How bugs build

I have a feature in New Scientist on insect architecture and what we can learn from it, pegged to a very interesting conference that took place in Venice last September. My feature started its life at nigh on twice the length (as many sadly do), and looked at some of the algorithmic architecture discussed at the workshop. I’m going to put a pdf of this long version on my website shortly (it’ll be under the ‘Patterns’ papers).

There's a book in the pipeline from the conference participants (and others), probably to be called Collective Architecture. This lovely image, by the way – a plaster cast of the labyrinth inside a termite nest – was taken by Rupert Soar, mentioned in the article.

Told by an idiot

[I have a Muse on Nature News about the perils and benefits of recommender systems. Here’s the pre-edited  version.]

Automated recommender systems need to put some jokers in the pack, if we’re not going to end up with narrow-minded tastes.

Medieval monarchy might not have much to recommend it compared to liberal democracy, but here’s one: today our rulers have no Fools. Even if the tradition was honoured more in literature – Shakespeare’s King Lear – than in reality, how often now will a national leader employ someone to laugh at their folly and remind them of bitter truths? More often, cabinets and advisers seem picked for their readiness to confirm their leader’s judgements.

Some people fear that the information age encourages this tendency to spread to the rest of us. The Internet, they say, is a series of echo chambers: people join chat groups to hear others repeat their own opinions. Climate sceptics talk only to other climate sceptics (and accuse climate scientists of doing likewise, perhaps with some justification). DailyMe.com will supply you with only the news you ask to hear, realising the vision of personalized news championed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab. The ‘Daily Me’ is now often used in a pejorative sense to decry the insularity this inculcates.

Now it seems you can’t make an online purchase without being recommended other ‘similar’ items. Music browsers such as Search Inside the Music, developed at Sun Labs, find you songs that ‘sound similar’ to ones you like already. But who’s to say you wouldn’t be more interested in stuff unlike what you like already?

That’s the dilemma addressed in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Yi-Cheng Zhang, a physicist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and his coworkers [1]. They point out that most data-mining ‘recommender’ systems such as those used by Amazon.com focus on accuracy, measured by testing whether they can reproduce known user preferences. This emphasizes the similarity of recommendations to previous choices, and can lead to self-reinforcing cycles fixated on blockbuster items [2].

But, say the researchers, the most useful recommendations may not be the most similar, but ones that offer the unexpected by introducing diversity. Like Lear’s Fool, they challenge what you thought you knew. Zhang and colleagues show that a judicious blend of algorithms optimized for accuracy and for diversity can actually offer more diversity and accuracy than any of the component algorithms on their own.

The researchers compare this effect with the value of ‘weak ties’ in our friendship networks. While we tend to seek advice from close friends – typically people sharing similar views and preferences – it is often comments from people with whom we have a more limited connection that are the most helpful, because they offer a perspective outside our regular experience.

The same is true in scientific research: scientists from disciplines outside your own can spark new trains of thought, while your fellow specialists trudge along the same track. Without fertilization from outsiders, disciplines risk stultifying. (One recent study implies that astronomy could be in danger of that [3].)

But it seems we instinctively gravitate towards the echo chamber. Networks expert Mark Newman at the University of Michigan has uncovered the stark division in purchases of books on US politics through Amazon [4]. He studied a network of 105 recent books, linked if Amazon indicated that one book was often bought by those who purchased the other. Newman found a pretty clean split into communities containing only ‘liberal’ books and only ‘conservative’ ones, with just two small bridging groups that contained a mixture. There was a similar split in links between political blogs. This clear division, Newman says, ‘is perhaps testament not only to the widely noted polarization of the current political landscape in the United States but also to the cohesion of the two factions.’ Recommender systems that offer ‘more of the same’ can only encourage this Balkanization of the ever-growing universe of information, opinion and choice.

Not everyone agrees there’s a problem. In an essay on Salon.com, David Weinberger disputed the notion of the Internet as an echo chamber [5]. He argues that some unspoken common assumptions – among liberals at that time, that George W. Bush was a bad president – allow online conversations to move on to more constructive matters, rather than becoming, say, a tedious litany of Bush-baiting. ‘If you want to see a real echo chamber’, said Weinberger, ‘open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV.’

If people truly want more of the same, it’ll always be hard to make them hear the Fool’s wisdom. But most recommender systems do want to find what people will like, not just what they think they like. Throwing diversity into the mix is a good start, but the bigger challenge is to figure out how preferences are formed. What are the coordinates of ‘preference space’ and how do we negotiate them? There might, say, be something about the melodic contours or timbres in Beethoven’s music that a fan will find not in other early nineteenth-century composers but in twentieth-century modernists. Some music recommender systems are examining how we classify music according to non-traditional criteria, and using these as the compass directions for navigating music space. Understanding more about such preference-forming structures will not only improve the choices we’re offered but might also tell us something new about how the human brain partitions experience. And we could be in for some delicious surprises – just as when we used to browse through record stores.

References

1. Zhou, T. et al., Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1000488107.
2. Fleder, D. & Hosanagar, K. Manag. Sci. 55, 697-712 (2009).
3. Guimerà, R., Uzzi, B., Spiro, J. & Amaral, L. A. N. Science 308, 697-702 (2005).
4. Newman, M. E. J., Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 8577-8582 (2006).
5. http://mobile.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/20/echo_chamber/index.html

So what did Darwin get wrong?

I have written a review for the Sunday Times of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s new book What Darwin Got Wrong. There was an awful lot to talk about here, and it was a devil of a job fitting it into the space available and getting it down to the appropriate level. Here’s how the review started (more or less). There’s considerably more to be said, but I’ve got too much else on the go at the moment. Suffice to say, the book is well worth a read, though it is not always easy going.

What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Profile, 2010
ISBN 978 1 84668 219 3
Hardback, 262 pages
£20.00

Around 1.6 million years ago, our hairy ancestors began roaming further afield in search of food, and all that trekking got them hot and bothered. So they shed most of their hair evolved into us, the naked ape.

Thus runs one of countless stories of how evolution is driven by genetic adaptation to the environment: the conventional narrative of Neodarwinism. But according to cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, they are all mistaken.

Despite their book’s unobjectionable title – of course there were things Darwin, who knew nothing of genes and DNA, got wrong – Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini don’t simply think he missed a few details. Although they agree, indeed insist, that all of today’s flora and fauna evolved from earlier species, they don’t think that Darwin’s natural selection from a pool of random mutations explains it.

The arguments warrant serious consideration, but let’s first be clear about one thing. An honest reading of this book offers not a shred of comfort to creationists, intelligent designers and other anti-evolutionary fantasists. That, as the authors must know, won’t prevent the book being misappropriated, nor will it save them from the opprobrium of their peers (Fodor has already had a spat with arch-Darwinist Daniel Dennett).

In Neodarwinian theory, genes mutate at random across generations, and those that bestow an advantageous physiological or behavioural trait (phenotype) spread through a population because they boost reproductive success. But there’s often no simple connection between genes and phenotype. A single gene may have several roles, for example, and genes tend to work in networks so tightly knit that evolution can’t necessarily tinker with them independently of one another.

Naïve accounts of natural selection tend to award it quasi-mystical omnipotence, whereby it can effect just about any change, and every change is interpreted as an adaptation. The Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Thompson rubbished this habit almost a century ago, but it hasn’t gone away. The palette of biology is surely constrained by other factors: perhaps, say, the reason we don’t have three arms or eyes is not that they are non-adaptive but that they are not within the repertoire of fundamental body-forming gene networks.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini also point out how ‘evidence’ for Darwinism is often conflated with evidence for evolution: ‘just look at the fossil record’. And post hoc adaptationist accounts of evolutionary change (such as the one I began with) risk being merely that: plausible but unscientific Just So stories. To the authors, that’s all they can ever be, because Darwinism is a tautology: organisms are ‘adapted’ to their environment because that’s where they live. How well adapted birds are to the air, and fish to the sea!

All of this is good stuff, and convincingly calls time on simplistic Neodarwinism. But as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini admit, many biologists today will say ‘Oh, I’m not that kind of Darwinist’: they know (even if they rarely say it publicly) that evolution is much more complicated. They agree that there is more to life than Darwin.

But Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini seem to want to banish him entirely, claiming that natural selection is logically flawed because it can’t possibly identify what exactly is selected for. Their argument is opaque, however. Are frogs selected to eat flies, or to eat buzzing black things which just happen invariably to be flies? The authors don’t explain why the simple answer – find out in an experiment with frogs and faux-flies – won’t do. Their objection seems to be that evolution can’t do the experiment, because it is non-intentional and can’t know what it is looking for (they say Darwin’s reliance on stock- and pigeon-breeding therefore involved a false analogy for evolution). And they worry that we can’t distinguish adaptations from genetic changes that ‘free-ride’ on them.

But blind natural selection does work in principle, as computer models unambiguously show. These models are highly, perhaps excessively simplified. But if the same thing doesn’t happen as a rule in real populations, vague logical arguments won’t tell us why not. And if we struggle to work out precisely what trait has ‘adapted’, surely that’s our problem, not nature’s.

In any event, the authors admit that at least some of the many ‘textbook paradigms of adaptationist explanation’ might be perfectly correct. Some certainly are: superbugs have acquired antibiotic-busting genes, which is about as direct an adaptation as you can get. The authors don’t wholly exclude natural selection, then, but say it may simply fine-tune other mechanisms of evolutionary change (whatever they are). Specific adaptations, they say, are historical contingencies, not examples of a general law. In the same way, there may be good specific explanations for why your bus was late this morning, and also last Thursday, but they don’t in themselves to amount to a natural law that buses are late. Fair enough, but then to say whether adaptation is the exception or the default we need statistics. The authors are silent on this.

So they don’t quite achieve a coherent story, neither are they able (or perhaps willing) to convey it at a non-specialist level. Even so, they make a persuasive case that the role of natural selection in evolution is ripe for reassessment. To say so should not be seen as scientific heresy or capitulation to the forces of unreason – it’s a brave and welcome challenge.

