcefully protecting society
from the dysfunctional.
So, there, I have answered the question "Do we
have free will" as it should be answered. We can have a very high
degree of free will. If we use it stupidly, such as jumping off the
Empire State Building to prove we have it, we then no longer have it.
If we assume we have it, we may not have it. We can develop it if we
think we lack it but we can also abuse it. We can use it to surrender
it. We can lose it. An intensive physical and chemical analysis of the
human brain is not likely on its own to have anything much more to say
on this matter.
In another useful coincidence,
the BBC has just broadcast on 11 Dec, 2 days after I wrote the above, a
debate beween Tony Blair and Peter Hitchens on the proposition
"Religion is a Force for Good in the World" in which Hitchens based his
case against the proposition on two main points: first the damage that
has been done in the name of religion by its followers, and second on
what he considered the abdication of
free will to the dictates of
either outdated scriptural texts or the opinions of the current human
head of a church or religious order. Hitchens won the debate two-to-one
because Blair conceded the first point (although able to argue that
religious people did good work, much of the good done by religious
leaders was, as Hitchens pointed out, repairing the damage done by
others of their ilk or their confused followers) and had also shot
himself in the foot in advance by converting to Catholicism, a
historically religiously intolerant church that preached salvation for
its followers alone. This fatally undermined his defence of religion on
the grounds that they all held their vital essentials in common.
However I
shall show in a separate file in due course that Hitchens, who was
intellectually at least in arguing his case well, can be shot down on
all his actual arguments against any and all religion just as
completely as
can be Blair in his idiosyncratic defense. Once I have destroyed all
their arguments (not their conclusions necessarily!) we can start to
make sense.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wv3vt
NEXT: DEATH and SEX
DECEMBER
10th 2010
DEATH and SEX
I am taking these two together. Brooks took them one at a time, death
before sex. In life we must experience them the other way round. Or do
we?
It is at this very fundamental point in the discussion that we can make
an error in our analysis. We use the word 'life' in three senses: life
as a phenomenon, life as the subjective experience of an individual,
and
the life of an individual as observed by their peers and surrounding
nature.
Brooks takes us on a fascinating trip through a study of the mechanisms
of ageing and death in a search to find the origins. I recommend a
careful read of it all. As a quantum physicist he should be accustomed
to failure in finding causality from the bottom up and indeed he fails,
which is why he puts death in his list of nonsense. Toward the end he
muses on the possibility that sex and death are linked in a two-way
causal relationship but fails to 'make sense' of either. I think we can.
Observation leads us to to believe that LIFE and particularly
INTELLIGENT LIFE is the most organised, interesting, consequential
phenomenon in the universal process that we can observe. We can observe
past universal development on on the large scale thanks to the finite
speed of light which enables us to look back 14 billion years, and on
the smaller and lesser scale thanks to the fossil records beneath our
feet, radioactive dating and other techniques. The moment we accept any
theory of evolution, the study of geometry and mathematics shows us
that evolution is dependent on the death of individual phenotypes. It
is both imposed and required - so we
could not have got here without it. Difficult to make more sense than
that!
It may be of interest to study the mechanisms of death, the origin of
mechanisms of death, the aspects of death and the infliction of death.
But we have to reject in a major way Michael Brooks' premise that death
'does not make sense' when it is a sine qua non of the evolutionary
process in any environment we can imagine or simulate. All life is
life-after-death-of-life.
Death does not make sense for Richard Dawkins. It is an anomaly
that does not follow from any of his theorising because he has defined
the evolutionary drivers in terms that are too limited. That is, in
turn, because his understanding of physics, geometry and mathematics is
too restricted. This dead end for Dawkins should give us the clue to
look elsewhere.
It is necessary to view the tree of life as a whole. A long-living
phenotype can experience but cannot evolve genetically. Genotypes did
not evolve. Evolution occurred through the EMERGENCE of new phenotypes
and sexual selection till with the passage of time and the
consolidation of epigenetic refinements a new genotype and a new
species is defined - defined for example in an obvious case by the fact
that in cannot interbreed with the previous species, though there are
other
criteria to choose.
