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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Born to believe?
There’s an interesting article in Science (326, 784-787) about what one might call the natural history of religion, reviewing current thought on how it might have arisen for evolutionary and cognitive reasons. Now, this is of course potentially dodgy territory, because it is a trivial matter to construct nice evolutionary-psychological Just So stories for why a propensity for religious belief might have had survival benefits. But Elizabeth Culotta’s article shows that the basic question is a serious one, and is being given some well-considered attention.
And this set me thinking what my friends the New Atheists make of it all. For the peculiar fact is that it seems more or less essential to their position, dare one say even an article of faith, that religion is not a product of evolution at all. They seem determined to believe (contra Darwin himself) that religion, perhaps almost uniquely among major behavioural traits of human populations, has no genetic component.
That would seem to be the view, for example, of P. Z. Myers. Apropos of my exchange with Sam Harris on science and religion, he said ‘It's a weird thing to argue with an atheist who claims religion is unavoidable (Oh? So what's so special about you?)’ – which, when you think about it, has the same absurd logic as the suggestion (I trust believers to humour this metaphor) that the existence of people without criminal records means that criminality is obviously avoidable in society. And besides, as I have mentioned before, this was a particularly lazy reading of my comments, since I pointed out only that we have notably failed to ‘avoid’ religion throughout history so far (I don’t think we need to debate that, do we?). I have no idea if it is ‘avoidable’ in any abstract sense, or even what that might mean.
Yet the odd thing is that I somewhat share Myers’ scepticism. To conclude from the near-ubiquity of religion in human culture that it must therefore be a genetic endowment seems rather akin to concluding that, say, schools or financial systems must be the products of our genes. Yet of course the argument is not quite as simple as that. For example, David Comings in California has found that the gene encoding DRD4, a protein that modulates the neurotransmission of dopamine, is present in a more active form in people who show a greater propensity to believe in miracles, mysticism and a spiritual supreme force, and less active in people with rationalist tendencies. I’m not about to answer Myers’ question ‘what’s so special about me?’ by saying that I must have a less active variety of DRD4; but neither am I (nor he) in any position to deny that such factors might play a role. Nonetheless, religiosity is hardly distributed throughout society in the patchy, pseudo-random manner of many genetically based diseases, and I’m inclined to attribute much more to culture than to genes. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely to be very profitable to search in our genes for reasons why one might believe that (say) the Earth is 10,000 years old.
But genes and culture are not so easily disentangled if a genetic tendency towards religion were very widespread. Some believe that it is. Lee Silver points out in his 2006 book Challenging Nature that ‘in no country of the world ever surveyed do reported levels of spirituality dip below 60 percent’ and that ‘all the evolutionary, genetic, and cultural studies and analyses… make it clear that our own biology, rather than divine spirits or society at large, is the primary source of human spirituality.’ (Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t believe Myers has taken the heavyweight Silver to task over this.) He adds that that ‘this conclusion is anathema to both dogmatic theists and postmodern atheists’ – for, if religion is an innate tendency rather than a foolish belief system foisted upon us by indoctrination, can we really hope to persuade the general population to discard it, whatever one-off conversions Sam Harris and his friends might celebrate? And yet – this is the truly bizarre thing – Sam utterly refused to engage with the milder and perhaps more ‘optimistic’ possibility (from that perspective) that I suggested, which is that religion might instead be one of those cultural phenomena, like monarchy, that commonly emerges from the nature of our social interactions and structures.
Specifically, what I said to Sam was this:
“I simply observe that since time immemorial human societies have organized themselves into hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets, of which religions are a prominent example. That’s what we’re dealing with. I think this is probably a more productive way to regard the situation than to think that humans are ritualistically inculcated into stupidity for which a dose of cold reason is the cure.”
He responded thus:
“It is amazing that you can advance this as a serious position. First off, it is undeniable that most humans are “ritualistically inculcated into stupidity” from birth onwards by their religious parents. Second, it is a perverse (and highly condescending) article of faith among secular academics that people can never be reasoned out of their religious convictions… For the purposes of this discussion, the only “social construct” that I am worried about is the one which convinces a journal like Nature that its paramount duty is to be polite in the face of Iron Age delusions.”
Religions, says Sam, are a "dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity". I guess that rules out genes, then.
So I look forward to Sam’s letter to Science pointing out that it is amazing they let Culotta present her article as a ‘serious position’. Of course, if indeed we have ‘religion in our genes’ (which is by no means clear, but which is what Silver and several of the people Culotta quotes seem to suspect), this doesn’t imply that we are predestined all to be believers, or that people can’t be persuaded to abandon religious irrationality. But it would suggest that at the level of cultures, the problem is not exactly what Sam thinks it is. He and Paul Myers seem determined to reject anything like a Darwinian view (and moreover anything like a sociological view) in favour of the notion that this universal phenomenon is just the product of blinkered ignorance. In fact I sense that they actually don’t give a fig about understanding religion – which, I have to suspect, means they are unlikely to have much effect in tempering its destructive and oppressive excesses. They seem to prefer the John Major position: that we need to understand less and condemn more. Well, it works for the Tories.
And this set me thinking what my friends the New Atheists make of it all. For the peculiar fact is that it seems more or less essential to their position, dare one say even an article of faith, that religion is not a product of evolution at all. They seem determined to believe (contra Darwin himself) that religion, perhaps almost uniquely among major behavioural traits of human populations, has no genetic component.
That would seem to be the view, for example, of P. Z. Myers. Apropos of my exchange with Sam Harris on science and religion, he said ‘It's a weird thing to argue with an atheist who claims religion is unavoidable (Oh? So what's so special about you?)’ – which, when you think about it, has the same absurd logic as the suggestion (I trust believers to humour this metaphor) that the existence of people without criminal records means that criminality is obviously avoidable in society. And besides, as I have mentioned before, this was a particularly lazy reading of my comments, since I pointed out only that we have notably failed to ‘avoid’ religion throughout history so far (I don’t think we need to debate that, do we?). I have no idea if it is ‘avoidable’ in any abstract sense, or even what that might mean.
Yet the odd thing is that I somewhat share Myers’ scepticism. To conclude from the near-ubiquity of religion in human culture that it must therefore be a genetic endowment seems rather akin to concluding that, say, schools or financial systems must be the products of our genes. Yet of course the argument is not quite as simple as that. For example, David Comings in California has found that the gene encoding DRD4, a protein that modulates the neurotransmission of dopamine, is present in a more active form in people who show a greater propensity to believe in miracles, mysticism and a spiritual supreme force, and less active in people with rationalist tendencies. I’m not about to answer Myers’ question ‘what’s so special about me?’ by saying that I must have a less active variety of DRD4; but neither am I (nor he) in any position to deny that such factors might play a role. Nonetheless, religiosity is hardly distributed throughout society in the patchy, pseudo-random manner of many genetically based diseases, and I’m inclined to attribute much more to culture than to genes. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely to be very profitable to search in our genes for reasons why one might believe that (say) the Earth is 10,000 years old.
