| Attenborough meets Dawkins We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobileSir David Attenborough, 84, is a naturalist and broadcaster. He studied geology and zoology at Cambridge before joining the BBC in 1952 and presenting landmark series including Life On Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and, recently, Life. Richard Dawkins, 69, was educated at Oxford, later lectured there and became its first professor of the public understanding of science. An evolutionary biologist, he is the author of 10 books, including The Selfish Gene (1976), The God Delusion (2006) and The Greatest Show On Earth (2009). He is now working on a children's book, The Magic Of Reality.What is the one bit of science from your field that you think everyone should know?David Attenborough: The unity of life.Richard Dawkins: The unity of life that comes about through evolution, since we're all descended from a single common ancestor. It's almost too good to be true, that on one planet this extraordinary complexity of life should have come about by what is pretty much an intelligible process. And we're the only species capable of understanding it.Where and when do you do your best thinking?DA: I've no idea. All I know is if I'm stuck with something and go to bed, I wake up with the answer.RD: That's a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it?DA: That's if I find the answer at all.RD: Very few people say, "I think I'll have an hour's thinking now."DA: Mathematicians do. I had an uncle who was a mathematician, and one of his students said, "How long can you think for?" He said, "I sometimes manage two or three minutes." And this young man said, "I've never managed more than 90 seconds." Of course, that's abstract thinking, and by and large I'm not an abstract thinker.What distracts you?RD: The internet.DA: I used to work to music, but I can't now. Music is too important not to give it my full attention.What problem do you hope scientists will have solved by the end of the century?DA: The production of energy without any deleterious effects. The problem is then we'd be so powerful, there'd be no restraint and we'd continue wrecking everything. Solar energy would be preferable to nuclear. If you could harness it to produce desalination, you could make the Sahara bloom.RD: I was thinking more academically: the problem of human consciousness.Can you remember the moment you decided to become a scientist?RD: I only became fired up in my second year of a science degree. Unlike you, I was never a boy naturalist, to my regret. It was more the intellectual, philosophical questions that interested me.DA: I am a naturalist rather than a scientist. Simply looking at a flower or a frog has always seemed to me to be just about the most interesting thing there is. Others say human beings are pretty interesting, which they are, but as a child you're not interested in Auntie Flo's psychology; you're interested in how a dragonfly larva turns into a dragonfly.RD: Yes, it's carrying inside it two entirely separate blueprints, two different programmes.DA: I couldn't believe it! I remember asking an adult, "What goes on inside a cocoon?" and he said, "The caterpillar is totally broken down into a kind of soup. And then it starts again." And I remember saying, "That can't be right." As a procedure, you can't imagine how it evolved.What is the most common misconception about your work?RD: I know you're working on a programme about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian fossils, David. A lot of people might think, "These are very old animals, at the beginning of evolution; they weren't very good at what they did." I suspect that isn't the case?DA: They were just as good, but as generalists, most were ousted from the competition.RD: So it probably is true there's a progressive element to evolution in the short term but not in the long term – that when a lineage branches out, it gets better for about five million years but not 500 million years. You wouldn't see progressive improvement over that kind of time scale.DA: No, things get more and more specialised. Not necessarily better.RD: The "camera" eyes of any modern animal would be better than what had come before.DA: Certainly... but they don't elaborate beyond function. When I listen to a soprano sing a Handel aria with an astonishing coloratura from that particular larynx, I say to myself, there has to be a biological reason that was useful at some stage. The larynx of a human being did not evolve without having some function. And the only function I can see is sexual attraction.RD: Sexual selection is important and probably underrated.DA: What I like to think is that if I think the male bird of paradise is beautiful, my appreciation of it is precisely the same as a female bird of paradise.Which living scientist do you most admire, and why?RD: David Attenborough.DA: I don't know. People say Richard Feynman had one of these extraordinary minds that could grapple with ideas of which I have no concept. And you hear all the ancillary bits – like he was a good bongo player – that make him human. So I admire this man who could not only deal with string theory but also play the bongos. But he is beyond me. I have no idea what he was talking of.RD: There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.DA: A physicist will tell me that this armchair is made of vibrations and that it's not really here at all. But when Samuel Johnson was asked to prove the material existence of reality, he just went up to a big stone and kicked it. I'm with him.RD: It's intriguing that the chair is mostly empty space and the thing that stops you going through it is vibrations or energy fields. But it's also fascinating that, because we're animals that evolved to survive, what solidity is to most of us is something you can't walk through. Also, the science of the future may be vastly different from the science of today, and you have to have the humility to admit when you don't know. But instead of filling that vacuum with goblins or spirits, I think you should say, "Science is working on it."DA: Yes, there was a letter in the paper [about Stephen Hawking's comments on the nonexistence of God] saying, "It's absolutely clear that the function of the world is to declare the glory of God." I