In which I become a Rock Legend

… or in which my past comes back to amuse me. In the course of a little research to prepare for my talk on The Music Instinct, I discover that buried within the Classic Rock Sequence played by BBC6 last Saturday is yours truly on keyboards. Now there’s a thing. Some day I might show you the photos. (No, that’s not me posing next to Dave Brock, but you know, it almost could have been.)

The Music Instinct - the story so far

There are some reviews of The Music Instinct in the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Economist and Metro. Most are nice, but Steven Poole in the Guardian, while sending out some good vibes, has some big reservations too. When I first read his review, it struck me as basically friendly, with some intelligent criticisms with which I mostly disagreed. That interpretation just about survives a second reading, but there are some very odd things here.

Most of all, as someone who has long deplored the scientism-ist (you know what I mean) approach to art that denounces anything which doesn’t meet ‘scientific’ criteria (I’ve gently derided that kind of thing in print before), I was disappointed that Poole seemed so determined to impose this reading on the book. I hope anyone who reads it will recognize that the suggestion that I go through music’s repertoire dishing out gold stars or finger-wagging according to whether composers have obeyed or contravened the ‘laws of music cognition’ is a misrepresentation bordering on the grotesque.

He seems uncomfortable with anything that strays beyond the bounds of the physiology and acoustic physics of sound – that’s to say, with ideas about how we interpret music as a coherent sonic entity, why it moves us, what roles factors such as tonality play in our perception – in short, with most of the field of music psychology. Which is naturally a bit of a problem. Of course, some will prefer to leave all that stuff to the realm of the ineffable, but it’s abundantly clear that this would involve a denial of the evidence.

I agree that it’s crucial to maintain a distinction between understanding how the brain processes music and using that to define ‘scientific’ criteria of what is ‘good’ in music. So I’m frankly baffled as to why Poole thinks I am ‘judging’ music. On the contrary, one of my aims is to suggest ways that might make all kinds of music more accessible. The only instance where I might be considered to be using cognitive principles as a tool for criticism is in the case of total serialism (not simply all serialism – I took great pains to make the distinction). I do point out that Schoenberg was wrong to consider tonality as merely an obsolete convention – it is an aid to music cognition. But as I clearly say, being able to make sense of music doesn’t by any means stand or fall on the issue of whether the pitches as a whole have audible hierarchical organization, and so eliminating tonality doesn’t mean one is doomed to write incoherent music. I don’t even criticise total serialism as such, but only those proponents of it who suggest that audiences’ difficulty with it is simply due to their lack of musical education, thereby failing to understand that this technique tends systematically to undermine our natural modes of organizing sound. Their condescension is misplaced.

Speaking of condescension, Poole seems to detect it in the way I illustrate how cognitive principles can be discerned in the way many composers have organized their music. If one wanted to insist that anyone was being condescended to here (and I can’t for the life of me see why that’s necessary), it would more obviously have to be the music psychologists, given a pat of the back for finally figuring out 300 years later the aids to cognition that Baroque musicians had been codifying and using in their rules for polyphonic composition.

Mozart and Berg reduced to a series of arithmetical tricks: huh? Says who? Compare Bee Wilson in the Sunday Times: ‘Ball never presumes that music can be reduced to some kind of scientific formula’. Well, you can decide for yourself. In any case, what has arithmetic to do with it?

Now, one could certainly read some of the music psychology literature and come away with the impression that indeed all there is to Mozart is a graph of tension and release. But I criticise that view, and point out that not only is it problematic in its own terms but it clearly leaves out something important about music’s affective power that no one has even begun to quantify. Marek Kohn’s comment that I insist on taking the science no further than is warranted directly contradicts Poole’s accusation of scientism.

On performance: I can think of few less controversial statements about music than that performance technique can bring a piece to life or kill it stone dead. To interpret this as saying that the performer does all the work and the composer has next to nothing to do with the way a piece of music is perceived (to what Poole calls ‘superstitions about the supremacy of performance and improvisation’), seems wilfully perverse (not to mention being contradicted by just about everything else I say in the book). But this reflects the dismayingly adversarial way in which Poole seems to have read the whole book. It is science vs art, logic vs intuition, tonal vs atonal, composer vs performer, notated vs non-notated music. And he seems to feel that to praise one side of such dualisms is to condemn the other. I find such dichotomies pointless and unhelpful.

On ‘originality’ of melodies: I don’t ‘praise’ composers for scoring well in this measure, but on the contrary say explicitly that ‘originality’ in this sense bears no relation to musical quality.

On notation: Having played in a big band, I know very well that some jazz forms use and even depend on scored music. Poole is right to point out that my wording seems to suggest otherwise (especially to someone with absolutist tendencies). Must put that right. When I said that notated music can’t evolve (or more accurately, it can only do so within very narrow parameters), I didn’t mean to imply that all music should evolve. I meant only that some forms (such as ‘traditional’, or what tends to be called folk) are best served by reserving that freedom, and therefore by using only very sketchy forms of notation as aides-memoire where it is needed at all. (If my statement here struck Poole as ludicrous, didn’t it occur to him that he might have misconstrued it? Still, I’ll spell this out in the paperback edition too.) As for notation in pop music, I mean ‘pop music’ in the sense in which it is generally used: the popular music coeval with and dependent on the democratization of recording technology and radio, starting roughly in the 1950s, and not ‘popular music’ of the prewar era.

Blimey, all this sounds a bit aggrieved. I’ve no desire to start an argument, especially with someone whose reviews I always read avidly, and especially especially with someone who so recently had kind words for another of my books. But I’m genuinely puzzled about what is going on in this review, and simply want to make my position plain. It is no surprise that some people will recoil at the idea of ‘analysing’ music with scientific methods, but Poole is extremely technically savvy and not in the slightest a scientophobe. I wonder if there is some over-compensation going on here from technophile (something I sometimes suspect in myself.) And if you saw a double entendre in that, you’re right: Poole’s suggestion that techno is a good place to explore for examples of rhythmic violations and the significance of timbre is an excellent one – wish I’d thought of it.

Postscript: I've now had a constructive exchange with Steven. While we don't agree on everything, we're not so divergent in our views either, and I now have a better appreciation of the points of misunderstanding.

Sharks and Virgin Births

Brian Worley, who runs the entertaining ‘lapsed Christian’ site (I hope that is not an impolite way to describe it) called exminister, has asked if I might comment on a story about ‘virgin births’ in sharks. Brian wondered whether there was a possibility that Christians might be prompted by this report to say ‘look, virgin births are a proven scientific fact…’. It would be a very unwise Christian who did so, since this sort of asexual parthenogenetic reproduction has been known for a very long time in a variety of creatures, including vertebrates such as lizards and fish (it’s not even a new discovery in sharks). To say that it must therefore be possible in humans would be much the same as to say that humans might grow a new limb after amputation, or that they might lay eggs or breathe underwater. Now, far be it for me to underestimate people’s capacity to say some peculiar things, but I think even the most committed fundamentalist might have to admit this one is a bit of a non-starter.

Besides, if anyone did want to use parthenogenesis as a scientific defence of the Virgin Birth, they would also then have to deal with the tricky issue that it would make Jesus a clone of Mary, not to mention the treacherous theology of the nature of Jesus’s flesh and embryogenesis.

All the same, Brian is by no means out on a limb here. When parthenogenesis was first induced artificially, and thus proven as scientific fact, the Virgin Birth was most certainly invoked. This happened in the 1890s, through the work of the German biologist Jacques Loeb at the research centre for marine biology in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He caused an unfertilized sea-urchin egg to divide by treating it with a mixture of simple salts such as sodium chloride and magnesium chloride – in essence, with a kind of reformulated sea water. In organisms that reproduce sexually, the development of an egg into a new organism generally proceeds only when it has united its genetic material with that of a spermatozoa. But Loeb’s discovery revealed that in some species this was strictly optional. It is not the provision of genes that constitutes the sperm’s role in triggering growth of an embryo, but some other function – one that can be carried out by other means. When an egg is thus provoked to commence parthenogenesis, the resulting organism is thus, as I say, a clone of the egg’s parent organism, with identical genetic constitution. Loeb had not so much created life as invented cloning.

In 1899, the Boston Herald reported on this work with the headline ‘Creation of Life. Startling Discovery of Prof. Loeb. Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means. Process May Apply to Human Species. Immaculate Conception Explained.’ That might sound like hysterical over-extrapolation of the sort that makes scientists roll their eyes in despair. But in this case it seems fair enough, for look at what Loeb had written in his account of the discovery:
“The development of the unfertilized egg, that is an assured fact. I believe an immaculate conception may be a natural result of unusual but natural causes. The less a scientist says about that now the better. It is a wonderful subject, and in many ways an awful one. That the human species may be made artificially to reproduce itself by the withdrawal of chemical restraint by other than natural means is a matter we do not like to contemplate. But we have drawn a great step nearer to the chemical theory of life and may already see ahead of us the day when a scientist, experimenting with chemicals in a test tube, may see them unite and form a substance which shall live and move and reproduce itself.”

Loeb’s discovery was no chance affair. He had been experimenting for some years on the control and manipulation of sea-urchin development using salts, at first under the instruction of the American biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan (whose supporters later accused Loeb of stealing his ideas) at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. But the breakthrough put Loeb in the limelight, a position that he seemed rather to enjoy. Despite early scepticism, his work was widely lauded, and in 1901 he narrowly missed out on being awarded a Nobel prize.

The work was soon followed up by others, and in 1910 the French scientist Eugene Battaillon in Dijon discovered that frog eggs could be induced to start developing into embryos by being pricked with a needle. The embryologist Frank Rattray Lillie, then at the University of Chicago and later founder of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was particularly interested in whether the trick would work for humans, and hinted that this should be possible. (It is not, apparently – human development differs in some important ways from that of sea urchins and frogs.)

Loeb and other biologists viewed the prospect of human parthenogenesis triggered by salt with somewhat uneasy humour, joking that ‘maiden ladies’ might feel compelled to stop bathing in the sea. More telling was the notion that Loeb had revealed males to be redundant. He apparently received letters from women asking him to induce artificial parthenogenesis in their own ova, while the French embryologist Yves Delage, who worked on the problem, was sent letters congratulating him from freeing women from ‘the shameful bondage of needing a man to become a mother.’ These are prescient themes: artificial means of conceiving a baby, however hypothetical, are now seen both as removing women’s control of their own reproductive destiny (and placing it under the favour of male scientists) and as liberating them to take control unilaterally. Equally telling as a taste of what was to come, another report speculated about the possibility of raising ‘domestic animals and children born without help of a male through an operation which would be regulated scientifically and almost commercially, similar to raising the fry of trout.’ Aldous Huxley waits in the wings.