But genes and culture are not so easily disentangled if a genetic tendency towards religion were very widespread. Some believe that it is. Lee Silver points out in his 2006 book Challenging Nature that ‘in no country of the world ever surveyed do reported levels of spirituality dip below 60 percent’ and that ‘all the evolutionary, genetic, and cultural studies and analyses… make it clear that our own biology, rather than divine spirits or society at large, is the primary source of human spirituality.’ (Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t believe Myers has taken the heavyweight Silver to task over this.) He adds that that ‘this conclusion is anathema to both dogmatic theists and postmodern atheists’ – for, if religion is an innate tendency rather than a foolish belief system foisted upon us by indoctrination, can we really hope to persuade the general population to discard it, whatever one-off conversions Sam Harris and his friends might celebrate? And yet – this is the truly bizarre thing – Sam utterly refused to engage with the milder and perhaps more ‘optimistic’ possibility (from that perspective) that I suggested, which is that religion might instead be one of those cultural phenomena, like monarchy, that commonly emerges from the nature of our social interactions and structures.
Specifically, what I said to Sam was this:
“I simply observe that since time immemorial human societies have organized themselves into hierarchical systems based on more or less arbitrary tenets, of which religions are a prominent example. That’s what we’re dealing with. I think this is probably a more productive way to regard the situation than to think that humans are ritualistically inculcated into stupidity for which a dose of cold reason is the cure.”
He responded thus:
“It is amazing that you can advance this as a serious position. First off, it is undeniable that most humans are “ritualistically inculcated into stupidity” from birth onwards by their religious parents. Second, it is a perverse (and highly condescending) article of faith among secular academics that people can never be reasoned out of their religious convictions… For the purposes of this discussion, the only “social construct” that I am worried about is the one which convinces a journal like Nature that its paramount duty is to be polite in the face of Iron Age delusions.”
Religions, says Sam, are a "dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity". I guess that rules out genes, then.
So I look forward to Sam’s letter to Science pointing out that it is amazing they let Culotta present her article as a ‘serious position’. Of course, if indeed we have ‘religion in our genes’ (which is by no means clear, but which is what Silver and several of the people Culotta quotes seem to suspect), this doesn’t imply that we are predestined all to be believers, or that people can’t be persuaded to abandon religious irrationality. But it would suggest that at the level of cultures, the problem is not exactly what Sam thinks it is. He and Paul Myers seem determined to reject anything like a Darwinian view (and moreover anything like a sociological view) in favour of the notion that this universal phenomenon is just the product of blinkered ignorance. In fact I sense that they actually don’t give a fig about understanding religion – which, I have to suspect, means they are unlikely to have much effect in tempering its destructive and oppressive excesses. They seem to prefer the John Major position: that we need to understand less and condemn more. Well, it works for the Tories.
Friday, November 06, 2009
A view from the roof at Chartres
This post is strictly for ultra-nerds of Gothic architecture. I recently got this photo of the ‘transitional flying buttress’ between the nave and choir of Chartres Cathedral – something that is not at all easy to do, as the buttress is not visible from the ground but requires access to the cathedral roof. I’d gone up there for other purposes (a Nova documentary on Gothic churches), and so sadly hadn’t come properly prepared to take photos – this one is from my mobile phone, and so is not of high resolution. But I want to put it up here in case anyone else should ever want to use it without the hassle of getting permission to go up on the roof. The structure is significant because it challenges the idea that the nave is older than the choir. The arches of the nave flyers are in a more squat and massive style, with rounded arches, which could be taken as a sign that they were built first, perhaps by a different master, with the slender pointed arches of the choir flyers (more ‘Gothic’, one might say) being added by a later hand. That was the case argued by Louis Grodecki in the 1950s. But this sole ‘transitional’ flying buttress on the east of the transepts seems to be an attempt to merge the different styles of the nave and choir, as though this was part of the plan all along – perhaps, as Jan van der Meulen suggests, the crossing and transepts were built first, and both the nave and choir built out from them at much the same time. All this is discussed in my book Universe of Stone.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Can you ken?
I’ve just heard a lovely programme on BBC Radio 4 about the late, great Ken Campbell. Catch it while you can. I saw Ken perform several times, and it always left me giggling throughout – as did this programme. The phrase ‘true original’ gets overused, but there was no one for whom it is more apt. Ken had a consistent fascination with science, which is understandable in someone whose constant demand was ‘astound me’. He developed some wonderful routines around such exploits as his conversations with David Deutsch about the multiverse, and there’s a great moment in the radio show where Ken’s precision with words collides with the glibness of scientists’ habitual speech patterns: he was delighted, on asking someone at CERN if they were worrried that they might generate an entire new universe in their particle collisions, to be told that it was ‘unlikely’. Ken captured the essence of the speculative extremes of physical theory when he would talk of how it required one not exactly to believe in such things as parallel universes, but simply to suppose them. ‘Can I suppose it?’, I remember him saying, immense eyebrows gesticulating. ‘Well yes, I can suppose it.’
I was thrilled to get Ken involved in the series of talks I arranged with Harriet Coles at Nature at the V&A Museum as part of the ‘Creating Sparks’ BA Festival in 2000. He was doing his Newton/Fatio routine at the time, and it became quickly clear that we were never going to achieve much in the way of tailoring to the themes of the series – he was going to do just what he was going to do. We didn’t much care, knowing that whatever he did would supply a great night – which it did (despite a few grumbles from people who’d been expecting a ‘science’ talk). When we chatted to Ken over tea afterwards, my wife and I figured that he would be exhausting to live with – and from the accounts of his daughter Daisy, that seems to have been the case, although it is nice (and a little surprising) to hear that it was mostly fun too. Ken was interested in the Paracelsus theatre project I was putting together at the time, and I always had the suspicion that he would have made a great Paracelsus. Even then I saw it as the ideal role for either him or the clown performer Gerry Flanagan, and I’m still filled with glee that I got Gerry to do it nearly a decade later. And while working with Gerry was a joy, I suspect working with Ken could be a kind of inspirational nightmare. But it was wonderful to have briefly come into his erratic orbit.
I was thrilled to get Ken involved in the series of talks I arranged with Harriet Coles at Nature at the V&A Museum as part of the ‘Creating Sparks’ BA Festival in 2000. He was doing his Newton/Fatio routine at the time, and it became quickly clear that we were never going to achieve much in the way of tailoring to the themes of the series – he was going to do just what he was going to do. We didn’t much care, knowing that whatever he did would supply a great night – which it did (despite a few grumbles from people who’d been expecting a ‘science’ talk). When we chatted to Ken over tea afterwards, my wife and I figured that he would be exhausting to live with – and from the accounts of his daughter Daisy, that seems to have been the case, although it is nice (and a little surprising) to hear that it was mostly fun too. Ken was interested in the Paracelsus theatre project I was putting together at the time, and I always had the suspicion that he would have made a great Paracelsus. Even then I saw it as the ideal role for either him or the clown performer Gerry Flanagan, and I’m still filled with glee that I got Gerry to do it nearly a decade later. And while working with Gerry was a joy, I suspect working with Ken could be a kind of inspirational nightmare. But it was wonderful to have briefly come into his erratic orbit.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Fear of music?
