| 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 |
A surprise from the LHC already! The CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced a surprise yesterday which may dramatically change our ideas about quarks, gluons and protonsThere was a special Cern seminar yesterday evening on some new results from the CMS experiment, one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. The result is summarised in this colourful landscape.First imagine this is a contour map of the cylinder CMS makes around the LHC collisions. It has been cut lengthwise and unrolled. Then for each pair of particles in an event, you put one of them at (0,0), and plot the position of the other. (Thanks to GreyBadger for the comment below correcting the initial over-simplified explanation here).The map is the average distribution of the separation between particle pairs for a very special class of events, with very many particles in them. The big peak is something like a "jet" of particles, what we expect when a quark or gluon in the proton undergoes a collision and is scattered off at an angle.Balancing it on the other side is a long ridge. This is an expected feature. You have to have something there to balance energy and momentum.The weird thing is the other ridge (pointed at by the arrow). This shows particles and energy coming out far away from the jet in rapidity (meaning at angles along the LHC beam) but on the same side of it around the cylinder. Our best models of quark and gluon interactions and jet production do not predict such an effect.What is causing it? Well, a similar effect was seen at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the US. There it was interpreted as the quarks and gluons in a collision between heavy nuclei behaving collectively - moving together like a drop of liquid or a plasma. This is the way quarks and gluons behave under extreme temperature and pressure - for instance shortly after the Big Bang.The big surprise is seeing these in proton-proton collisions. As far as I know, it was thought that the temperature, pressure and the sheer number of quarks and gluons would not be enough to cause this. This is why RHIC uses heavy nuclei, not just protons. The LHC will run with heavy ions at some point soon. (In fact the Alice detector is built specifically for this). My guess is that the CMS scientists were making this measurement with protons as a baseline test for future heavy ion measurements. I suspect they are as surprised as anyone else to see that ridge.I expect a lot of theoretical activity over the next weeks and months as people try to digest and interpret these results. And some experimental activity as we on Atlas try to see if we can see the same effect.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Morality beyond God | Mary Warnock Calls for a return to faith assume God is the only moral authority, but sympathy with human need is the bedrock of good behaviourWhat is faith without God?It is often assumed that religion is the only source of agreed, stable morality. We must therefore either return to literal faith in the existence of God, or we must accept moral "relativism", which is another word for moral anarchy.Such assumptions, surprisingly common even among those who practice no religion, are, in my view, mistaken; they rest on a false belief about the actual nature of the moral. But before I argue that case, I'd like to ask what recent calls for a return to faith entail. Suppose for a moment you understood Stephen Hawkings's argument that it can be shown mathematically that there is no need to suppose a God as creator of universes; and suppose you rejected it, arguing, like creationists now and in the 18th century, that the universe we live in is such that it constitutes proof of a designer, who is God, what else could you infer about this designer?The answer, surely, is: nothing. We cannot move from believing that God lit the blue touchpaper to assuming that he made man in his own image, or gave him dominion over other animals in the world. We cannot assume that just because a creator must exist, he must also be a loving father, interested in the wellbeing of his children, and aiming for the salvation of their immortal souls, or, on the other hand, a stern judge, condemning the sinful to eternal damnation.These beliefs, as David Hume pointed out more than 200 years ago, are quite extraneous to any belief that the world was created by a divine hand. From the need for a creator you can infer nothing but that a creator exists, or did once exist. About the creator's attributes or character you can know nothing. But those who call for a return to faith call for more than a return to the belief in a creator. They want a belief in God as the great and unchanging moral authority, by knowledge of whose commands we can know for certain what it is right and what it is wrong.However, the enthronement of God as the source not only of the laws of nature but of moral law has its origin not in the argument from design, but in the narrative of the scriptures. In the Jewish tradition, the laws that should regulate life in society, among them the Ten Commandments, were given to Moses by God in the mists of Mount Sinai. In the Christian tradition, the new covenant of love that replaced the old was preached by God himself through his incarnate son. To return to faith is to accept the authority of these narratives and treat them as the literal truth.But is it now possible for people simply to decide to believe the literal truth of the scriptures? We have become too scientifically and historically sophisticated to accept the story of the Garden of Eden as other than a myth, albeit a powerful and illuminating myth. How can we simply choose to see God's hand in the Ten Commandments? Our historical sense tells us the small, suffering society that was the Jews needed a cement to hold them together contra mundum and that this was provided by their great moral leader Moses and the story of his shortlived private encounter with God, giving supernatural authority to his teaching. Shared legends are cohesive.Similarly, the genuinely great moral reform that constituted Christianity's break from the rest of Judaism was imbued with the supernatural and acquired power over the imagination as the messianic story was repeated. Religious narrative is the imaginative clothing of morality. Religion is born from moral leaders who are believed either to have seen God or to be God incarnate. So their authority is confirmed.Has morality, then, in reality none but human authority? I do not believe that it has; but this does not entail it must be completely uncertain or that there is no real difference between how we must and how we must