If you want to know more about this stuff, you’ll be able to get it in my next book Unnatural: The History of the Heretical Idea of Making People, which will be published by Bodley Head some time next year.

Listen up

The sound files (and podcasts) for my book The Music Instinct are now live. Hope they’re useful to anyone reading the book. And I discuss the book in a podcast for Blackwell’s by George Miller.

Morals don't come from God

[I have a written a Muse for Nature News on a paper probing the origins of morality (and by extension, of religion). Here it is. This stuff is always provocative, but the most stimulating aspect for me was discovering Jesse Bering’s paper
 ‘The folk psychology of souls’.]


‘Religion’, novelist Mary McCarthy wrote, ‘is only good for good people.’ Weigh the Inquisition against Martin Luther King, homicidal fanatics against Oxfam, and you have to suspect that religion supplies a context for justifying or motivating moral choices rather than a reason for them.

Into this bitterly contested arena comes a new paper by psychologists Ilkka Pyysiäinen of the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser at Harvard [1]. They point out that individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not.

They draw on tests of moral judgements using the web-based Moral Sense Test that Hauser and others have developed at Harvard [2-6], or variants thereof. These present dilemmas ranging from how to handle freeloaders at ‘bring a dish’ dinner parties to the propriety of killing someone to save others. Few if any of the answers can be looked up in holy books.

Thousands of people, with diverse backgrounds, age, education, religious affiliation and ethnicity, have taken the tests. Pyysiäinen and Hauser say the results (mostly still in the publication pipeline) indicate that ‘moral intuitions operate independently of religious background’, although religion may influence responses in a few highly specific cases.

This may speak to the origins of religion. Some have suggested it is an adaptation that promotes cooperation between unrelated individuals [7,8] – for example, discouraging cheating with the notion that ‘God is watching’. Others say that religious behaviour is not specifically selected for, but arises as a by-product of other cognitive functions and capacities [9,10]: for example, religion may have appropriated underlying psychological reasons for a belief in souls and an afterlife.

Since religion has little influence on moral judgements, say Pyysiäinen and Hauser, the latter hypothesis appears more likely. They argue that human populations evolved moral intuitions about behavioural norms – which themselves promoted group cooperation – before they became encoded in religious systems. The researchers suggest we may possess an innate ‘moral grammar’ that guides these intuitions.

The paper plays to a wider issue than this point of largely anthropological interest, for it challenges the assertion commonly made in defence of religion: that it inculcates a moral awareness [11]. If we follow the authors’ line of thinking, religious people are no more moral than atheists.

Pyysiäinen and Hauser do not wholly deny that religion is adaptive. They think that natural selection may have fine-tuned it, from an existing array of moral-determining cognitive functions, to optimize its benefits for cooperation. There is some evidence that religion promotes in-group altruism and self-sacrifice beyond what non-believers display [12].

Their paper may annoy both religious and atheistic zealots (which is usually a good sign). By taking it as given that religion is an evolved social behaviour rather than a matter of divine revelation, it tacitly adopts an atheistic framework. Yet at the same time it assumes that religiosity is a fundamental aspect of human psychology, thereby undermining those who see it as culturally imposed folly that can be erased with a cold shower of rationality.

It’s debatable, however, whether these moral tests are probing religion or culture as a moral-forming agency, since non-believers in a predominantly religious culture are likely to acquire the moral predispositions of the majority. Western culture, say, has long been shaped by Christian morality, as much as it has by the festivals and vocabulary of the church.

All the same, the tests show that neither culture nor religion matter very much: some other factors – presumed to be inherited – dictate our judgements.

That would explain why religious moral doctrine sometimes displays such illogic that one must suspect the judgement itself precedes it. Take, for example, the Catholic church’s early opposition to in vitro fertilization, which sat alongside a fierce prohibition against any other hindrance to procreation. And most religions have the same set of core moral principles about lying, thieving and murder, all with evident adaptive benefits to a group, beyond which the details (Christian original sin, say) are a question of historical contingency (Augustine was a powerful bishop, Pelagius an obscure monk).

But to uncover religion’s roots, is morality necessarily the place to look? It seems hard to credit that the immense cultural investment in religion was made merely to strengthen and fine-tune existing moral circuits. Some place more emphasis on the adaptive rationale for religious symbols and mystical beliefs, rather than morals [10]. And let’s not forget that religion is more than an expression of personal convictions: it is generally institutional, with a status structure.

Yet attempting to explain the origins of such a rich cultural phenomenon as religion is doomed to some extent to be a thankless task. For to ‘explain’ Chartres Cathedral and Bach’s B Minor Mass in terms of non-kin cooperation is obviously to have explained nothing.


References

1. Pyysiäinen, I. & Hauser, M. Trends Cogn. Sci. 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.007.
2. Huebner, B. et al. Mind & Lang. (in press).
3. Huebner, B. & Hauser, M. D. Philos. Psychol. (in press).
4. Hauser, M. D. et al., Mind & Lang. 22, 1-21 (2007).
5. Banerjee, K. et al., J. Cogn. Cult. (in press).
6. Abarbanell, L. & Hauser, M. D. Cognition (in press).
7. Johnson, D. & Bering, J. Evol. Psych. 4, 219-233 (2006).
8. Johnson, D. & Krüger, O. Polit. Theol. 5, 159-176 (2004).
9. Boyer, P. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994).
10. Bering, J. M. Behav. Brain Sci. 29, 453-462 (2006).
11. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. Morality Without God (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009).
12. Bulbulia, J. & Mahoney, A. J. Cogn. Cult. 8, 295-320 (2008).

The Music Instinct

If you catch this within a week (or so?) of posting, there’s a little trailer here for my new book The Music Instinct on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves. It was the usual story, even on the delightfully thoughtful Nightwaves, i.e. barely time to garble the most basic of messages. But the music is nice. If you’re interested in more and are in striking distance of London, I’m speaking on this subject at the Royal Institution on 16th Feb. (There’s a list of other speaking dates on my web site.)

Is minor-key music sad for everyone?

[I wrote a recent Muse for Nature News on an interesting study of the emotional qualities of major and minor keys. Here it is (pre-edited). I should say that I could do no more here than hint at the problems I had with the Bowling et al. paper. It is very stimulating – I’d not seen a claim of this sort made before – but ultimately I find it unconvincing. Their procedure is pretty hard to follow, but I think I’ve got it right in the end. I find it very odd that they are apparently digging out some ‘implied fundamental’ for all the tonic intervals they consider, more or less regardless of whether there is any evidence that such a thing is heard (in the absence of the tonic actually being simultaneously played!). And as I say, the formant ratios for both types of speech are dominated by major intervals, but simply less so for ‘subdued’ speech – that’s to say, this speech doesn’t seem to have a ‘minor’ feel to it (if such a thing is meaningful anyway), but just less strongly major. So the issue is very much open. But in any event, empirical evidence surely shows us that music using modes close to the Western diatonic minor needn’t be sad at all in other cultures.]


Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnell famously declared that D minor is “the saddest of keys”. But is music in a minor key inevitably sad?

Why does Handel’s Water Music and the Beatles’ ‘There Comes The Sun’ sound happy, while Albinoni’s Adagio and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sound sad? The first two are in major keys, the second two in minor keys. But are the emotional associations of major and minor intrinsic to the notes themselves, or culturally imposed? Many music psychologists suspect the latter, but a new study suggests there’s something fundamentally similar about major and minor keys and the properties of typically happy and sad speech, respectively.

Neuroscientists Daniel Bowling and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, say in a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that the sound spectra – the profiles of different acoustic frequencies – in major-key music are close to those in excited speech, while the spectra of minor-key music are more similar to subdued speech [1]. They compared the frequency ratios of the most prominent acoustic peaks in speech (called formants) with those in Western classical music and Finnish folk songs.

The acoustic characteristics of happy, excited speech, which is relatively fast and loud, are common in most cultures, while sadness elicits slower, quieter vocalizations. We have a natural tendency to project such physiognomic associations onto non-sentient objects: a drooping willow is seen as ‘weeping’. There’s good reason to believe that music mimics some of these universal emotional behaviours, supplying a universal vocabulary that permits listeners sometimes to deduce the intended emotion in unfamiliar music. For example, Western listeners were able to judge fairly reliably whether pieces of Kyrghistani, Hindustani and Navajo Native American music were meant to be joyous or sad [2,3], while the Mafa people of Cameroon who had never heard Western music could guess more often than chance whether extracts were intended to be happy, sad or ‘fearful’ [4]. Here it seems that tempo was the main clue.

Of course, it’s simplistic to suppose that all music is ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, or that all ‘happy’ music is equally and identically ‘happy’, as opposed to joyous, blissful, contented and so forth. But these crude universal indicators of emotion do seem to work across borders.

Is mode (major/minor) another of them? The idea that the minor key, and in particular the musical interval between the first and third note of the scale (a so-called minor third) is intrinsically more anguished than the major (where the major third seems naturally ‘bright’ and optimistic) is so deeply ingrained in Western listeners that many have deemed this to be a ‘natural’ principle of music. This notion was influentially argued by musicologist Deryck Cooke in his 1959 book The Language of Music.

Cooke pointed out that musicians throughout the ages have used minor keys for vocal music with an explicitly sad content, and major keys for happy lyrics. But he failed to acknowledge that this might simply be conventional rather than innate. And when faced with the fact that some cultures, such as Spanish and Slavic, use minor keys for happy music, he offered the patronizing suggestion that such rustic people were inured to a hard life and didn’t expect to be happy.