My piece on the cognition of atonal music has appeared in Prospect. I’m happy to say that it’s part of the site’s free content, but here it is below in extended, pre-edited form. I’m glad to see that it is drawing some comments. Not everyone is going to like what it says, for sure. But Tali Makell gets the wrong end of the stick – I’m not attacking the music of Schoenberg and his school. I’m a fan of most of this music, and think Berg’s Lyric Suite is a masterpiece. And of course I never said that Schoenberg et al. used total serialism. It’s absolutely right that they used some of tonality’s organizing principles, and to great effect. But there are problems with that in itself, as Roger Scruton has pointed out, since some of these structural principles are a direct consequence of tonality itself, and lose their meaning when taken out of that context. Besides, my view is that Schoenberg’s serialism was here acting as a convenient compositional tool that made it a little easier for the composers to use atonality – basically it was a scheme that reduced the effort needed to avoid tonality, and not one that actually brought any profundity or musicality in itself. These composers put that back in in other ways – with dynamics and so forth. There was nothing inevitable about Schoenberg’s method, and the justifications for it given by Adorno, and indeed by Schoenberg himself, are largely bogus. But that doesn’t make serialism intrinsically ‘bad’ as a way of composing. It’s when serialism becomes total that the problems really start (both musically and ideologically).
I hope all of this will be made clearer in my forthcoming book The Music Instinct. I am aware, however, that I have not addressed either here or there the defence of serialism made by Morag Josephine Grant in her book Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics (CUP). Here she attacks Fred Lerdahl’s critique of serialism (and other modern compositional methods), which is based on his linguistic approach to music cognition. Lerdahl believes that music needs to have an audible ‘grammar’: as he says, ‘The musical surface must be available for hierarchical structuring by the listening grammar’. In short, if we can’t construct hierarchies of pitch, rhythm and so forth, then the ‘musical surface’ is shallow: everything just sounds like everything else. This is the thrust of my Prospect piece, and I think it is true: for music to be more than a collection of mere sounds, there needs to be some audible way of organizing it. Grant complains that Lerdahl is forcing music into a straitjacket: she says his ‘argument ‘ that musical language, like spoken language, is generative in structure excludes the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence.’
But Grant is not, as it might seem, rejecting the need for music to acknowledge cognition. Rather, she asserts that this was precisely the concern of the serialists. They, however (she says), felt that our perception was culturally conditioned, and that we have ‘the ability to develop or uncover previously suppressed abilities’. One of those is the recognition of the tone row itself: ‘the use of the row is itself a constraint, not just on the composer, but in the aid of comprehensibility as well.’ Lerdahl is unaware of this, Grant says, while serialism imposes a system precisely to aid cognition.
And this is where Grant’s thesis utterly falls apart. For it has been shown quite clearly now that serialism’s ‘system’ is not one that can be cognized. It exists only on paper; listeners simply don’t hear it. And the reason for this is that it is simply not the kind of system that the mind intuits: we don’t listen to music by remembering arbitrary sequences of notes, but rather – as Lerdahl says – we organize those notes into hierarchical patterns: hierarchies of pitch, rhythm, melodic contour and so forth.
Can musical coherence be achieved by non-hierarchical methods? I’m not sure anyone knows, but certainly Grant provides no evidence of this – it is an act of faith. And what, precisely, are those methods, if we must exclude the tone row itself as one of them? She doesn’t say. She does, however, say that ‘the intense concentration on the tiniest of fluctuations’ is ‘central to the hearing of serial music’. I’m not sure what this means: fluctuations in what? The fluctuations in rhythm are either rather traditional, as in Berg, or are so extreme (as in Boulez) that rhythm has no meaning. Fluctuations in pitch, as in deviations from the tone row, would not be heard even if they were permitted. Grant also says that serialism ‘has the ability to create structures specific to each of its utterances’. Again, make of that what you will. If it means that each composition, each tone row, creates its own private language, then we know what Wittgenstein had to say about private languages. Why can’t Grant just explain how we are meant to find coherence in serial music, other than by its utilization of traditional techniques in parameters other than pitch?
I suppose one might interpret her remarks as saying that serialism encourages us to focus on each event as an entity in itself, not as something embedded in a hierarchical grammar. That’s possible. It might be interesting. And it is what I refer to below as sound art. If that’s the intention, it seems to me to be an explicit admission that ‘coherence’ isn’t the aim at all. And to my mind, coherence is the one characteristic that music should possess – I don’t care if you ditch tonality, or rhythm, or melody, or harmony, so long as what remains is in some manner coherent.
Incidentally, and in the hope of not sounding horribly patronizing, I have a lot of time for what Grant is up to more broadly. Defending Stockhausen is a noble cause in itself, even if I don’t buy it, and anyone who does so while listening to Scottish folk music and rap wins my vote.
Anyway, here’s the piece:
Writer Joe Queenan recently caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Luciano Berio’s 1968 Sinfonia “35 minutes of non-stop torture”, Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano”, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) “belligerent bees buzzing in the basement”, and Harrison Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling”. A hundred years after Schoenberg, he said, “the public still doesn't like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”
Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of ‘modern’ works like this well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concert-goers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. The problem is that, like most clichés, they become such by frequent use. Sure, these works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works now are as old as ‘Rock Around the Clock’, have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this ‘new’ music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.
David Stubbs considers this important question in his new book Fear of Music (Zero, 2009) but doesn’t come close to answering it. His speculative suggestion – that music lacks an ‘original object’ that, in visual art, can become the subject of veneration or trade – clearly has little force, given that it must surely apply equally to Beethoven and Berio. Indeed, Stubbs’ analysis is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Like economists trying to understand market crashes, he wants to place all the motive forces outside the system: his gaze never fixes on the music itself. To Stubbs, your responses to music are a function of your context and perspective, not of the music. His comparisons of visual and musical art assumes an equivalence that allows no possibility of their being cognitively distinct processes.
He is in good company. Social theorist Theodore Adorno’s advocacy of Schoenberg’s atonal modernism was politically motivated: tonality was the bastion of bourgeois complacency. To the hardline modernists of the 1950s and 60s, any hint of tonality was a form of recidivism to be denounced with Maoist vigour; Pierre Boulez refused for a time even to speak to tonal composers. American composer Milton Babbitt’s provocative 1958 essay ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ argued that it was time for ‘serious’ composers to withdraw from public engagement altogether, while offering nothing in the way of explanation for the public’s antipathy to ‘difficult’ music (his included) except a belief that they were too ill-informed to understand it. After giving a lecture on the music of Boulez and Elliott Carter, the eminent pianist and critic Charles Rosen responded thus to a question from the audience about whether composers have a responsibility to write music that the public can understand: “On such occasions I normally reply politely to all questions, no matter how foolish, but this time I answered that the question did not seem to me interesting but that the obvious resentment that inspired it was very significant indeed.”