not behave. For human beings alone among animals can envisage a world that is better than their own. They can understand the faults, the hazards and the horrors of their own, even if it is others not themselves who suffer. They have much in common and can sympathise with each other. This is part of human nature, though it needs to be taught.Morality arises as the predicament of human beings in the world is recognised and their shared responsibility one for another is understood. No human being is exempt from the temptation to make things worse in his own interest, nor from the responsibility not to do so. One way of marking this human commonality is to talk of universal human rights. Another is to call attention to common human needs, and that sympathy with human need that is the foundation of good, rather than bad behaviour.ReligionEthicsStephen HawkingMary Warnockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Don't be spun on science funding - a checklist for the Spending Review Evan Harris, a veteran of spending announcements, warns the science community to be cautious before claiming salvationRemember the trick played by Labour in 1999 when it announced a three-year boost for the NHS of £21 billion which turned out to be an increase of £3.5bn each year for three years? By adding 3.5 + 7 + 10.5, the government was - for the first time ever - giving a cumulative figure. The true increase in spending was £10.5bn but through a sneaky double/triple count it was spun as twice the size. One major NHS player said that a £21bn increase was "beyond his wildest dreams" - which was true since it really was a fantasy. For the next three years the Secretary of State for Health read back this comment to him and opposition spokesmen like me who exposed the true figures and complained about the over-hype. So when we read this morning that the government has let it be known that science and research have escaped significant cuts, we need to be cautious and avoid hostages to fortune.I set out in this post back in September the basis upon which the spending review should be considered. This is my six-point guide for considering the science R&D settlement1) Consider only real terms figures These are inflation-proof. They reflect more closely the real world (hence the adjective). A cash "freeze" for science is predicted for the CSR, which is a real terms cut of 8.9% over three years. A cut is not a freeze. 2) Will a 10% cut in real terms be managed without pain?The Royal Society has forecast that a 10% cut in real terms "would be painful but manageable, and could only be delivered through substantial efficiency savings, and some rebalancing of investment priorities." Even that, however, does not take account of some other factors and it requires substantial reinvestment after the four-year term to reverse the damage done. Furthermore, UK science is already efficient and only work judged excellent is funded, so there is not much scope for efficiency savings from cutting grants.3) How does it compare with what our competitors are doing?Scientific research is a global undertaking with a relatively mobile skilled workforce and the fact is that our major rivals are increasing investment in R&D even as they battle their own deficits. In relative terms, therefore, a 10% real terms cut is worse. 4) We don't know the plans for capital spendingSome current expenditure (including part of what we pay for major projects like CERN, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider) is funded out of capital. The outgoing Labour government proposed 50% cuts in planned capital expenditure, which the coalition has said it will not cut further overall. But what that means for science is not clear. Capital is important in science of course both in terms of new facilities that are state of the art but also to renew existing equipment. The one part of Labour's mixed record on science R&D that cannot be quibbled with is the significant capital investment it oversaw, which is a fitting legacy to former science ministers Lords Sainsbury and Drayson.5) We do not yet know if the £2.1bn of R&D funded by other government departments is at risk Although this spending is not formally part of the science budget or even the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) science spend (which also includes university research funding allocated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England) the jobs it pays for are just as real, the scientific programmes it supports are just as high quality as those funded through BIS. If these are cut in cash terms then the reduction in science R&D is greater than 10% and the scope for terrible cuts is considerable given the pressure on other government departments. Those figures - buried within departmental budgets - will not be available for at least a few days. 6) There may be greater cuts in some research councils when the cake is divided upThe division may not be pro-rata as government will want it to match its research priority areas. There is nothing wrong with government specifying broad areas (as long as it does so transparently because it is accountable for taxpayers' money), but this could mean deep cuts in some areas. If the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which mostly funds physics and funds much of the subject, is hit then there will be damage. This is because the STFC has already faced cuts under Labour and has less scope for savings because much of its budget is pre-spent on large facilities and international subscriptions. In fact if anyone doubts the impact of a flat cash settlement they need only look at what STFC went through in 2008-9 and is still going through.Overall, I would agree with those who believe the science community may have had an escape from the prospect of terrible cuts. We should also judge that David Willetts, Vince Cable and Adrian Smith (the director general for science and research at BIS) have done a fine job. I also applaud the scientific "great and the good" like the Royal Society and other learned societies for their lobbying. And we should pay special tribute to my colleagues in the "down and dirty" Science is Vital campaign with their 35,000 signatories approving their direct pressure on Westminster and Whitehall, which shows that political action by scientists can produce results.But it is best to reserve final judgment for when the figures have become clear. That may not be the case even by this afternoon. Many scientists also get paid to teach or work alongside those who teach in universities, and it would be polite to see what is planned for them before popping the champagne corks.Evan Harrisguardian.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 |