No such chauvinism afflicts the latest work of Bowling and colleagues. But their conclusions are still open to question. For one thing, they don’t establish that people actually hear in music the characteristic spectral signatures that they identify. Also, they assume that the ratios of frequencies sounded simultaneously in speech (what in music are called harmonic intervals) can be compared with the ratios of frequencies sounded sequentially in music (melodic intervals). And most troublingly, major-type frequency ratios dominate the spectra of both excited and subdued speech, but merely less so in the latter case.

In any event, this work still faces the problem that some cultures (including Europe before the Renaissance, not to mention the ancient Greeks) don’t link minor keys to sadness. Western listeners sometimes misjudge the emotional quality of Javanese music that uses a scale with similarities to the minor mode yet is deemed ‘happy’ by the musicians. So even if a fundamental ‘sadness’ is present in the minor mode, it seems likely to be weak and easily over-written by acculturation. It’s possible even in the Western idiom to write ‘happy’ minor-key music (for example, van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’) or ‘sad’ major-key music (Billie Holiday’s ‘No Good Man’).

So let’s not conclude too soon that minor keys give everyone the blues.

References

1. Bowling, D. L., Gill, K., Choi, J. D., Prinz, J. & Purves, D. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127, 491-503 (2010).
2. Balkwill, L. L. & Thompson, W. F. Music Perception 17, 43-64 (1999).
3. Juslin, P. N. & Kaukka, P. Psychological Bulletin 129, 770-814 (2003).
4. Fritz, T. et al., Curr. Biol. 19, 1-4 (2009).

Looking into the Test Tube

Most of my Crucible columns for Chemistry World are too techie to be suitable here. But here’s one that isn’t. The sites I mention are well worth a look.

I also have a feature in this issue (January) on molecular machines. It was necessarily (and sensitively) cut down from a piece considerably longer, which I will put up at full length as a pdf on my website very soon.

****************************************************

When I say that I’m no fan of reality TV, I don’t mean that I view it with a disdainful ‘tsk tsk’ issuing from pursed lips, but simply that I’ve never even given myself that opportunity. It’s a land I’ve not visited. But I do appreciate that watching people just going about their business, rather than pretending to be engaged in exotic dramas, can be fascinating.

Of course, these programme makers lack the courage to make that business truly ordinary, relying instead on absurdly contrived situations. But perhaps we might hope that a faith in ordinariness will ultimately emerge (that is after all where the genre has its roots) to counter the current fashion in documentary-making for funny camera angles, far-flung locations, portentous music and actors in period wigs. This, all too often, is how science is presented on the small screen: an exhausting whirl of spectacular graphics, pounding music, genesis and apocalypse.

What a joy it is, then, to visit Test Tube, a web site stemming from a project at the University of Nottingham after the city was designated in 2005 one of six British ‘Science Cities’. The site offers a clutch of short videos (generally a few minutes long), posted on YouTube, that claim to take you ‘Behind the scenes in the world of science.’ And they really do.

Here are messy offices – not ostentatiously messy, but properly so, with rows of anonymous ring-binders – and anodyne lab benches. Here are scientists looking and talking like everyone else, describing their work not in carefully edited sound bites or with faux enthusiasm but in a relaxed and non-patronizing way. There are no breathless presenters, no ‘locations’: the camera rarely ventures beyond the determinedly red-brick confines of the university.

Although he would surely wish to deny it, a star of the clips is Nottingham chemist Martyn Poliakoff, renowed as a specialist on ‘green’ solvents. With his unruly shock of grey-white hair, untrendy spectacles and donnish cadences in which a ghost of his Russian ancestry survives, Poliakoff could seem like the eccentric scientist from central casting. But this notion is gently sent up even as it is indulged. In one of the most popular clips he talks about how people (especially after closing time in the city centre) constantly call out ‘Hello Einstein’. “Part of my mission is to show that all scientists don’t look like me”, he says.

The videos are made by Australian-born Brady Haran, a former BBC reporter and video journalist who became ‘filmmaker-in-residence’ at Nottingham in 2007 and began working on the Test Tube series. His short films are all the more striking for their simplicity, sometimes verging on banality. It takes confidence and skill to strip things down so much and not to appear merely amateurish: to capture people in a way that is so unforced, letting them genuinely speak for themselves. “I didn’t just want pretty pictures or a constant stream of ‘breakthroughs’, says Haran. “I wanted to show what real scientists are like and how they work. I want the viewer to feel like they are in my position, seeing what I see, and I ask what I think they would ask.”

But this isn’t all. Haran has also produced two other video-short series at Nottingham, called The Periodic Table of Videos and Sixty Symbols. The first provides a clip for every element in the periodic table, explaining something of its nature, history and roles. The second takes sixty of the symbols used by physicists and astronomers (and chemists) – the wavefunction [psi], vectors, magnetic moment [mu], and so on – and allows scientists to talk about what they mean. And Poliakoff, Haran and colleagues have just received funding approval for a new series on molecules.

The scientists involved in these projects think they can fulfil several functions. Since they are informative not only about science but about what it is like to do science (including the routine drudgery of grant proposals), they help to make that a believable career choice, rather than one that looks impossibly cerebral or falsely glamorous. They are full of useful material for teachers. Even specialists are likely to be intrigued – how would you explain a wavefunction? And the clips are so quick to make – the light editing often takes no more than a day – that they can be responsive to new developments or to viewer feedback. When element 112 was named copernicum last July, a video discussing the choice was on the Periodic Videos site within hours.

Signs are that the videos have captured attention far and wide. They have drawn web traffic from over 160 countries (some of the videos are available in foreign-language translation), and while relying on little more than word of mouth, the number of hits for all the sites compares impressively with big commercial science-communication channels such as those of New Scientist and Scientific American. Within weeks of being released, the Periodic Videos had around 500,000 hits, and they are now (like the periodic table) an ongoing enterprise. Although Haran makes canny use of forums such as MySpace and Twitter, he feels that ‘at the end of the day, if you make something good and then keep making it, people eventually notice.’ They have.

On the Five-Pointed Snowflake

There’s a fun letter in the latest issue of Nature from Thomas Koop at the University of Bielefeld pointing out how often snowflakes in festive decorations, greetings and wrapping paper are misdrawn with fewer or more than six points. Above is a particularly fine example that I discovered this year, in which some of my presents were (ironically) wrapped (available at Sainsbury’s, no doubt now at a reduced price). It never ceases to amaze me that designers have failed to assimilate this very basic fact about the six-pointed snowflake, though it’s been generally known for centuries. Indeed, the knowledge goes much further back than Kepler’s seventeenth-century treatise, as I pointed out here and in the ‘Branches’ volume of my recent trilogy Nature’s Patterns.

(I’m amused too to see that Nature’s marketing folk are still managing to embarrass the scientific staff. I could tell other tales, but it would be cruel.)

Yet these pentagonal snowflakes set me thinking. As is widely known, the only way ‘crystals’ can display growth habits with fivefold (or indeed eightfold) symmetry is if they are in fact quasicrystals. But could water form quasicrystals? Certainly, in the liquid state it is much more congenial for water molecules to form fivefold rings than the sixfold ones present in ice, because the bond angles are then much closer to that preferred in the tetrahedral coordination geometry. And these pentagonal rings are a general feature of the crystal structures of clathrate hydrates, in which water is frozen around nonpolar solutes such as methane. Now, I’m no crystallographer but I have the impression that it would be naïve to imagine that a local pentagonal packing symmetry is all it takes to make quasicrystallinity feasible. But on the other hand, it’s a good start; our current understanding of quasicrystals grew partly out of Charles Frank’s early work on icosahedral clustering in simple liquids. And large icosahedral structures for water have certainly been postulated. In fact, I’m very puzzled that I can seem to find no discussion in the literature of the possibility of quasicrystallinity in water – either I’m failing badly to understand something (quite possible) or I’m somehow looking in the wrong places (also possible). But I will ask my water structure gurus about this, and if anything comes of that, watch this space.

Incidentally, strict twelvefold symmetry is also forbidden in true crystals but known in quasicrystals. Yet a sort of pseudo-twelvefold symmetry has been seen in snowflakes, due to the coalescence of two snowflakes.

The transformation of Chartres

 I was interviewed recently by a chap from Die Welt for an article (in German) about the restoration of Chartres Cathedral. This is, for Chartres fans, a very big deal – not only is everything being cleaned up, but the walls are being painted in the original colour scheme of the 13th century, shown above from my book Universe of Stone. The church interior was painted ochre, with while highlights for some of the piers and arches, and a web of white lines picking out false masonry joints. We know this because some of the original paintwork still remains in remote corners of the building.

The result, it’s said, is going to transform the way the interior looks: no longer will it have the purple gloom for which Chartres is famous – one might even say revered. Instead, it will be flooded with light, looking – the claim goes – much closer to the way it did when it was built.

Now, I feel that I should probably be taking an outspoken stance on this – either denouncing the plans as a travesty and desecration, or praising it as a long overdue and wondrous thing. But the truth is that I can too readily see the arguments on both sides.

It is easiest to enumerate those against. It is not lightly that conservators of paintings have reached a consensus that one should not retouch damaged the works of the Old Masters, but should instead aim to prevent or limit further damage while leaving existing blemishes evident. It’s OK, the current view goes, to stick back on flakes of paint that are falling off, but not OK to apply fresh paint. Better to have an honest record of what we have left of these works than to leave us mistaken or confused about what is new and what is original.

What’s more, as I say in the article, it is tempting to imagine that a paint job will enable us to see the cathedral ‘as medieval peasants saw it’. But we need to acknowledge the fact that we can never do that. It’s not just that we will still lack the opulent wall hangings and other accoutrements of ecclesiastical splendour, nor the precise rituals or the social hubbub that conditioned the experience in the thirteenth century. Most crucially, we don’t have thirteenth-century minds. Our entire aesthetic is different, and so is the experience of religious life even for believers today. We enter the Royal Portal from a very different world, already accustomed to light and colour and monumental architecture, even if that is in the form of an office tower. To us – again, even to many Christians – Chartres is basically a tourist destination, and we don’t really have the perception any longer that it is a kind of heaven on earth. Besides, there is no ‘medieval mind’ (despite, I admit, the subtitle of my book) – what nobles, clerics and peasants experienced and believed was considerably different.