No one can deny that audiences are conservative, whether they be Parisians rioting at the première of the Rite of Spring in 1913 or punks lobbing bottles at art-rockers Suicide on tour with the Clash. And since questions like this one are often a coded demand that composers start writing ‘real music’ like Mozart did, Rosen can be forgiven some impatience. Stubbs is justifiable indignant that even fans of conceptual art will parrot trite witticisms about the ‘cacophony’ of much experimental music.
But the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of music that has emerged in the past several decades implies that it is not enough to tell ingrates bemused by Stockhausen to knuckle down and try harder. Many musicologists accept a definition of music as ‘organized sound’ (ironically, since this was the description used by avant-garde electronic pioneer Edgar Varèse for his own musique concrète, a paradigm of all that is seen as distressing about ‘modern’ music). Yet sound does not become organized merely because the composer has used a system to arrange it. Sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. So music is sound in which the organization is audibly perceptible, not just that in which it is theoretically present.
Our brains use rules of thumb, both learnt and innate, to arrange an acoustic signal into a coherent entity: to pick out key, melody and harmony, to identify rhythm and metre, and to create a sense of structure and logic. The traditional music of just about every culture on earth builds in elements that assist this decoding process. When we encounter unfamiliar music, we may need to adjust our decoding rules, or learn new ones, before we can truly hear it at all.
Chief among these rules are the ‘Gestalt principles’ identified by a group of German-based psychologists in the early twentieth century. Initially identified in visual processing, these principles help us make good guesses at how to interpret complex sensory stimuli. We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side. We group together objects that look similar, or that are close together. Although the Gestalt principles are not foolproof, they make the world more comprehensible. Both in sound and in vision, the ability to interpret sensory data this way must have had clear evolutionary benefits.
In music, this means that melodies that move in small pitch steps tend to sound unified and ‘good’, while ones with large pitch jumps are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Traditional melodies in diverse cultures do indeed proceed mostly in small rather than large pitch steps. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones are apt to confuse us.
The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce – enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are seriously undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the ‘melody line’, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, we can develop no expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect. What remains may be a temporarily diverting sound, but the indulgent listener risks becoming like the sentimental audiences about whom nineteenth-century music theorist Eduard Hanslick complained, wallowing in the sonic surface while oblivious to the musical details.
And yet how can Structures lack structure? It is one of the most ‘structured’ pieces of music ever written! It was composed using the technique of ‘integral serialism’, in which musical parameters such as pitch, dynamics and rhythm are prescribed along the lines of Schoenberg’s ‘twelve-tone’ method, introduced in the 1920s. In Schoenberg’s original formulation, this approach dictated only the choice of pitches, and it was meant to eliminate all vestige of tonality – the anchoring of a piece of music to a tonic centre, which enables us to assign it a particular key. Schoenberg considered that tonal music – which meant all Western music until that point – had become tired and formulaic, and serialism was supposed to offer a systematic way of composing atonally.
The composer first chose a tone row: all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, lined up in a particular order. This was the composition’s basic musical gene: the piece was made up of repetitions of the tone row in strict order, sounded simultaneously or in succession. Individual notes could be immediately repeated, and could be used in any octave. And various mathematical permutations of the tone rows, such as reverse order, were also permitted.
The twelve-tone method ensures that no note is used more often than any other, so that none can acquire the status of a tonic merely by repetition. By the 1950s serialism had became, in many leading schools of classical composition, the only ‘respectable’ way to compose; anything hinting at tonality was considered passé and bourgeois. Yet Schoenberg not only failed to justify his horror of tonality – a composer like Béla Bartók displayed remarkable dissonant invention without abandoning it – but more importantly, he never truly came to terms with what its abandonment implied for both composer and listener. Since atonality has no tonal ‘home’, there was nowhere to depart from or return to, so that beginning, endings, and the entire matter of large-scale structure became problematic. As Roger Scruton says, ‘When the music goes everywhere, it also goes nowhere.’
Tonality is also one of the pillars of music comprehension. Far from being a decadent Western device, it is used in just about every musical tradition in the world (it does not rely on Western scales). Cognitive studies have shown how tonality provides a sense of location in pitch space and a way to organize the sequence of notes. It is the removal of this, far more than any considerations of harmony and dissonance, that many listeners find disconcerting in serialism.
This is not to say that atonality in general, and serialism in particular, is doomed to sound aimless and incomprehensible. There are plenty of other parameters, such as rhythm, dynamics and timbre, that a composer can deploy to create coherent structures. Schoenberg often did so masterfully, and Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925-6) is so beautifully wrought that one would hardly know it was a twelve-tone composition at all. But as integral serialism and other techniques progressively and systematically subverted other means of providing audible organization, so it was unsurprising that audiences found the music ever harder to ‘understand’. The serialist’s rules are not ones that can be heard – even specialists in this music can rarely hear tone rows as such. Boulez’s serial piece Le Marteau sans Maître was widely acclaimed when premiered in 1955, but it wasn’t until 22 years later that anyone else could figure out how it was serial: no one could deduce, let alone hear, the organizational ‘structure’. One can hardly blame audiences for suspecting that what is left is musically rather sparse.
This is not to imply that music must return to tonal composition, with its cadences and modulations (although that is to some degree happening anyway). But ‘experimental’ music can only qualify as such if, like any experiment, it includes the possibility of failure. If musical composition takes no account of cognition – if indeed it denies that cognition has any role to play, or determinedly frustrates it – then composers cannot complain when their music is unloved.
Sadly, although these difficulties afflict only one strand of modern classical music, the fact that it was once dominant means that all the rest tends to get tarred with the same brush. Its critics often fail to differentiate music lacking clear cognitive ‘coherence systems’ from that which has new ones. What Javanese gamelan experts Alton and Judith Becker say of non-Western music pertains also to much contemporary experimental music: “it has become increasingly clear that the coherence systems of other musics may have nothing to do with either tonality or thematic development… What is different in a different musical system may be perceived, then, as noise. Or it may not be perceived at all. Or it may be perceived as a ‘bad’ or ‘simple-minded’ variant of my own system.” Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension, even enjoyment, is a refusal to adapt, to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart or Springsteen. We need, in the parlance of the field, to find other ‘listening strategies’. Gyorgi Ligeti’s works can be appreciated as some of the most thrilling and inventive of the twentieth century once we realise that it handles time differently for instance. Musicologist Jonathan Kramer distinguishes it as ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’ time: musical events do not relate to one another in succession, like call and response, but are stacked up into sonic textures that slowly mutate and take on almost tangible forms.