thought, what does that sentence mean?!What keeps you awake at night?DA: Worrying about things I worked at too late in the evening.RD: I have the same problem.What has been the most exciting moment of your career?DA: One would be when I first dived on a coral reef and I was able to move among a world of unrevealed complexity.RD: Something to do with a puzzle being solved – things fall into place and you see a different way of looking at things which suddenly makes sense.DA: We are living in the most exciting intellectual time in history. In my lifetime we have discovered such profundities, such huge principles. When I was an undergraduate, I went to the professor of geology and said, "Would you talk to us about the way that continents are drifting?" And he said, "The moment we can demonstrate that continents are moving by a millimetre, I will consider it, but until then it's sheer moonshine, dear boy." And within five years of me leaving Cambridge, it was confirmed, and all the problems disappeared – why Australian animals were different – that one thing changed our understanding and made sense of everything. When I made Life On Earth, we had to start with really complex organisms because the ecology of the very first oceans was not known. But you're doing a child's book? Tell me about it.RD: It's about science more generally. Each chapter begins with the myths, so in the sun chapter, for instance, we have an Aztec myth, an ancient Egyptian myth, an Aboriginal myth. It is called The Magic Of Reality and one of the problems I'm facing is the distinction between the use of the word magic, as in a magic trick, and the magic of the universe, life on Earth, which one uses in a poetic way.DA: No, I think there's a distinction between magic and wonder. Magic, in my view, should be restricted to things that are actually not so. Rabbits don't really live in hats. It's magic.RD: OK, but what if you took a top hat and all you can see inside is some little boring brown things, and then one splits and out emerges a butterfly?DA: Yes, that's wonderful. But it's not magic.RD: OK. Well, you're rather dissing my title...DA: The wonder of reality? But that's rather corny.RD: Yes, it's a bit like "awesome".Who is your favourite fictional scientist?RD: The one I can think of is Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, but he was a very irascible character and not a good role model.DA: I don't read fiction.What is the most difficult ethical dilemma facing science today?DA: How far do you go to preserve individual human life?RD: That's a good one, yes.DA: I mean, what are we to do with the NHS? How can you put a value in pounds, shillings and pence on an individual's life? There was a case with a bowel cancer drug – if you gave that drug, which costs several thousand pounds, it continued life for six weeks on. How can you make that decision?Richard DawkinsBiologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Study shows latest government spill estimate right By SETH BORENSTEIN 2010-09-23T18:01:39ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- After several missteps, the federal government finally got it right, accurately estimating how much oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, an independent scientific study found.... hosted.ap.org |
Elevator Pitch: Utopia brings science research data to life Philip McDermott, a research associate, is working with two principal investigators and two other research associates on the project, which has been funded by the EU and UK Research Councils and by Portland Press , Pfizer and AstraZeneca in the private sector. Utopia's first incarnation was in 2002 as Utopia Tools, which was downloaded a modest 200 times each month. McDermott has more ambitious plans for Utopia Documents. • What's your pitch?"Modern science produces masses of data, but scientists usually only get to publish articles about the highlights, and once they are published articles are frozen in time. So a lot of important knowledge gets lost or hidden. "Utopia Documents links scientific research papers to the data and to the community. It enables publishers to enhance their publications with additional material, interactive graphs and models. It allow the reader to access a wealth of data resources directly from the paper they are viewing, makes private notes and start public conversations. It does all this on normal PDFs, and never alters the original file. We are targeting the PDF, since they still have around 80% readership over online viewing. "Semantics, loose-coupling, fingerprinting and linked-data are the key ingredients. All the data is described using ontologies, and a plug-in system allows third parties to integrate their database or tool within a few lines of script. We use fingerprinting to allow us to recognise what paper a user is reading, and to spot duplicates. All annotations are held remotely, so that wherever you view a paper, the result is the same." • How do you make money?"Our viewing software is free, and it's free to make public comments. Larger customers will want to annotate and discuss documents in private: we're able to provide bespoke back-end solutions so they can have complete control over their data." • How are you surviving the downturn?"As a research group, we're a not-for-profit setup, so we just need to bring in enough money to cover our costs. Even that is quite tricky though, and set to get harder as the cuts to the UK research budget bite. That said, we're getting a growing amount of interest from industry, so we're fairly optimistic about the future." • What's your background?"I'm originally a software engineer from the mobile devices world, before I returned to academia to do my doctorate. Since then I've been researching the application of modern data management techniques to scientific data. Our research group has a history of virtual reality and scientific data visualisation." • What makes your business unique?"We sit somewhere between academia and the business world. Our passion is research, but practical research that can actually be used by real working scientists." • What has been your biggest achievement so far?"At last year's Portland Press launch , David Thorne selected the word 'cleavage' accidentally in the demo paper; Utopia Documents dutifully brought