This much is true for any kind of antiquated art, of course. The same considerations are rightly said to somewhat undermine a purist attitude towards ‘authentic’ early music: we can do all we like to play it on the ‘original’ instruments, and with the ‘original’ intonation, but we don’t have, and can’t give ourselves, Renaissance ears. The way we hear has been irrevocably ‘contaminated’ – or better to say, altered. Arguably, it is best simply to recognize that and to get on with the business of responding to art from a contemporary standpoint, rather than fooling ourselves that we can experience it ‘as it was originally intended’.

And yet… One could surely argue that, just because we can’t reproduce exactly the experience of people at the time the art was made, that needn’t prevent us from doing what we can to get close to it. It could seem rather condescending to take the attitude that, because the audience is ‘ignorant’, it doesn’t really matter what we place before them. Besides, there is surely a difference between pretending we can paint a hand just like Titian and slapping on some wall paint that, in all probability, was applied in the thirteenth century with not too dissimilar a sensibility to that of builders and interior decorators today (i.e. it’s just another job). And might many visitors already think anyway that what they are seeing at Chartres is what the medieval worshippers saw?

What’s more, conservation of a building like this, exposed to the elements – unlike a painting that can be kept in a protective environment – has to involve a constructive element. Otherwise it wouldn’t last another hundred years. That was very apparent to me when I visited the masons’ yard at York Minster, where stones were constantly being shaped to replace those that were on the point of crumbling away. There is a kind of enforced honesty in this process, as one can very easily distinguish the new, golden blocks from the old soot-stained ones.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we need to get rid of the idea that there was some ‘pristine’ version of the cathedral that, now lost, should forever remain so. A cathedral was almost always a work in progress, and almost always a mutated, even botched or ruined, version of what one or other of the master builders envisaged. As often as not, no sooner had a piece of work been completed than the next bishop would decide he wanted this or that altered. Throughout the centuries, changes were made with no sense of reverence for what had gone before. So what is so bad about another revision today?

On balance, I am somewhat in favour of the restoration work. Not least, I am simply curious, even excited, to see what effect the colour and brightened windows will have, quite aside from arguments about the supposed rights and wrongs of it all. I love Chartres, but I think we’re in trouble if we start to regard the place as untouchable. That was never how a cathedral was meant to be. I think that a restoration like this can be welcomed if it is done in good faith (so to speak), making it clear to visitors that this is indeed new paintwork that represents our best guess at what this particular aspect of the cathedral interior was like at the time of its consecration. Of course, my best recommendation for making sure visitors are well prepared to interpret what they see would be to read Universe of Stone first. But modesty forbids. 

Quantum Objects

[I have a piece in Nature on an art exhibition in the US by Julian Voss-Andreae, who has been working for some time now on representations of ideas, concepts and objects in physics and chemistry. This latest show is called ‘Quantum Objects’, and there are images of it here. I have written previously about Julian’s chemistry-related sculptures. I think Julian’s work is some of the best there is on the sci-art interface, creating a genuine point of confluence rather than, as all too often happens, a kind of awkward shotgun marriage.

In the course of preparing the piece, I had an exchange with Julian about the thinking behind his work, during which he said far more than I could accommodate in the article. This was all good stuff, so I’ve appended his comments below.]

When once asked what his Third ('Eroica') Symphony meant, Beethoven is said to have sat down at the piano and started to play it. Physicists might seek analogous recourse when asked to explain quantum theory – by writing down Schrödinger’s wave equation. And even this was Schrödinger’s attempt to provide a concrete embodiment of the still more abstract ‘description’ in Heisenberg’s austere matrix mechanics. Some of the field’s pioneers concluded that perhaps all we can ever meaningfully hope for by way of representation are the equations.

This implies that any attempt to show quantum concepts using images, whether for experts or non-specialists, is doomed to be misleadingly reductive. But maybe another alternative is to subvert our preconceptions through art. That is the view of Oregon-based sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae. Art, he says, ‘freed nowadays from the presupposition that it needs to visually accurately represent reality, has a unique potential for indicating aspects of reality that science cannot.’

Voss-Andreae is better placed to judge than most artists, for he was previously a physicist working at the forefront of experimental quantum physics at the University of Vienna, where he came face to face with the counter-intuitive aspects of the theory. In 1999 he participated in a ground-breaking experiment showing that even objects as ‘big’ as C60 molecules may display the wavelike property of interference (M. Arndt et al., Nature 401, 680-682; 1999). Voss-Andreae’s portrayals of ‘quantum objects’ are now on display in an exhibition called Worlds Within Worlds, running until April at the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland.

‘There simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics, because our brains are exquisitely adapted to making sense of the world on our scale’, says Voss-Andreae.  ‘I want to increase the audience’s capacity to intuit the unfathomable deeper nature of reality by sensually experiencing the works.’

This attempt to leap beyond the logical is an impulse with an obvious appeal to artists, but Voss-Andreae is not the first to find inspiration in the way that modern physics requires it of us. In the early twentieth century, Surrealist artists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí were excited by what they saw as the challenge posed by quantum theory and relativity to conventional notions of causality, time, geometry and objectivity (see Gavin Parkinson’s Surrealism, Art and Modern Science; Yale University Press, 2008). Yet their enthusiasm was due as much to the new physics’ perceived radicalism and assault on convention as it was to any genuine interest in the theories, and they didn’t understand the science terribly well.

But who does? Perhaps the biggest problem for any artist seeking to mine quantum theory is that some of the fundamental issues are still not agreed by its practitioners. The disputes about interpretation among the early pioneers such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger are now legendary (see Manjit Kumar’s Quantum; Icon, 2008), but this by no means implies that they are behind us. The Copenhagen interpretation favoured by Bohr and Heisenberg, with its wave-particle duality, probabilistic picture and observer-induced collapse of the wavefunction is still not universally accepted, and the nature of the transition from quantum to classical behaviour continues to be debated. Meanwhile, the failure to unify quantum theory with gravitation remains one of the most well advertised lacunae in physics, seeming to leave open the possibility that quantum theory is a stop-gap, a mere mathematical convenience.

It’s therefore arguably either brave or foolhardy to try to represent quantum phenomena visually. Perhaps Voss-Andreae’s greatest asset as a former physicist is that he knows how much we don’t know, and how much is contingent. In some of his works, the inverted commas of analogy are explicit to the knowing eye. Quantum Corral materializes something that could hardly be less material: the wavelike properties of electrons (first reported in Nature in 1927). Here they are represented in a block of wood milled to the contours of electron density seen in 1993 around a ring of iron atoms on the surface of copper using a scanning tunnelling microscope. The gilded surface reminds physicists that it is the mobility of surface electrons in the metal which accounts for its reflectivity (and the coloration of gold is itself a relativistic effect of the metal’s massive nuclei). But for art historians, this gilding not only invokes the crown-like haloes of medieval altarpieces but could also allude to the way gold was reserved in the Renaissance for the intangible: the other-worldly light of heaven.


Night Path and Spin Family (Bosons and Fermions), with their webs of metal wire or silk thread in solid steel frames, hark back to the sculptures of Naum Gabo, themselves inspired by the appearance of new mathematical geometries and models. Yet Night Path shows a quantum idea: the path-integral approach to the trajectories of light, in which the passage of a photon is considered to be the integral over all possible paths, calculated by slicing up time. Here, however, Voss-Andreae is not trying to produce a ‘textbook’ representation. ‘I do not show a fixed end point as Feynman’s method demands’, he says. ‘Instead in my piece the paths emerge from one point and then keep opening up. The artwork is not meant to accurately illustrate the technique of path integration; I made it to illustrate the ‘feel’ of it.’ In the Spin Family series, inspired by the quantized spin states of the two classes of fundamental particles, the diaphanous thread allows us to visualize superpositions of states while cautioning against too literal a picture of what ‘spin’ itself represents.

A feeling of intangibility and the subjectivity of points of view pervades Quantum Man, a walking figure created from parallel slices of steel in which the particle-like concreteness seen from the front shifts to wave-like near-invisibility viewed from the side. This sense of an object on the point of disintegrating is a common trope of recent artistic efforts to capture ideas in physics, from Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud series to Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter. Put the pieces together yourself, they seem to say – because that’s how the world works anyway.


Q&A with Julian Voss-Andreae
PB: Do you actually want to give viewers a flavour of the ideas behind the quantum works, or are you simply using the science as a launching point for something more abstract?

J V-A: I do want to give a flavor of the underlying ideas, at least while the sculptures are on display at the American Center for Physics. I am displaying them with explanatory text to alert the audience to the fact that there is a real concept behind each piece. For this show I wanted to make works that physicists can relate to. But I didn’t want to stop there. I am always seeing the physics (or other sciences) as a starting point for creating something that develops its own life as an art object. I want people who don’t have a background in science to enjoy the work as well. I want to increase the audience’s capacity to intuit the unfathomable deeper nature of reality by sensually experiencing the works.
PB: Do you feel that quantum theory is really something that can be, or ought to be, visualized at all? - I guess the answer to that must clearly be 'yes'

J V-A: Well, the way my own mind functions I cannot really grasp anything without images. I have to make images for myself, real ones or in my mind, if they don’t exist. And I believe that this is so for many if not most people. So if you look at any quantum mechanics textbook there are lots of images - especially in books from your culture. In Germany people have often tried to get rid of images [even though they have the word ‘anschaulich’]; there was for example a movement in mathematics, I believe in the 1960s, which banned images altogether from their books because the authors felt it is a flawed practice since every image can always portray only one special case. That is of course true, but most of us still need images. Many of the more complicated things visualized in quantum physics textbooks are clearly illustrations of a single facet of something more complex and more abstract, something that the mathematical description might be able to express in one coherent concept but that we sometimes cannot grasp within one coherent (mental) picture. You are probably familiar with Bernd Thaller’s work: He creates movies of quantum systems, typically of the time evolution of wave functions. Using color value and hue to encode different variables he is able to portray complete wave functions including their phase. It looks beautiful how they move and it is very instructive. So, I definitely think quantum theory can and should be visualized.
PB: But what would you say to the view that any such representation is bound to create an artificially concrete representation of something that is beyond our capacity to intuit?