It would arguably benefit all concerned if some experimental music, like much of Stockhausen’s or Boulez’s oeuvre and certainly the ambient noises of John Cage’s notoriously ‘silent’ 4’33”, were viewed instead as ‘sound art’, a term coined by Canadian composer Dan Lander and anticipated by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises. That way, one is not led to expect from these compositions what we expect of music. For if music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains.
Added note: The comments continue on the Prospect site, and make interesting reading. Of course, there are the inevitable blogosphere crazies. Will Orzo thinks he should tell me about this field called music cognition, in which people study other people’s responses to music. Thanks Will – hey, maybe I should use some of that work in my book on music cognition! Seriously, though, anyone who actually knows this field, as opposed to having looked it up on Wikipedia, would see straight away that this is precisely what I’m drawing on in my claims about how atonalism is perceived, especially the work of Fred Lerdahl, Carol Krumhansl and David Huron. If I am regurgitating anyone’s opinions, it is theirs. If you want references, look up my article in Nature last year (453, 160).
As for Joe Schmoe – anyone figure out who he’s ranting against? Sometimes it seems to be Stubbs, sometimes Adorno, sometimes Babbitt, sometimes me. An angry man. But incoherently so.
I hope all of this will be made clearer in my forthcoming book The Music Instinct. I am aware, however, that I have not addressed either here or there the defence of serialism made by Morag Josephine Grant in her book Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics (CUP). Here she attacks Fred Lerdahl’s critique of serialism (and other modern compositional methods), which is based on his linguistic approach to music cognition. Lerdahl believes that music needs to have an audible ‘grammar’: as he says, ‘The musical surface must be available for hierarchical structuring by the listening grammar’. In short, if we can’t construct hierarchies of pitch, rhythm and so forth, then the ‘musical surface’ is shallow: everything just sounds like everything else. This is the thrust of my Prospect piece, and I think it is true: for music to be more than a collection of mere sounds, there needs to be some audible way of organizing it. Grant complains that Lerdahl is forcing music into a straitjacket: she says his ‘argument ‘ that musical language, like spoken language, is generative in structure excludes the possibility of other, non-hierarchical methods of achieving musical coherence.’
But Grant is not, as it might seem, rejecting the need for music to acknowledge cognition. Rather, she asserts that this was precisely the concern of the serialists. They, however (she says), felt that our perception was culturally conditioned, and that we have ‘the ability to develop or uncover previously suppressed abilities’. One of those is the recognition of the tone row itself: ‘the use of the row is itself a constraint, not just on the composer, but in the aid of comprehensibility as well.’ Lerdahl is unaware of this, Grant says, while serialism imposes a system precisely to aid cognition.
And this is where Grant’s thesis utterly falls apart. For it has been shown quite clearly now that serialism’s ‘system’ is not one that can be cognized. It exists only on paper; listeners simply don’t hear it. And the reason for this is that it is simply not the kind of system that the mind intuits: we don’t listen to music by remembering arbitrary sequences of notes, but rather – as Lerdahl says – we organize those notes into hierarchical patterns: hierarchies of pitch, rhythm, melodic contour and so forth.
Can musical coherence be achieved by non-hierarchical methods? I’m not sure anyone knows, but certainly Grant provides no evidence of this – it is an act of faith. And what, precisely, are those methods, if we must exclude the tone row itself as one of them? She doesn’t say. She does, however, say that ‘the intense concentration on the tiniest of fluctuations’ is ‘central to the hearing of serial music’. I’m not sure what this means: fluctuations in what? The fluctuations in rhythm are either rather traditional, as in Berg, or are so extreme (as in Boulez) that rhythm has no meaning. Fluctuations in pitch, as in deviations from the tone row, would not be heard even if they were permitted. Grant also says that serialism ‘has the ability to create structures specific to each of its utterances’. Again, make of that what you will. If it means that each composition, each tone row, creates its own private language, then we know what Wittgenstein had to say about private languages. Why can’t Grant just explain how we are meant to find coherence in serial music, other than by its utilization of traditional techniques in parameters other than pitch?
I suppose one might interpret her remarks as saying that serialism encourages us to focus on each event as an entity in itself, not as something embedded in a hierarchical grammar. That’s possible. It might be interesting. And it is what I refer to below as sound art. If that’s the intention, it seems to me to be an explicit admission that ‘coherence’ isn’t the aim at all. And to my mind, coherence is the one characteristic that music should possess – I don’t care if you ditch tonality, or rhythm, or melody, or harmony, so long as what remains is in some manner coherent.
Incidentally, and in the hope of not sounding horribly patronizing, I have a lot of time for what Grant is up to more broadly. Defending Stockhausen is a noble cause in itself, even if I don’t buy it, and anyone who does so while listening to Scottish folk music and rap wins my vote.
Anyway, here’s the piece:
Writer Joe Queenan recently caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Luciano Berio’s 1968 Sinfonia “35 minutes of non-stop torture”, Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano”, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) “belligerent bees buzzing in the basement”, and Harrison Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling”. A hundred years after Schoenberg, he said, “the public still doesn't like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”
Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of ‘modern’ works like this well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concert-goers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. The problem is that, like most clichés, they become such by frequent use. Sure, these works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works now are as old as ‘Rock Around the Clock’, have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this ‘new’ music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.
David Stubbs considers this important question in his new book Fear of Music (Zero, 2009) but doesn’t come close to answering it. His speculative suggestion – that music lacks an ‘original object’ that, in visual art, can become the subject of veneration or trade – clearly has little force, given that it must surely apply equally to Beethoven and Berio. Indeed, Stubbs’ analysis is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Like economists trying to understand market crashes, he wants to place all the motive forces outside the system: his gaze never fixes on the music itself. To Stubbs, your responses to music are a function of your context and perspective, not of the music. His comparisons of visual and musical art assumes an equivalence that allows no possibility of their being cognitively distinct processes.
He is in good company. Social theorist Theodore Adorno’s advocacy of Schoenberg’s atonal modernism was politically motivated: tonality was the bastion of bourgeois complacency. To the hardline modernists of the 1950s and 60s, any hint of tonality was a form of recidivism to be denounced with Maoist vigour; Pierre Boulez refused for a time even to speak to tonal composers. American composer Milton Babbitt’s provocative 1958 essay ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ argued that it was time for ‘serious’ composers to withdraw from public engagement altogether, while offering nothing in the way of explanation for the public’s antipathy to ‘difficult’ music (his included) except a belief that they were too ill-informed to understand it. After giving a lecture on the music of Boulez and Elliott Carter, the eminent pianist and critic Charles Rosen responded thus to a question from the audience about whether composers have a responsibility to write music that the public can understand: “On such occasions I normally reply politely to all questions, no matter how foolish, but this time I answered that the question did not seem to me interesting but that the obvious resentment that inspired it was very significant indeed.”