back only images and descriptions of 'cleaved proteins'... much to our relief." • Who in the tech business inspires you?" Clay Shirky . He's very insightful and has a pragmatic attitude I admire. I like the approach of the 37Signals guys too, although we've actually chosen Python over Ruby for our scripting language. Sorry, guys." • What's your biggest challenge?"Funding. Since we fall between two worlds, we have to convince businesses to invest in academia and research councils to invest in an application, both of which can be difficult." • What's the most important web tool that you use each day? "I'm an OmniFocus convert, it leaves your mind free to do other things." • Name your closest competitors"Some applications allow you to annotate a PDF, but they change the underlying file which is no good for what we want. Mendeley are in a nearby ballpark, although they appear more focused on the scientific articles themselves, whereas we are more interested in their actual content." • Where do you want the company to be in five years?"The default reader for scientific articles." • Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google?"We'd like to choose the middle way: license to Google!" getutopia.comInternet startupsResearch and developmentDigital mediaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The government agrees: Science is vital The doomsayers predicted we'd fail, but with very little time and a massive effort we scientists have shown that united we really can get results, says Jenny RohnLast week, I helped deliver the Science Is Vital petition to Downing Street, attended a lobby of parliament, and was part of a delegation invited to speak with David Willetts about the importance of science funding for the economy. During the intervening period, in the calm before the spending review storm, I have been living in quiet fear of today's announcement. And last night I was genuinely astonished at the news leaked from the Treasury: that cuts to the scientific research budget were to be much less severe than initially indicated. Astonished and, yes, happy.Twitter was alive with jubilation. This morning I woke to a backlash: we wanted investments, not cuts, people were saying, even though what we lost was far less than the 15% that Julian Huppert MP told us last week would constitute a victory. We should be wary, not pleased. Although I do not dispute the wisdom of these sentiments, I think the tide of public opinion will inevitably continue to shift and resettle today as we struggle to know whether we should be toasting our efforts or sobbing into our pints.The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the middle. I speak now not as the founder or official spokesperson of Science is Vital, but as someone at the coal face of scientific research, as one of these young, not quite "excellent" scientists whose career is threatened by the tightening belt of funding. It is no surprise that our emotions are rollercoastering to such an extent: the campaign has been a long, exhausting trip. We packed into four weeks a number of great achievements that most campaign groups would have been happy to notch up after half a year's efforts.When I kicked this entire thing off a month ago, I truly was not sure we would have any effect on the government whatsoever. Within hours of tweeting my initial call to arms, someone replied that things like this never work, that it would probably just be a sad cluster of a dozen scientists demonstrating in the rain. Even just before the rally, when we had more than 2,000 people signed up to attend, another person helpfully pointed out that if no one showed up, we'd look ridiculous. And yes, that lonely, rainy scenario kept me awake for more than a few nights in the runup.To make some sort of difference, though, hefty inertia needs to be overcome. I think it is human nature to despair at turning oil tankers, and to think that ordinary people can't make a difference. It is far easier to criticise than to get off one's seat and at least try to do something. Fortunately, these sorts of inertial types were in the minority, and the vast majority of people who heard our call responded in an overwhelmingly positive way: 33,000 signatures; 2,000 demonstrators, 110 MPs signing our early day motion, hundreds of pieces of news coverage, a packed lobby in parliament. Somewhere in the thick of these successes, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a sly piece in the New Yorker saying that Twitter couldn't start a revolution. I think that most would agree that the Science Is Vital campaign proved him wrong.For me, the most important thing to remember today is this: by all indications, our message was indeed heard, and heeded far more than we had any reason to expect or hope. Yes, there is no controlled experiment where Science is Vital did not exist, but a number of credible sources have credited the science community's voice for the fact that the announced cuts are less than the 25-40% predicted.The government's own language suggests that our message became absorbed. David Cameron used the adjective "vital" when talking about science in prime minister's questions last week, and in today's announcement, Osborne said: "Britain is a world leader in scientific research and that is vital to our future economic success."For this achievement – and make no mistake that it is one – we scientists must allow ourselves a moment of quiet celebration: not that our research funding has not been cut in real terms, or that UK science is still not being funded optimally, but that we were able to come together and make some sort of tangible difference to the outcome.And perhaps more importantly, we now know, in the face of future threats to science funding, exactly how powerful we can be when we pull together to make our voices heard. In this respect, scientists will never be the same again: we've done the experiment.Science funding crisisScience policySpending review 2010Tax and spendingJenny Rohnguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Langbroek promotes psychological testing of political candidates Queensland Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek says psychometric testing could weed out candidates who would not cope with the scrutiny of public life. abc.net.au |