It has been recognized that quantum theory does not admit of a realistic interpretation. For example, we have no accurate space-time representation of a particle, say an electron:  it is neither a wave nor a particle nor any other “thing”. So there is certainly a danger in presenting artificially concrete representations without making sure they are correctly understood as only a facet of something more complex or altogether different. A well-known example of such a misunderstanding is the ubiquitous hydrogen atom model. There are the earlier models that show electrons as particles orbiting the nucleus in discrete orbits. Then there are the representations of electrons as wave-functions: countless textbooks show the images of s, p, d,… orbitals. [These models often contain an additional imprecision in that they illustrate only the angular dependence of the wave function, and not also the radial one. I am sure there are quite a few scientists who would draw those spherical harmonics if asked ‘what a hydrogen atom looks like’.] But even if the observable electron density is pictured, there still remains a problem, namely the very notion that a hydrogen atom (or any quantum “object”, for that matter), is an object, and has a particular appearance independent of the means used to observe it, or for that matter any objective existence at all. So in the case of the H atom, even if the correct three dimensional shape of the probability density is pictured it is still a potentially misleading abstraction because you need to keep in mind that this shape merely represents tendencies for results of possible electron position measurements, whereas the phenomenal reality it refers to are the discrete and apparently random positions at which the electron is actually measured when an experiment is carried out in which that wave-form represents the prepared state. In fact, there is always a danger of taking any image or model too literally (Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”). Using images in science or philosophy to illustrate states of affair is therefore quite generally a two-edged sword, and one needs to know the limits of a picture, and use it with discrimination and intelligence.  So with that caution, I would say that art, freed as it is nowadays from the presupposition that it needs to visually accurately represent reality, has a rather unique potential for indicating aspects of reality that science cannot.

In a related vein, I don’t think that a specific piece of art has a single correct “interpretation” (as is true for a textbook image). To me, good art is something that has (by virtue of its sensual and conceptual properties) the potential to give rise to a web of meaningfully interlocking interpretations. So my experimentation ultimately aims at finding (in that sense) ‘good’ art objects. [Btw, it is interesting to relate this to the quantum mechanical measurement process: Art is like an unmeasured wave function with tendencies, a superposition of possibilities (the different interpretations). Then comes the individual’s interpretation of the art work in a specific instance, analogous to the physical measurement that reduces it to one classical answer and forces the system into that state.] 

To further comment on the relationship between my art and the science it relates to:  a piece like “Night Path” (the Feynman paths one) if shown in a textbook, might lead to the misunderstanding that there are a finite number of actual paths to be added. Of course, the number really needs to be infinite to yield the correct result. Moreover, I do not show a fixed end point as Feynman’s method demands; but instead in my piece the paths emerge from one point and then keep opening up. But the art work here is not meant to accurately illustrate the technique of path integration. I made it to illustrate the ‘feel’ of it. I like the idea of having these myriad paths that wiggle around in a completely ‘non-physical’ fashion (i.e. being everywhere at every time) and that they get more and more important in the classical trajectory’s vicinity because there the phase oscillates slower. So I took a Gaussian distribution around a parabola and used the pseudo random generator in the computer to calculate where to make holes into the slices. I followed the output of the algorithm quite strictly because I didn’t want to bias the result with ‘human pseudo randomness’. Before I built the piece I visualized it in the computer to fine-tune the parameters involved (the shape of the trajectory, the sigma of the Gaussian etc.) and that gave me the idea of evoking an image of a meteor falling through the night, which then informed the choice of colors. That is where I allow myself the ‘poetic departure’ from physics. For a textbook, I would not have used a parabola and I would have collected the paths back into a single endpoint. So my hope is to convey this bizarre feeling of the path integral approach (even if it is not recognized as such) by merging it with an image (the meteor) that is known to everyone. I always feel I am experimenting here. Not only with the materials and algorithms etc. but also with having an idea and turning it into a real object to see what it does to me and others. This is where my experimental art work departs from experimental physics: I am ultimately interested in creating an art object, something that strikes a chord in the viewer.

[I think it is key to display the works in an art setting. Even though it is the American Center for Physics in this case, the place where the sculptures are displayed is designated to displaying art and the audience knows that. The same is true for the display on my website.]

[Concerning the wording in your question: Do you mean capacity to intuit or capacity to understand? There are obviously things that are beyond our capacity to understand in the sense that we cannot find a single coherent mental image that provides a complete description of that thing. But maybe we can intuit a solution to a paradox even though we cannot understand it.][PB: I agree, and that’s indeed what I meant: intuition does not necessary imply rigorous understanding, but is perhaps all we can hope for here, especially if one isn’t a specialist.]
PB: I'm also interested in whether there are any artists who provide particular inspiration for you, either from a purely visual point of view or because they have similarly tried to articulate and present rather abstract ideas and phenomena.
J V-A: I am influenced visually by a lot of things in art and architecture. I frequently get ideas from other artists about how to solve problems technically or they give me an idea what could work visually. I don’t have a particular artist that I draw inspiration from when it comes to taking images from science to create art. But on a more abstract level there are artists I greatly admire for the intensity of their work and because they lead the way with their visions and their ability to realize them. There is one artist in particular I feel I have an odd connection with and that is Antony Gormley. It happened several times already that I had an idea and found out later that he had gone in that direction. We are interested in very similar things and he is very systematic and efficient in exploring them. I would love to meet him one day.

PB: Can you also tell me a little about how the exhibition came about?

J V-A: The curator, Sarah Tanguy, had asked me a few years ago if I was interested in showing my work at the American Center for Physics because she thought my work would fit well there. Last year, after she was able to secure the funding, I was supposed to have the show. But after I had thought about it and decided to make all works which had to do with quantum physics, I realized that I needed another year to finish them.


Statement on the website, also displayed at the exhibition (J V-A)
The term “Quantum Object”, although regularly used in physics, is really an oxymoron. An ‘object’ is something that lives completely in the paradigm of classical physics: It has an independent reality in itself, it behaves deterministically, and it has definite physical properties, such as occupying a well-defined spot in time and space. For the ‘quantum’ all those seemingly self-evident truths become false: Its reality is one that is relative to the observer, the principle of causality is violated, and other features of materiality such as clear boundaries in space and time, objective locatedness or even identity, do not pertain.
After struggling with quantum physics for the last hundred years we cannot escape the fact that there simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics, because our brains are exquisitely adapted to making sense of the world on our scale, as perceived through our unaided senses. My hope is that the unique ability of art to transcend the confines of logic and literal representation and to offer glimpses of something beyond can help us open up to a deeper understanding of the world and to wean ourselves from the powerful grip classical physics has had over the last centuries on our every perception of reality.
General Artist Statement (J V-A)

My diverse interests, investigations and works as both scientist and artist are ultimately derived from my lifelong fascination with Nature. As an observational painter in my youth I was so intrigued by the natural sciences and its philosophical implications, that I subsequently spent the next eight years studying physics at European universities. I earned my degree in physics participating in a seminal experiment at the boundary between quantum physics and philosophy. I then moved to the United States to study art and began developing a body of sculptural work often inspired by scientific themes, such as quantum physics or the structure of protein molecules, the building blocks of life.

I create art by taking something I see or know and translating it into an object. This translation starts out being guided by clearly expressible ideas and tends to develop into something successively complex and less accessible through logic and words. The act of creation contains an extraordinary and most fulfilling aspect I find impossible to understand intellectually: The creative moments are not governed by my conscious thought. On the contrary, it is typically the unconsciously contributed aspects, executed in a certain meditative state of mind that brings the work to life, adding new and often surprising layers of meaning.

It is important for me to create works in a spectrum ranging from mostly intellectual to mostly intuitive in order to generate a cross-inspiration between both approaches. Achieving the right balance of intellect and intuition, of science and art, is central to both my work and my life. In fact, I feel unable to clearly distinguish between the concepts of intellect and intuition, which are commonly perceived as polar opposites, and I strive to unify these opposites into a single more fundamental idea. I am motivated by the desire to create a broader understanding of Nature than the one provided by science alone: My work allows intuiting our world by offering a sensual experience of what is usually accessible only through our intellect.

Books of the Decade

Blackwell’s have, in their wisdom, apparently selected Critical Mass as one of their top 100 ‘paperbacks of the decade’ (don’t ask me why they specify paperbacks). Nice. As a result, they asked me to come up with my own selection of three from the past decade – which is not as easy as it sounds (it makes me realise that most of the books I read are older than this). So this is what I offered them:

James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love (Canongate, 2005), while beautifully written and plotted, might not seem an obvious candidate for an outstanding novel of the decade. But it has stayed with me as an exquisite piece of storytelling of the kind that one associates with the best pre-modernist fiction, and makes a compelling imaginative leap into a wholly unfamiliar milieu. Comparisons with Conrad and Dostoevsky were not amiss. It’s not clear whether W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Penguin, 2002) is fiction or not, but it was my introduction to Sebald and to an entirely original and totally hypnotic style of writing. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (HarperCollins, 2008) is perhaps the only history of science I have read that has been genuinely exciting and inspiring to read, with something to enthral the reader on every page. All of these books have left their mark on my own writing.

Sceptical of the sceptics

I have a review of Christopher Booker’s book The Real Global Warming Disaster in the Observer today. Here it is below in its original form. I’d be surprised if Booker, or other sceptics, don’t respond in some way, so here too is some of the further comment at which I hinted in the review. And not that it is likely in any way to prevent Booker from dismissing me as a minion of the great conspiracy that is the ‘global warming consensus’, but I’ll just mention too that I have also taken some flak in the past from James Hansen, Booker’s prime villain as the man who (he says, absurdly) almost single-handedly got the global-warming juggernaut on the road. I didn’t endorse Hansen’s call for a more forcefully worded message from the scientific community to supplement what he considered to be the reticence of the IPCC. My view was that, while I understand and sympathize with Hansen’s motivation, the IPCC’s caution has been to its great credit, and has helped maintain its credibility. Needless to say, to Booker the IPCC is simply a cabal of alarmists.

*******************************

Considerable effort has gone into Christopher Booker's definitive manual for sceptics. Shame he's talking bunk, says Philip Ball.

Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph columnist and bête noir of climate campaigners, has here produced the definitive climate sceptics’ manual. That’s to say, he has rounded up just about every criticism ever made of the majority scientific view that global warming, most probably caused by human activity, is underway, and presented them unchallenged. If you share his convictions, you’ll love it (although I’m not sure you’ll actually wade through the dense arguments), and will dismiss the rest of this review as part of the cover-up.

Me, I was moved to a queer kind of admiration for the skill and energy with which Booker has assembled his polemic. Unlike other climate-sceptic diatribes like the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle or the writings of Nigel Lawson, this one cannot be dismissed with off-the-shelf knowledge. And some of it is true. But much, including the central claim, is bunk.

Some of Booker’s stratagems are transparent enough. One is to introduce all climate sceptics with a little eulogy to their credentials, while their opponents receive only a perfunctory, if not disparaging, preamble. This reaches its apotheosis on the back cover with a quote from  ‘the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and ‘climate scientist’’, MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Unusually for sceptics, Lindzen does have significant academic status, but probably only his mother would endorse this description. Besides, it seems odd that someone so intent on raising platforms of authority should also ask us to believe that the credibility of the entire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been undermined by an Australian computer consultant.

Another of Booker’s techniques is to latch on to genuine flaws in the science or its dissemination with the tenacity of a bulldog. Predictably, he attacks the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, a plot of global mean temperatures over the past 1000 years produced by two scientists in 1998 which shows little change for the entire period until suddenly soaring in the twentieth century. It is now mostly accepted that the analysis that produced these data was wrong. The question, still unresolved, is ‘how wrong?’ – have we experienced comparable warming in the historical past, in which case the argument that it is a natural fluctuation seems plausible, or is the current trend truly unusual? But Booker’s implication that the entire edifice of the global-warming consensus rested on the shaky hockey stick is absurd: it was one strand among many. For a balanced critique of this episode, look instead to Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents (Norton).

In the end, however, the devil is in the details. And therein lies the problem, for to persuasively dismantle Booker’s case would require an equally long and citation-encrusted tome. You are going to get nothing more (here at least) than my word for it that, say, the first of Booker’s accusations about faulty science and procedural misdemeanour that I chose at random to investigate further – the resignation of hurricane specialist Chris Landsea from the IPCC in 2004 – proved to have a rather different complexion from the one presented here.

Yet some of the cracks become evident just from paying attention. When Booker commits the cardinal sin, for which climate scientists have often castigated alarmists, of making a swallow into a summer (or here, winter) by using the cold snap of 2008 as a reason to doubt the warming trend, it’s game over. And by claiming that the slight cooling trend since around 2003 undermines the IPCC’s climate models, he fails to understand that different timescales demand different models: the projections for 2100 are hardly meant to predict whether next summer will be a scorcher. Don’t even get me started about the graph on page 328 that shows this cooling; just take a look at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif and then tell me what you feel about it (what do you mean, where is it? It’s that bit at the end). Besides, Booker admits briefly that a climate model in which medium-term ocean circulation was included was able in 2009 to rationalize the current cooling (which may last until 2015). We are supposed to regard this result as suspiciously convenient, but even Booker can come up with no scientific reasons to discard it. Indeed, he later criticizes the IPCC models for failing to simulate shifts in ocean currents. His aim is simply to sling enough mud, and to hell with consistency.

Suppose you are genuinely undecided on climate change, and determined not to be guided simply by what you’d like to believe. If unpicking the real story demands so much effort and insider knowledge, how can you possibly make up your mind? Here’s an unscientific suggestion. Booker’s position would require that you accept something like the following options: (1) Most of the world’s climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming, and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W. Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception. (2) Most of the world’s climate scientists are incompetent and have grossly misinterpreted their data and models – yet their faulty conclusions are not, as you might imagine, a random chaos of assertions, but all point in the same direction.

There’s a third option, however: (3) The world’s climate system is hugely complex, hard to predict, and constantly surprising; yet in the long term the world is getting warmer, for reasons we basically understand, and there is good reason to believe that humans are mostly responsible for it.

You decide.

*******************************************

Oh, there is much, much more to be said. As I say in the review, taking on Booker’s arguments means wading through a morass of technical detail and having to get hold of the scientists involved to get the real story. I have done so in just a few cases. If they are representative, then it seems clear what to expect of the rest. Here we go:

Boy, does Booker have it in for David King, former chief governmental science adviser. Quite aside from the specifics, his position here is utterly inconsistent – for example, he says at one point that it’s terrible we set so much store by someone’s credentials as a ‘qualified scientist’ (and thus dismiss Bjorn Lomborg), but it’s apparently equally terrible that we listen to King, a mere ‘surface chemist’. (Bizarrely, ‘surface chemistry’ never appears without its quotes, as though it’s some kind of made-up discipline.) King, says Booker, has little more specialist authority than ‘a man holding forth in a pub’ – or dare we say, in a newspaper column?

The main accusations against King, however, appear in Booker’s account of King’s trip to Moscow in 2004. This was indeed an extraordinary affair, but in the manner Booker asserts. The meeting, instigated by Putin, was supposed to bring together international experts to debate climate change. But as Booker indicates, some of the key Russians were sceptics, and as a result they derailed the whole affair. King was asked to arrange a programme, which he did, including 12 leading British scientists. However, then Putin brought in his economic adviser and head sceptic Alexander Illarionov, who hijacked the meeting and altered the programme, excluding the UK team and inviting several of the key sceptics, such as Nils-Axel Mörner at Stockholm. King and his team were actually en route to Moscow when they were given the revised programme, which immediately shows you the tactics Illarionov was using.

Naturally, King was furious. But he continued to the meeting when it was agreed that the British scientists would be allowed to speak. However, Illarionov insisted on chairing the entire meeting, and King’s team was persistently harangued throughout. The matter was so bad that King had to contact Tony Blair while in Moscow to explain that an international incident was developing; Jack Straw’s chance presence in Moscow at that time helped to prevent it from deteriorating any more than it did, but King was asked simply to try to make the best of it.

Booker alleges that King and his colleagues walked out when challenged with questions they couldn’t answer. In fact, King had announced already that he’d have to leave for another meeting at a certain point, and that’s what he did. As he did so, Illarionov was literally screaming at him that he was not permitted to go. One has the sense that, in former times in the Soviet Union, comrades who disagreed with Illarionov would have lost their jobs and silently disappeared, in the manner of Lysenkoism.

The extensive quotes that Booker provides from Illarionov’s three-hour subsequent press conference pretty much undermine his case in themselves, since they show him to be a borderline hysteric. Indeed, he claimed that Britain had ‘declared war’ on Russia, a claim that was repeated in a headline in the Moscow Times. What Booker doesn’t say is that Putin subsequently sacked Illarionov, who is now a bitter man. The whole episode, far from showing King to be intolerant and scientifically naïve, instead shows how crazy the climate sceptics can become, and how underhand their tactics are.

Next.

I mention the resignation of Chris Landsea in my review. The villain here is Kevin Trenberth, the hurricane modelling expert at UCAR (the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in the US). Naturally, we hear nothing from Booker about Trenberth’s side of the story. So here is what Trenberth says of the matter:

*********************************************

Summary:

Chris Landsea was not a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) or a Lead author of the report.  He was asked by the CLAs to be a contributing author (there are 66 in Chapter 3) who write a half page or so on a particular topics that are assembled into the report by the Lead Authors.  He could easily refuse to do so, but to publicly resign the way he did was a very political approach that had nothing to do with any scientific dispute. 
Trenberth’s response was to publish the scientific basis for the news conference criticized by Landsea in the June 2005 Science, and Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology independently published direct observational evidence in Nature only two months later. He showed that significant increases in cyclone intensity and duration around the world since 1970 have been strongly related to rising SSTs. Challenges from Landsea and other experts have led to modest revisions  in the specific correlations, Emanuel 2005b, but do not alter the overall conclusion. In September 2005 Peter Webster and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology published an article in Science that explicitly showed a substantial rise in the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes since 1970 and in the percent of total hurricanes that fit that description. They concluded that the rise was to be expected, given the observed increase in SSTs.

Landsea’s letter was written late in 2004, and subsequently, in addition to the many new published papers, the record breaking 2005 hurricane season occurred, including hurricane Katrina and 3 other category 5 hurricanes.

There is no doubt that there is large natural variability in hurricanes, and also disputes about how reliable the record is, points made by Landsea (for example Landsea, Nature 2005 and Chan, Science 2006) ; but other articles have demonstrated that the changes in the hurricane environment have a human component, such as Santer et al., PNAS 2006.  

There is a wide range of scientific opinion on the issue, reflecting the genuine scientific uncertainties and developing nature of the science.  Subsequently, the IPCC has also weighed in and the attribution of changes to a human role are clearly stated in chapters that were not authored by Trenberth.  
Trenberth summarizes his views on hurricanes as follows:

1) There is large natural variability of hurricanes.  We can not say anything about increases in numbers or frequency from the record or how these may change in the future.

2) However, the environment in which the hurricanes are occurring is clearly changing, and those changes are part of global warming. 

3) For the past 10 years the SSTs have been higher from 10-20∞N in the Atlantic, where the hurricanes form and track, than at any other time in the record through the 20th C.

4) During this period 8 out of the 10 years had above normal numbers of hurricanes and the 2 exceptions were El Niño years when the main activity shifts to the Pacific.

       1995-2004  1970-1994    2004
TCs    13.6               8.6            14   
Hurr    7.8                5.0             9

1) Water vapor amounts are rising
2) Precipitation has been becoming more intense in the US as a result.
3) Hurricane Catarina off Brazil in March 2004 was unprecedented

5) Hence there is every reason to think that these changes should increase the intensity of hurricanes and rainfalls associated with hurricanes.

6) We can not say anything much about the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida, except that the rainfalls and flooding were likely enhanced by global warming. 

7) The IPCC in 2001 also states that hurricanes are likely to become more intense with stronger winds and heavier rainfalls.

8) While the influence of climate change on hurricanes may not be detectable because of large natural variability, this does not mean that there is no influence.