However we can also observe that there has been an evolution of
evolution. There is no reason to think that from the human race will
emerge successful new genotypes with more than two eyes or two legs or
five digits, or protective armour. We have machines and technology. So
it could be claimed that, since there is no need for continual
evolution of intelligent life through the development of new species,
therefore the sine qua non for death is removed. No need for better
brains (we have computers) or dexterity or speed (automation) so no
justification for the evolutionary requirement for death. The rules of
chance, possibility, probability and necessity and the dimensional
matrix no longer demand the rational inclusion of death. They did, but
they may not in the future. So taking the best (or worst) case scenario
and moving on, is there another reason why the human life time should
not only have been limited to about what it is now, but will be also in
the future.
I think there is. Let us use the reductio ad absurdum to find the
principle and then adjust to the circumstances.
This is a great moment to pause, giving readers a chance to see if they
can get there on their own. I will post more when I have finished on
this issue.
DECEMBER 15th 200 DEATH
and SEX continued...
In his chapter on death, Brooks mentions
the anomaly of the Blanding's Turtle. The oldest known specimen, he
tells us was seventy-seven years old in the 1980s, a female still
laying eggs. According to Brooks these turtles do not get old and
decrepit or show increased liability to disease with age. He assumes
(without evidence) that she should still be and an laying. He does not
consider as relevant the life-style of the turtle - the fact that it
looks old and decrepit compared to most animals from very early in its
life and apart from laying eggs spends a life doing very little apart
from wandering slowly through the ocean. Nor does he mention they take
15-20 years to reach sexual maturity, and lay an average of only 8 eggs
a year. For most turtle species, only one in 100 survives to maturity.
I do not have a survival figure to hand for the Blanding's Turtle but
it is on the Endangered Species List. Clearly longevity and an apparent
lack of ageing in this case is very far from achieving eternal life.
Let us park all that on one side and consider the Sockeye Salmon, not
featured in Brooks.
According to Wikipedia: Sockeye are blue tinged with silver in
colour while living in the ocean. Just prior to spawning both sexes
turn red with green heads and sport a dark stripe on their sides. Males
develop a hump on their back and the jaws and teeth become hooked
during their move from salt to fresh water.
Sockeye spawn mostly in streams having lakes
in their watershed. The young fish, known as fry, spend up to three
years in the freshwater lake before migrating to the ocean. Some stay
in the lake and do not migrate. Migratory fish spend from one to four
years in salt water, and thus are four to six years old when they
return to spawn one summer (July-August). Navigation to the home river
is thought to be done using the characteristic smell of the stream, and
possibly the sun.
There is no mention yet in the
unfinished Wikipedia entry of
the extraordinary activity of these salmon prior to spawning. There
journey upstream in rivers that no human could stand in the shallows
due to the violence of the flow, surmounting rapids and waterfalls, is
one of unbelievable agility, muscular power and determination after
which they spawn and die. A short and at times exciting and energetic
but very short life life seems appropriate for the salmon and the
species is far from extinction in spite human predation. This year saw
a record number of Sockeye returning to Canadian rivers to spawn.
Now consider the Kleiber Ratio
(see http://www.beholders.org/mind/scienceandfacts/124-1billionheartbeats.html
)
The Kleiber Ratio determines that for every creature, the
amount of energy burned per unit of weight is proportional to that
animals mass raised to the three-quarters power. Symbolically: if q0 is
the animal's metabolic rate, and M the animal's mass, then Kleiber's
law states that q0 ~ M3/4.
Thus a cat, having a mass 100 times that of a mouse, will have
a metabolism roughly 31 times greater than that of a mouse.
Kleiber Ratio’s is universal: “There’s this exquisite
interconnectivity. All the structures have different forms and
functions, but all of them adhere to the same scaling pattern.”
Capillaries grow into veins and arteries according to the same
three-quarter-power scale. So also do neural fibres by becoming
whole nerves then becoming nerve bindles. From the mitochondria
to the cell to the blue whale, the rule holds through twenty-seven
orders of magnitude.
I think we can see here not only some interesting
connections between function and life-span but also between what Brooks
has titled SEX and DEATH. He says they make no sense because he is
taking them as if they could exist separately. I maintain that you have
to understand both to understand either, and Brooks, taking them
separately, logically can make no sense of either one.