No one can deny that audiences are conservative, whether they be Parisians rioting at the première of the Rite of Spring in 1913 or punks lobbing bottles at art-rockers Suicide on tour with the Clash. And since questions like this one are often a coded demand that composers start writing ‘real music’ like Mozart did, Rosen can be forgiven some impatience. Stubbs is justifiable indignant that even fans of conceptual art will parrot trite witticisms about the ‘cacophony’ of much experimental music.
But the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of music that has emerged in the past several decades implies that it is not enough to tell ingrates bemused by Stockhausen to knuckle down and try harder. Many musicologists accept a definition of music as ‘organized sound’ (ironically, since this was the description used by avant-garde electronic pioneer Edgar Varèse for his own musique concrète, a paradigm of all that is seen as distressing about ‘modern’ music). Yet sound does not become organized merely because the composer has used a system to arrange it. Sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. So music is sound in which the organization is audibly perceptible, not just that in which it is theoretically present.
Our brains use rules of thumb, both learnt and innate, to arrange an acoustic signal into a coherent entity: to pick out key, melody and harmony, to identify rhythm and metre, and to create a sense of structure and logic. The traditional music of just about every culture on earth builds in elements that assist this decoding process. When we encounter unfamiliar music, we may need to adjust our decoding rules, or learn new ones, before we can truly hear it at all.
Chief among these rules are the ‘Gestalt principles’ identified by a group of German-based psychologists in the early twentieth century. Initially identified in visual processing, these principles help us make good guesses at how to interpret complex sensory stimuli. We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side. We group together objects that look similar, or that are close together. Although the Gestalt principles are not foolproof, they make the world more comprehensible. Both in sound and in vision, the ability to interpret sensory data this way must have had clear evolutionary benefits.
In music, this means that melodies that move in small pitch steps tend to sound unified and ‘good’, while ones with large pitch jumps are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Traditional melodies in diverse cultures do indeed proceed mostly in small rather than large pitch steps. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones are apt to confuse us.
The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce – enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are seriously undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the ‘melody line’, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, we can develop no expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect. What remains may be a temporarily diverting sound, but the indulgent listener risks becoming like the sentimental audiences about whom nineteenth-century music theorist Eduard Hanslick complained, wallowing in the sonic surface while oblivious to the musical details.
And yet how can Structures lack structure? It is one of the most ‘structured’ pieces of music ever written! It was composed using the technique of ‘integral serialism’, in which musical parameters such as pitch, dynamics and rhythm are prescribed along the lines of Schoenberg’s ‘twelve-tone’ method, introduced in the 1920s. In Schoenberg’s original formulation, this approach dictated only the choice of pitches, and it was meant to eliminate all vestige of tonality – the anchoring of a piece of music to a tonic centre, which enables us to assign it a particular key. Schoenberg considered that tonal music – which meant all Western music until that point – had become tired and formulaic, and serialism was supposed to offer a systematic way of composing atonally.
The composer first chose a tone row: all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, lined up in a particular order. This was the composition’s basic musical gene: the piece was made up of repetitions of the tone row in strict order, sounded simultaneously or in succession. Individual notes could be immediately repeated, and could be used in any octave. And various mathematical permutations of the tone rows, such as reverse order, were also permitted.
The twelve-tone method ensures that no note is used more often than any other, so that none can acquire the status of a tonic merely by repetition. By the 1950s serialism had became, in many leading schools of classical composition, the only ‘respectable’ way to compose; anything hinting at tonality was considered passé and bourgeois. Yet Schoenberg not only failed to justify his horror of tonality – a composer like Béla Bartók displayed remarkable dissonant invention without abandoning it – but more importantly, he never truly came to terms with what its abandonment implied for both composer and listener. Since atonality has no tonal ‘home’, there was nowhere to depart from or return to, so that beginning, endings, and the entire matter of large-scale structure became problematic. As Roger Scruton says, ‘When the music goes everywhere, it also goes nowhere.’
Tonality is also one of the pillars of music comprehension. Far from being a decadent Western device, it is used in just about every musical tradition in the world (it does not rely on Western scales). Cognitive studies have shown how tonality provides a sense of location in pitch space and a way to organize the sequence of notes. It is the removal of this, far more than any considerations of harmony and dissonance, that many listeners find disconcerting in serialism.
This is not to say that atonality in general, and serialism in particular, is doomed to sound aimless and incomprehensible. There are plenty of other parameters, such as rhythm, dynamics and timbre, that a composer can deploy to create coherent structures. Schoenberg often did so masterfully, and Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (1925-6) is so beautifully wrought that one would hardly know it was a twelve-tone composition at all. But as integral serialism and other techniques progressively and systematically subverted other means of providing audible organization, so it was unsurprising that audiences found the music ever harder to ‘understand’. The serialist’s rules are not ones that can be heard – even specialists in this music can rarely hear tone rows as such. Boulez’s serial piece Le Marteau sans Maître was widely acclaimed when premiered in 1955, but it wasn’t until 22 years later that anyone else could figure out how it was serial: no one could deduce, let alone hear, the organizational ‘structure’. One can hardly blame audiences for suspecting that what is left is musically rather sparse.
This is not to imply that music must return to tonal composition, with its cadences and modulations (although that is to some degree happening anyway). But ‘experimental’ music can only qualify as such if, like any experiment, it includes the possibility of failure. If musical composition takes no account of cognition – if indeed it denies that cognition has any role to play, or determinedly frustrates it – then composers cannot complain when their music is unloved.
Sadly, although these difficulties afflict only one strand of modern classical music, the fact that it was once dominant means that all the rest tends to get tarred with the same brush. Its critics often fail to differentiate music lacking clear cognitive ‘coherence systems’ from that which has new ones. What Javanese gamelan experts Alton and Judith Becker say of non-Western music pertains also to much contemporary experimental music: “it has become increasingly clear that the coherence systems of other musics may have nothing to do with either tonality or thematic development… What is different in a different musical system may be perceived, then, as noise. Or it may not be perceived at all. Or it may be perceived as a ‘bad’ or ‘simple-minded’ variant of my own system.” Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension, even enjoyment, is a refusal to adapt, to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart or Springsteen. We need, in the parlance of the field, to find other ‘listening strategies’. Gyorgi Ligeti’s works can be appreciated as some of the most thrilling and inventive of the twentieth century once we realise that it handles time differently for instance. Musicologist Jonathan Kramer distinguishes it as ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’ time: musical events do not relate to one another in succession, like call and response, but are stacked up into sonic textures that slowly mutate and take on almost tangible forms.
It would arguably benefit all concerned if some experimental music, like much of Stockhausen’s or Boulez’s oeuvre and certainly the ambient noises of John Cage’s notoriously ‘silent’ 4’33”, were viewed instead as ‘sound art’, a term coined by Canadian composer Dan Lander and anticipated by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises. That way, one is not led to expect from these compositions what we expect of music. For if music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains.