Landsea writes “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.”  Yet no such claims were made.  On the contrary, it was clearly stated that natural variability was dominant in observed the climate record.  Many other mis-statements have been made by Landsea about what was said, and the fact that all statements were carefully caveated.

There are always differences of opinion among scientists on issues of science. NCAR encourages responsible dialog and discussion. But we do not condone name-calling and deliberate attempts to mislead.   The IPCC process is robust, open, and subject to extensive reviews, checks and balances.  We have confidence that it will be balanced and represent the consensus.  However, the process is helped if people contribute rather than withdraw from it.

Updates:
There was a tremendous amount of publicity, often ill-informed, following all of this.  Trenberth remained quiet and did not respond in person to the often personal attacks on his integrity.  Instead he documented the state of the science and the views he espoused at the press conference in this article:

Trenberth, K., 2005: Uncertainty in hurricanes and  global warming. Science, 308, 1753–1754.

Shortly thereafter, two other publications came out which also provided strong support:

Webster, P. J., G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang, 2005: Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment. Science, 309, 1844–1846.

Emanuel, K. , 2005a: Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature, 436, 686–688.
—, 2005b: Emanuel replies. Nature, 438, E13, doi:10.1038/nature04427.

And these in turn produced the following article in November 2005

Pielke, R.A., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, and R. Pasch, 2005: Hurricanes and Global Warming. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 86, 1571–1575.

The following was a rebuttal by the news conference participants:
Pielke et al (2005) provide their assessment of the situation with regard to hurricanes and global warming.  They state there is "lack of a theory for future changes in storm frequencies" and "the state of understanding of tropical cyclogenesis provides too poor a foundation to base any projections about the future".  Given the lack of any physical understanding of how hurricanes work it follows then that " ...until a relationship between actual storm intensity and tropical climate change is clearly demonstrated,  it would be premature to conclude that such a link exists or is significant ..." .  It is unfortunate that they overlook the considerable understanding and modeling capabilities that do exist in tropical storms, even while recognizing that the theory is incomplete. Indeed, there is plenty of research indicating that hurricanes do respond to the environment in which they are embedded, as summarized by Trenberth (2005).

Observed changes in hurricanes are masked by poor data, especially prior to the 1960s when the satellite era began.  Moreover changes in atmospheric temperature throughout the atmosphere are distorted by changes in radiosondes and instruments. Rising sea surface temperatures and increased atmospheric water vapor provide the primary fuel for tropical convection through latent heat release, and both are increasing.  Atmospheric dynamics play a key role in determining where storms occur and their tracks, and changes are less certain in association with global warming.  But the evidence suggests increases in intensity of storms, once they are formed, and increases in heavy rains and risk of flooding.   The Pielke et al. essay never does discuss the most widespread impact of such storms which is already flooding.

However, the essay also attacks the “misguided” participants in a telecon news conference held to discuss the changes and impacts of the record breaking 2004 hurricane season in Florida.  The transcript  of the news conference has been made available by UCAR (to correct the many misquotes of the statements made at that news conference.  In fact the comments by Trenberth are fully consistent with those in Trenberth (2005).  Pielke et al. further misquote the IPCC (2001).   There is no doubt that social changes of people placing themselves in harm’s way contributes substantially to hurricane damage, but they seriously underestimate the changes in nature that also contribute. But then what should one expect from a bunch of guys who have no expertise in climate change? The article is exceedingly political, and can not even get the strong link between burning fossil fuels and energy and changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric composition changes right.

Misguided news conference participants (Jim McCarthy, Paul Epstein, Kevin Trenberth).

It was also followed up by this article and response:

Anthes, R. A., R. W. Corell, G. Holland, J. W. Hurrell, M. C. McCracken, and K. E. Trenberth, 2006: Hurricanes and global warming—Potential linkages and consequences. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 87, 623–628.

Pielke, R., C. Landsea, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, and R. Pasch, 2006: Reply to “Hurricanes and Global Warming Potential Linkages and Consequences”. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 87, 628–631.

Of course the 2005 season broke so many records that it further demonstrated that global warming was playing a role. 

In January 2007, the AR4 IPCC report was approved in Paris with the following statement in the Policy Maker’s summary (approved unanimously):

There is observational evidence for an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater. Multi-decadal variability and the quality of the tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about 1970 complicate the detection of long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity. There is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones.

And from the Summary of chapter 3 of IPCC:

Intense tropical cyclone activity has increased since about 1970. Variations in tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are dominated by ENSO and decadal variability, which result in a redistribution of tropical storm numbers and their tracks, so that increases in one basin are often compensated by decreases over other oceans. Trends are apparent in SSTs and other critical variables that influence tropical thunderstorm and tropical storm development. Globally, estimates of the potential destructiveness of hurricanes show a significant upward trend since the mid-1970s, with a trend towards longer lifetimes and greater storm intensity, and such trends are strongly correlated with tropical SST. These relationships have been reinforced by findings of a large increase in numbers and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5 globally since 1970 even as total number of cyclones and cyclone days decreased slightly in most basins. The largest increase was in the North Pacific, Indian and southwest Pacific Oceans. However, numbers of hurricanes in the North Atlantic have also been above normal (based on 1981–2000 averages) in 9 of the last 11 years, culminating in the record-breaking 2005 season. Moreover, the first recorded tropical cyclone in the South Atlantic occurred in March 2004 off the coast of Brazil.

**********************************************

Well, that may be more than you wanted. But it suggests, at the very least, that this is a complicated matter, no? Would you conclude on the basis of all this, that there was skulduggery against Landsea, who was making valid criticisms of bad science? Oh, of course you might, if that’s the conclusion you want to reach. But I think you’d be hard put (to say the least) to make that case objectively.

Next.

Booker makes a big deal of how glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro has been cited as evidence of global warming. Now, the reasons for the retreat of the ‘snows of Kilimanjaro’ are complex and controversial, and it is ill-advised to use this as evidence of global warming. In this respect, Booker is right to criticize those who do so. But he is wrong and disingenuous to imply that this matter is settled. It’s true that one can pick from the literature to support the contention that the glacier retreat has nothing to do with global warming (and with a handful of incompletely cited works, Booker does just that). But an honest appraisal would force one to conclude that we just don’t know. For example, Lonnie Thompson has just published a paper (PNAS 10.1073/pnas.0906029106 - here) pointing out that, contrary to what Booker claims, the ice retreat on Kilimanjaro had not ‘mostly taken place before 1950’ – on the contrary, the areal extent of summit ice has been decreasing between 1989 and 2007 at more than twice the rate of the decline between 1912 and 1953. Thompson and colleagues present evidence that “the combination of processes driving the current shrinking and thinning of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields is unique within an 11,700-year perspective” (i.e. since the end of the last ice age).

Booker has now commented on this work, as follows:

“In their desperation to keep the panic going before next month's Copenhagen climate conference, the media warmist groupies last week wheeled out, yet again, one of their favourite but long-discredited scare stories, the one about the melting snows of Kilimanjaro. Their excuse was a new study by Al Gore's friend Dr Lonnie Thompson, claiming to show that the ice on Africa's highest mountain is vanishing due to soaring temperatures.

Indeed Kilimanjaro's snow and ice is receding, as I saw for myself when I climbed it a few years back. But, as a small army of international experts have shown, this has nothing to do with global warming (temperatures on the summit, at 19,346ft, never rise above freezing). It has been going on since 1880, due to the decline in precipitation caused by widespread clearance of forests around the volcano's base.

The rate of the ice shrinkage (as I note in my new book on the climate change scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster) was in fact at its greatest in the years before 1950, long before those rising 20th-century temperatures set off the panic over global warming.”

So he dismisses Thompson’s findings without having the slightest argument for why they are wrong – he simply repeats his assertion that the rate of ice loss was greatest before 1950. This puts me in mind of the debate with a creationist that Richard Dawkins records in his new book The Greatest Show on Earth, in which his arguments about the existence of plenty of transitional fossils in museums around the world is met with a mantra-like repetition of dogma.

Indeed, the main reason we are supposed to dismiss Thompson’s findings is that he is ‘Al Gore’s friend’ – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Booker refer to him as anything else, whereas in reality Thompson is internationally regarded as one of the world’s foremost palaeoglaciolgists. And Booker doesn’t acknowledge that Thompson resolutely avoids firmly ascribing the retreat of Kilimanjaro’s ice to anthropogenic global warming. The paper says that it is difficult to identify the reason for the continued retreat, and acknowledges that precipitation changes  have been implicated (Thompson offers reasons why they are unlikely to be sufficient on their own to account for the trend, however). Thompson also points out that the observed trends are consistent with what has been observed on mountain glaciers elsewhere which are not complicated by such factors. In other words, Thompson lays out his arguments clearly, and stops short of making unjustified extrapolations or interpretations. This is how science is done. Booker just clings to his old story as if to a pole in the wind.

Booker says in his concluding ‘personal note’ that “It is inevitable that such a book will contain errors for which I am solely to blame. But I look forward to the zeal with which they will be picked out and fastened on by hostile reviewers and commentators, claiming that, if I have got this or that fact wrong, then this proves that the whole book can be dismissed as worthless.”  Well no, Christopher, I won’t do that – that is your technique, not mine. However, one has occasionally to raise eyebrows. For example, he claims that “global temperatures in 2007 began that sharp drop which for the first time revealed a distinct gap between the predictions of the computer models that they would continue to rise by 0.3 C per decade, and what was happening in the real world.” And we are now [in the writing of the book] in… mid-2009? So already we know where we’ll end up in 2017? Extraordinary. And then on page 233, Booker claims that “global temperatures’ had experienced a ‘total drop since January 2007” of 7.7 degrees – “a tenth of a degree more than the entire net warming of the 20th century.” Can he be serious? I think he means 0.7 degrees. Bit unfortunate, the way this error seems so alarmingly to support his case. (Actually it wouldn’t, to anyone knowledgeable, who’d recognize that a cooling of this magnitude in so short a time would be unlike anything we’ve ever seen in any climate record ever, and so would have to indicate a process of Armageddon-like proportions.)

Finally, I have just seen Geoffrey Normington’s post on the Prospect site about taking on the climate sceptics. I can’t say I wasn’t warned.