In his chapter on death, Brooks takes us through the mechanisms,
attempting to find the reason for death in the mechanisms but then
wondering why the mechanisms arose in the first place. Behind all this
lies the assumption that a failure to live forever is a failure, could
not be part of a success. That a failure to self-repair, being
apparently against the interest of the organism, is really and truly,
finally and irrevocably against the self-interest of the organism.
The extraordinary achievement of human self-consciousness has given us
a great sense of our own importance but blinded some of us to the
possibility of a life greater than our own of which we are a part. We
either see a human death as a tragedy or evoke a system of personal
survival after death to deny it, and this is how we handle our affairs
when we have a possible lifespan of less than 100 years. Imagine if you
will, if we had a lifespan of 500 years, how badly dealt with we would
feel if at the age of 21 we lost a leg in an accident? What if we were
born disabled, or just extremely STUPID? And if a lady whose well-paid
spouse is killed in an aircraft accident and the airline were proved
negligent, thereby depriving him at the age of 50 of 200 years or more
of life? Does Michael Brooks still not see natural death in a span of
the order of three-score years and ten for most and a limit of about
100 as usual as 'making sense'?
Even if we now remove the need to evolve as the sine-qua-non reason for
death, if we were to extent the human lifespan without being able to
repair all accidental damages and prevent all homicide we would be
making more than a rod for our backs. The beginning of wisdom is to
understand that we are dispensable, and that in no way makes the world
a
cruel or heartless place. Quite the contrary.
So please read Brooks' chapter on death, all of it, as it is excellent
and Brooks makes sense. But he is looking in the wrong place. I maintain that the life-span of organisms, from the
fruit-fly and smaller to the whale in size, and the bacteria to the
human in intelligence and complexity, is always appropriate. That what
is appropriate is what makes sense, and what science needs to
understand is what is appropriate and why, and where.
That brings me to SEX
DECEMBER 21st 2010
SEX
Reductionists may be saying (or thinking) that my contention that death
'makes sense' because the life spans are 'appropriate' has nothing to
do with science, because there is no causality. I would remind them
that the most fundamental Darwinism is based on survival, not on
construction through causality. So even if fundamental Darwinism is
flawed (which it is because it is only a player, not sufficient) it is
not only permissible but mandatory to take the coeval, synergistic,
symbiotic, cooperative and even parasitic functions of living organisms
into account. The attributes that all life forms develop therefore have
to be appropriate to the survival of their species and the other
species on which they depend. Bear in mind it is LIFE
that evolves, not
species.
Reproduction by cell-division, asexually initiated, may or may not be
more 'efficient' or advantageous for specific genes, but unless you are
a Dawkins this is of no significance. Brooks does not set much store by
it either and nor should we. Yet we can return to the most reductionist
level to find the causality of sex in the basics of geometry. Gravity
forces every chemical element to associate to the extent that
thermodynamic entropy is overcome by constraint. Atoms share
electrons and bonds form to create molecules. The basic abstract rules
of geometry ensure survival by dimensional agreement, complementarity,
cohesion. At the next level the same rules may Pi, Phi and and the
Fibonacci sequence a feature of the construction of naturally formed
organisms that will later form the basis visual attraction. All of this
is inevitable if the meaning, not just the mathematics, of Pythagoras
and Fermat's theorem are understood.
Next I will by contrast call on Dawkins' better mind in the use of his
metaphor 'The Blind Watchmaker', for the eyes which all species of a
certain size and autonomy have acquired were not there in the beginning
as the evolutionary process gathered pace. Life 'felt its way' as it
chose its associations, atomic, molecular and cellular. It felt its
way, smelled its way, used every means of detection as autonomy grew,
microscopically over millions of years. Nature was indeed blind and its
attempts at geometrically based chemical satisfaction (which still
takes place in the brains of every modern human) were ruthlessly
selected by the inanimate environment. The mathematical basis on which
choice was made would billions of years later be the same mathematical
basis that produced the macro and micro forms that would govern sexual
attraction through visual, aural, oral and olfactory signals between
humans today. The proportions of Leonardo's famous human figure are
linked to the geometry that gave rise to sexual reproduction. The eyes of the watchmaker are in the watch. The
watchmaker is also is at one with the existence the watch, the past of
the watch
and the future of the watch.
The autonomy of the single cell, however complex, is of a low order.