Added note: The comments continue on the Prospect site, and make interesting reading. Of course, there are the inevitable blogosphere crazies. Will Orzo thinks he should tell me about this field called music cognition, in which people study other people’s responses to music. Thanks Will – hey, maybe I should use some of that work in my book on music cognition! Seriously, though, anyone who actually knows this field, as opposed to having looked it up on Wikipedia, would see straight away that this is precisely what I’m drawing on in my claims about how atonalism is perceived, especially the work of Fred Lerdahl, Carol Krumhansl and David Huron. If I am regurgitating anyone’s opinions, it is theirs. If you want references, look up my article in Nature last year (453, 160).
As for Joe Schmoe – anyone figure out who he’s ranting against? Sometimes it seems to be Stubbs, sometimes Adorno, sometimes Babbitt, sometimes me. An angry man. But incoherently so.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The bioethics of human cloning
It’s a funny business, bioethics. I’d never really before now looked into what it is that people called bioethicists do – but the more I do so, the more it feels that their job is basically to offer personal opinions with a professionalized aura. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about that – practising scientists tend to spend too little time thinking hard about ethical issues (beyond the basic stuff of plagiarism, fabricating data and so forth), so it is good that someone does it. And when this kind of ‘op ed’ discourse is conducted with considered philosophical rigour, and/or informed by a humane and open-minded perspective, it seems potentially to have a lot to recommend it. But from what I’ve seen so far, it strikes me as a very mixed bag.
I’ve currently been grappling with the views of Laurie Zoloth on human cloning. Zoloth is no ringside commentator, but wields considerable clout as the Director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University. And this is what makes me kind of surprised.
Her position is laid out in ‘Born again: faith and yearning in the cloning controversy’, a chapter in Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research, ed. P. Lauritzen (OUP, 2001). This essay is also available online (in more or less verbatim form) here. The title goes a long way towards articulating her position. Human cloning, she believes, is all about a yearning to avoid death, and thus a narcissistic impulse to produce a copy of oneself.
Now, this is very odd. You can imagine this being the impression of someone outside the mainstream of the debate, particularly someone intuitively opposed to the idea. And there are good reasons to feel unease at the idea of reproductive cloning in humans, even in the face of the cogent arguments that Ronald Green puts forward, in the same book, in its favour. But Green makes it clear that the principal motivation for reproductive cloning is as another variant of assisted conception, alongside conventional IVF. It might be used, for example, in cases where couples wanted to have a genetically related child but either the man or the woman had no gametes at all. One can see the arguments: is it, for example, really any more potentially confusing for a child to know fully about their genetic heritage (and parentage) than to know only half of that equation in the case of anonymous gamete donation? And cloning would also offer female couples who want to conceive a child the same potential advantage over sperm donation. Of course, that opens up another can of worms in some eyes, and all the more so if one considers male homosexual couples using surrogacy for gestation. But I’m not going to argue (here) about whether such reproductive cloning is justified; the point is that the parental wish for a genetically related child, rather than for a ‘copy’ of oneself, is the motive force behind arguments supporting it. Sure, it’s possible to contend that the wish for any genetic relation to a child is itself narcissistic – and this then is a kind of narcissism displayed by the majority of the human race, and universally accepted as a ‘natural’ human desire.
Zoloth also takes on the issue of cloning performed to ‘replace’ a dead child. She movingly describes a situation in which she could appreciate this wish, but in which she could also see that the better response was to confront the anguish of the loss. Notwithstanding the fact that there is no law or intervention that prevents parents from conceiving another child ‘normally’ in response to such a tragedy, I think few would dispute that attempts to ‘replace’ a dead child are never a healthy thing. But both here and in the case of efforts to cheat one’s own mortality through cloning, the simple fact is that such actions are deluded in any event from a scientific point of view. This isn’t, as Zoloth implies, a case of science offering the temptation and bioethicists advising us to resist. Any scientist worthy of the description who knows the first thing about genetics will be the first to point out that genetically identical individuals are not in any meaningful sense ‘the same’. In her comments here, Zoloth tacitly endorses the myth of genetic determinism that scientists are always at pains to dismantle.
It seems extraordinary that a leading bioethicist would labour under these misconceptions. Naturally, if you’re temperamentally opposed to human cloning then it makes strategic sense to pick the worst possible reason for doing it in order to argue the case against. But one might question the ethics of doing so, if done intentionally. If done unintentionally, the issue is then one of competence.
What I’ve noticed in several of the critiques of the new reproductive technologies and of human embryo research is a shameful evasion of plain speaking. Time and again, one can see where the argument is inevitably heading, but the critic will not spell that out, for what one can only assume is fear of saying something unpopular. Instead, they take refuge in woolly, wise-sounding rhetoric that masks the real message. They present their criticisms – and some are, without doubt, well motivated – but decline to explain what their alternative would be. So then, for example, Zoloth says that ‘advanced reproductive technology’ relies on the notion of infertility as a disease, which must then of course be ‘cured’. This is a valid criticism: there are real dangers of setting up a situation in which people consider it their ‘right’ to have any medical treatment that will offer them the chance of conceiving a child – and in the process having their condition pathologized. But to simply say this and leave it at that is to dismiss the plight of infertility all together – to imply that ‘you just have to learn to live with it’, or perhaps, ‘you’ll just have to adopt then’ (from a greatly diminished pool, for both social and medical reasons). Zoloth nowhere acknowledges that infertility has always been seen as a problem – not just today but in the times to which she looks for the ‘wisdom of ages’. How can it possibly be that someone who makes so much of her Jewish heritage seems oblivious to the ‘disgrace’ that Rachel felt when she could bear Jacob no children (until God relented, that is). (Mind you, Zoloth’s theology seems to hold other surprises – for can it really be the case that, as she suggests, Noah is now the object of rabbinical criticism for thinking only of his wife and children and not arguing with God about the injustice of destroying the rest of his community? Sounds like a good point to me, but can it really be the case that Jewish theologists now think one should be prepared to pick arguments with God? Wild.)
So then, the unspoken text of Zoloth’s essay is that infertility is a bad roll of the dice that you have to learn to put up with. At least, I think that’s what it is. She doesn’t put it like that, of course. She puts it like this: we must look for a ‘refinement of imperfection, not the a priori obliteration of imperfection. In this, we could serve to remind [sic] of something else: of the blinding power of human love, which sees and knows, right through the brokenness’. Got that?
If I’m right in my interpretation, this doesn’t seem to offer a great deal of empathy for people who encounter infertility. Oh, but that’s mild – for elsewhere Zoloth says that ‘The hunger of the infertile is ravenous, desperate’. There are more offensive things you can say to infertile people, but not by very much.