Two principles emerge early in the evolutionary process which, as with
the laws of geometry, continue to guide and determine the success which
in turn defines the species that appear and survive for a significant
moment in our planetary history. These are: cooperation and the
division of labour. These principles are manifest in organisms,
super-organisms and the organisations we have built in society,
industry and politics. Cooperation started with the sponge, which
reappeared billions of years later in fossilised form as flint to play
a
vital role in the evolution of hominids. As for the division of labour
(see this phrase in for example http://eh.net/book_reviews/natural-origins-economics),
this
sets
in
soon
after
the
sponge
appears.
All
the sponges we find today
have a rudimentary division of labour in the form of specialised
funnels and flagellum appendages. The division of labour confers
advantages recognised by Darwin in the case of ants.
Nowadays
we
(well
some
of
us)
appreciate
that
the
colony,
not
the ant,
is most helpfully regarded as the organism (that is to say the unit of
the species). We can call it a super-organism but, if we do, then a
single human is a super-organism and better understood as
such.
What has all this got to do with sex, death and these two phenomena
'making sense'? Everything. Brooks runs through a host of theories on
sex which he discards as insufficient before suggesting (a point I had
overlooked when making the same suggestion myself at the end of my
discussion on DEATH), that the anomalies of death and sex might be
solved together. But he fails to finish the case. I think I have taken
it further but there is more to say to wrap it all up.
I just found this.
http://www.essortment.com/all/whatareseaspo_rkql.htm
Particularly:
Most sponges are hermaphrodites, that is, a single sponge can
display either male or female tendencies as required.
They release living young through the outgoing oscula. The new-born
baby sponges resemble plankton and after a few days of free floating
will attach themselves to a hard surface and begin to grow. Sponges
have a life span of a few months to 20 years or more. They also have
the ability to regenerate into new individuals from even the tiniest
fragments of the original. This is of particular value when sponge
habitats begin to degrade or can no longer support the growing
population or if food supplies suddenly diminish. When any of these
variables occur the sponges fragment and lie dormant until such time as
growing conditions once again become ideal.
Quite a lot there on sex and death
which should help us to understand how they both 'make sense' in
allowing the most primitive corporate animal to feed and procreate
while at the same time being able to regenerate from the smallest
remnant. I am told you can put a sponge in a liquidiser and grow a new
identical one from the smallest fragment. The sponge you have in the
bathroom is the skeleton of a once living animal.
Richard Dawkins once based the progress of
evolution on the efficient survival of the gene measured against the
winnowing selection of the environment, with random mutations (caused
by either radiation or DNA copying errors) being the source of
variations on which natural selection operated if any advantage was
gained. The higher organisms were in his view driven by this
genetically based mechanism, so that even if the gene-shuffling
afforded by sexual reproduction advanced the variations the conscious
behaviour of phenotypes had little influence on the choice of mate and
learned behaviour could not possibly be passed on genetically. But the
evidence for epigenetic influence was obvious to many in the mid 20th
century [http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/haig/Publications_files/04EpigeneticOrigins.pdf].
Had
I
known
this
when
struggling
to
formulate the theory in 1984 it
would actually not have helped, as it was only the belief I was
breaking new ground that got me to write anything at all.
Be that as it may. given the observed
symbiosis and interdependence of the species we know about (let alone
the ones we have not yet identified) it would seem to be more
reasonable if not to reverse to at least balance the fundamental
direction and the level on which selection can operate. When we get to
advanced life-forms, sexual selection, whether conscious or
unconscious,
engages the mental process of animals in proportion (in my view) to
their intelligence. The social role of sex could in theory hark back to
very primitive life forms. Intentionality and anticipation in animals
has been the object and subject of scientific experiments but
experience shows us that friendship and companionship between animals,
and between humans and animals, can reveal things that pure experiments
cannot. The herd instinct can sometimes be be analysed mathematically
to show a survival benefit for the species and for a proportion of
individuals, but there are very solid examples as different as horses
and chickens forming bonds of friendship that are not sexual in any
way, and of animals that pine away when their companion of the same or
another species departs.
My conclusion after considering all the reason Brooks gives for the
reason of finding 'no scientific sense' in either sex or death is that
the science and maths engaged in the theories he has examined are
insufficient to describe the natural origins because the theories he
examines are scientifically and mathematically primitive, and again
insufficient to describe the development of sexual activity because
they ignore the value of autonomy and intelligence in the life-forms
involved. Science that does not include social science cannot be
sufficient to describe nature as we know it even at the level of a
sponge, which we discover can use sexual and asexual reproduction as
required or regenerate in appropriate environments from its smallest
fragment. In brief, nothing could possibly make more sense than sex and
death, whichever science we use to examine them. They have produce the
world as we know it and will produce the future, whether we make a
success of life on this planet or not.
Now, working backwards, during the Christmas holiday I will deal with
the chapter that lies at the heart of the Michael Brooks Anomaly: LIFE.
It will make a lot more sense now!
FEBRUARY 22nd 2011
LIFE
Michael Brooks' header for this chapter is "Are you more than just a
bag of chemicals?". My answer is clear. We are more than just a bag,
but we are composed of chemicals; the confusion is caused by our
ignorance of these chemicals, the structure that supports them in space
and time, their capabilities and their origin. We know a lot, but
there is a lot more to know. 11 pages later, after the recital of some
fascinating and enlightening information, Brooks writes: "LIFE, for now,
stubbornly remains an anomaly; something unique, mysterious and - put
simply - special".
I find this curious given that in the
preceding pages we find a surplus of reasons why the chemicals we
observe, in the conditions we observe, are so likely to have resulted
in the life we observe over the time we have now traced that we
actually have competing theories, rather than a lack of any, as to how
life on this planet started. Oh boy, does it make sense!
There are theories as to how it got started on the planet from
chemicals formed here once conditions were appropriate and also
theories that it could have arisen from organic chemicals formed
elswhere that were deposited on a waiting Earth where, due to the special
environmental conditions (particularly the tidal movements caused by
the moon), it started and then evolved. So, there is the word 'special'
in the right context.
The universe is (amongst its other attributes) an immense machine
bound, without
fail, to produce the chemicals. What is remarkably special is our
planet. That is
not to say it is unique in the sense that there are no other planets
this size with an appropriate sun and moon and gravity, but they may
well be one in
a hundred million or a billion or even more. That is special alright,
but I will deal with the probabilities elswhere. Given that special
environment I
think that the science we now agree on is sufficient to conclude that
the
emergence of life 'AS WE KNOW IT, JIM', is not an anomaly but a norm.
As with all of Michael Brooks' book, though, I encourage you to read
all he has written. I am confident you will come to the same conclusion
as I, but I
will add some comments here on some of the points he raises. We
do have to deal with the defintion of life
and on that I agree entirely with Brooks that there is no threshold
line to be
drawn because there is more than one attribute and the number of these
that have
to be present in a 'thing' to make it animal, vegetable or one of the
other forms is a matter for subjective opinion. The attributes are, as
suggested, such as the presence of a metabolism, of the ability to
grow, of self-reproduction or the production of scions or offspring, of
organized complexity. of reaction to the environment, of autonomy. The
fewer of these and the lower their degree, the less likely we are to
consider the matter under consideration to be 'alive'.
One thing to be noted is that advanced life forms are dependent
internaly on lower life forms and externally on peer on life forms of
every level up to their peers. Life on our planet, and I would assert
on any planet, is vast family of organisms which evolves in symbiosis
along with the evolution of its inorganic components. It is not an
anomaly, it is the only game in town on the surface of this globe and
one that is changing constantly.
Where I go along with Brooks, until it leads him astray, is where he
says on page 74 "Such bullish
attitudes don't take acount of our ignorance.....if creating life is
simply a question of putting the right chemical together under the
right conditions, there is still no consensus about what 'right'
actually is - for the chemicals or the conditions." Exactly,
there are many things we do not know ranging from the basic to the
sophisticated. It is only a few years since we discovered that human
DNA contains more information than is stored in all the computers in
the world in at this time. Although it may be possible to assemble
chemicals to create organisms that will 'grow', and even grow into the
forms we predesign, in environments we create so that they can
'evolve', it is highkly likely, in my considered opinion, that life as
we know it, created by the 4 billion year symbiotic process we are
still discovering, in which every bit of that time and space played a
part, with what we consider its failures being as important as what we
consider its successes, is not something we can imitate in even its
earliest stages by slapping stuff together. We can assemble from
existing evolved materials, mix and match, insert and change (genetic
engineering) but I find it hardly surprising we cannot simulate in the
lab what takes a solar system, planet moon and the complete chemical,
gravitational and electromagnetic environment to get it started.
Building information is the name of the game, but rather a lot of it.
Scientists can so underestimate the material world that is their great
passion. They like to say information cannot be lost, but they are not
appreciating how it is created. In their frustration, some physicists
are now proposing that the information in our world is a hologram
produced from a 2-dimensional surface at the boundary of space-time. I
can tell them that in a way they do not understand they are, in a
sense, right. It is not a holographic projection, however, it is a
process of realisation
in the realm of experience of which we are at the heart.
That word 'realisation' will one day be understood. The way information
builds is
indeed connected to the extremes of space-time, through the logical
abstractions that govern the dynamics that come into play the moment
singularity is abandoned in the cause of self-knowledge. I don't ask
the reader to follow me there, here and now; so back to the book.
Brooks assembles opinions that, while acknowledging the interest in a
reductionist approach, acknowledge it is inadequate as an explication
of how things build in a complex environment. Philip Anderson's 'More
is different' echoes the opinion of many and for most of humanity
science is not the area in which they find the best writings on life.
They find it in the writings of Shakespeare, Montaign, Confucius,
Tolstoy, Kipling, Omar Khayyam, the King James Bible
and the great poets. Life and humanity being a 'fait accompli' for
every new arrival, most of them treat scientists who claim it has to be
explained to fit their theories as arrogant. I have to agree and am
glad to find it said, more and more by eminent scientists, that the
more
they discover the more the surface of their ignorance expands. Yes, but
their knowledge also if they can span the disciplines. How
different this is to a century ago, and how reassuring. 'Making sense'
is not dependent on our perfect, exact understanding, right now, how
everything has come into being; it is a measure of consistence and
coherence and plausibility of theories of the past but vitally of its
performance in the world we observe today. My case, of which I am
certain, is that the world we observe makes sense in every way. The
problems we now face are far from random. The paradoxes are there to be
solved, leading on further tasks.
I you have not yet had a look, go now to
Continuing here on the discussion of LIFE, there is much to be said on
the future of life on Earth. Darwins basic theory of evolution
concentrated on mortality as the means of natural selection but it
would be more correct to understand the process as related to success
in reproduction multiplied by restance to mortality before reaching
reproductive capability. Humanity has radically altered the process of
evolution through developing technology and medicines. Our medical
progress, while impressive, is very short term and confused. To the
extent that we use it to save lives and reduce pain it may well be
adverse to the survival of our species. There are too many of us making
too many demands and expecting far too much of our planet unless we
learn very much faster how not to abuse the resources, animal vegetable
and mineral on which we depend.
The evolution of evolution is now at last accepted by most biologists
but at the same time we are running into a new source of confusion. The
refusal of many biologists to get to grips with the realities of
epigenetics until now has rendered them blind and confused between
adaption and evolution. The obsession with selection by mortality on
the products of random selection has resulted in them still talking
about 'human evolution' in a general way when it would be simpler to
have some new words to describe the changes in characteristics that may
be inherited but which are in no way a movement toward a new
post-homo-sapiens species. It is possible that such a new species could
exist at some time in the future that lives happily in gravity-free
conditions. It would have adapted to these and the adaptations
accelerated epigenetically in the procreation of similar beings
breeding in gravity free conditions. But on the surface of a planet I
believe the human form is unlikely to change very much. Machinery will
complement our physical shortcomings and communications and education
could collectively overcome our individual mental failings, so that
biological intelligence will always control the electronic machinery it
creates, using only the different limitations of the latter as its
asset. After all, the moment a computer can calculatingly lie it is
useless.
Above all, it is life itself, universal life that is what our
achievement must be, not our own brief candle, even though it is all
the brief candles that produce the great event. Only when that is
understood, that individual life is supremely important, wonderful and
valuable, but its end not a tragedy or disaster even if the cause of it
is due to the grossest failure, will the confusion that causes people
to see life as an inexplicable anomaly, or a mystery, an unendurable
pain or a meaningless disappointment, be removed.