Well then, sic indeed – for there are times when you have to wonder quite what has happened to her prose and grammar. I suspected at first if there might be a first-language issue here – if so, all criticisms are retracted – but it doesn’t look that way. Rather, one has to suspect the old post-modernist problem of language becoming a casualty of a reluctance to be truly understood. Sometimes this tension creates an utter car-crash of metaphors. For example, in telling us how parents must reject the desire for a ‘close-as-can-be-replica’ (see above), she says they must ‘earn to have the stranger, not the copy, live by our side as though out of our side’. As though what? What else can ‘out of our side’ evoke if not, after all, a clone? And indeed, the first of all clones, Eve made from Adam’s rib! Why plunge us into that thicket? Does she really mean to? Please, what is going on? (Notice here that ‘copy’ = product of one parent’s genome alone; ‘stranger’ = product of both parents’ genomes. There is some odd asymptotic calculus here, quite aside from the fact that a ‘copy’ of one parent’s genome is surely then far more of a ‘stranger’ to the other parent.)
Then how about this: ‘We need to reflect on the meaning not only of the performance gesture of cloning but also the act of the imagination that surrounds the act in popular culture.’ Now, here’s a statement I do actually endorse; but what a tortured way to put it. Indeed, that is the very aim, in a sense, of the book for which I’m reading all this stuff. And it’s therefore with some gladness of heart that I see Zoloth giving me material to work on. ‘The whole point of ‘making babies’’, she says, ‘is not the production, it is the careful rearing of persons, the promise to have bonds of love that extend far beyond the initial ask and answer of the marketplace.’ How true. And how interesting, then, that for her the hypothetical cloned human (and, to pursue the logic, already the IVF baby) becomes not a person who can be born and reared with love but a mere product of the marketplace. That assumption, that prejudice, is just the thing that interests me.
I’ve currently been grappling with the views of Laurie Zoloth on human cloning. Zoloth is no ringside commentator, but wields considerable clout as the Director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University. And this is what makes me kind of surprised.
Her position is laid out in ‘Born again: faith and yearning in the cloning controversy’, a chapter in Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research, ed. P. Lauritzen (OUP, 2001). This essay is also available online (in more or less verbatim form) here. The title goes a long way towards articulating her position. Human cloning, she believes, is all about a yearning to avoid death, and thus a narcissistic impulse to produce a copy of oneself.
Now, this is very odd. You can imagine this being the impression of someone outside the mainstream of the debate, particularly someone intuitively opposed to the idea. And there are good reasons to feel unease at the idea of reproductive cloning in humans, even in the face of the cogent arguments that Ronald Green puts forward, in the same book, in its favour. But Green makes it clear that the principal motivation for reproductive cloning is as another variant of assisted conception, alongside conventional IVF. It might be used, for example, in cases where couples wanted to have a genetically related child but either the man or the woman had no gametes at all. One can see the arguments: is it, for example, really any more potentially confusing for a child to know fully about their genetic heritage (and parentage) than to know only half of that equation in the case of anonymous gamete donation? And cloning would also offer female couples who want to conceive a child the same potential advantage over sperm donation. Of course, that opens up another can of worms in some eyes, and all the more so if one considers male homosexual couples using surrogacy for gestation. But I’m not going to argue (here) about whether such reproductive cloning is justified; the point is that the parental wish for a genetically related child, rather than for a ‘copy’ of oneself, is the motive force behind arguments supporting it. Sure, it’s possible to contend that the wish for any genetic relation to a child is itself narcissistic – and this then is a kind of narcissism displayed by the majority of the human race, and universally accepted as a ‘natural’ human desire.
Zoloth also takes on the issue of cloning performed to ‘replace’ a dead child. She movingly describes a situation in which she could appreciate this wish, but in which she could also see that the better response was to confront the anguish of the loss. Notwithstanding the fact that there is no law or intervention that prevents parents from conceiving another child ‘normally’ in response to such a tragedy, I think few would dispute that attempts to ‘replace’ a dead child are never a healthy thing. But both here and in the case of efforts to cheat one’s own mortality through cloning, the simple fact is that such actions are deluded in any event from a scientific point of view. This isn’t, as Zoloth implies, a case of science offering the temptation and bioethicists advising us to resist. Any scientist worthy of the description who knows the first thing about genetics will be the first to point out that genetically identical individuals are not in any meaningful sense ‘the same’. In her comments here, Zoloth tacitly endorses the myth of genetic determinism that scientists are always at pains to dismantle.
It seems extraordinary that a leading bioethicist would labour under these misconceptions. Naturally, if you’re temperamentally opposed to human cloning then it makes strategic sense to pick the worst possible reason for doing it in order to argue the case against. But one might question the ethics of doing so, if done intentionally. If done unintentionally, the issue is then one of competence.
What I’ve noticed in several of the critiques of the new reproductive technologies and of human embryo research is a shameful evasion of plain speaking. Time and again, one can see where the argument is inevitably heading, but the critic will not spell that out, for what one can only assume is fear of saying something unpopular. Instead, they take refuge in woolly, wise-sounding rhetoric that masks the real message. They present their criticisms – and some are, without doubt, well motivated – but decline to explain what their alternative would be. So then, for example, Zoloth says that ‘advanced reproductive technology’ relies on the notion of infertility as a disease, which must then of course be ‘cured’. This is a valid criticism: there are real dangers of setting up a situation in which people consider it their ‘right’ to have any medical treatment that will offer them the chance of conceiving a child – and in the process having their condition pathologized. But to simply say this and leave it at that is to dismiss the plight of infertility all together – to imply that ‘you just have to learn to live with it’, or perhaps, ‘you’ll just have to adopt then’ (from a greatly diminished pool, for both social and medical reasons). Zoloth nowhere acknowledges that infertility has always been seen as a problem – not just today but in the times to which she looks for the ‘wisdom of ages’. How can it possibly be that someone who makes so much of her Jewish heritage seems oblivious to the ‘disgrace’ that Rachel felt when she could bear Jacob no children (until God relented, that is). (Mind you, Zoloth’s theology seems to hold other surprises – for can it really be the case that, as she suggests, Noah is now the object of rabbinical criticism for thinking only of his wife and children and not arguing with God about the injustice of destroying the rest of his community? Sounds like a good point to me, but can it really be the case that Jewish theologists now think one should be prepared to pick arguments with God? Wild.)
So then, the unspoken text of Zoloth’s essay is that infertility is a bad roll of the dice that you have to learn to put up with. At least, I think that’s what it is. She doesn’t put it like that, of course. She puts it like this: we must look for a ‘refinement of imperfection, not the a priori obliteration of imperfection. In this, we could serve to remind [sic] of something else: of the blinding power of human love, which sees and knows, right through the brokenness’. Got that?
If I’m right in my interpretation, this doesn’t seem to offer a great deal of empathy for people who encounter infertility. Oh, but that’s mild – for elsewhere Zoloth says that ‘The hunger of the infertile is ravenous, desperate’. There are more offensive things you can say to infertile people, but not by very much.
Well then, sic indeed – for there are times when you have to wonder quite what has happened to her prose and grammar. I suspected at first if there might be a first-language issue here – if so, all criticisms are retracted – but it doesn’t look that way. Rather, one has to suspect the old post-modernist problem of language becoming a casualty of a reluctance to be truly understood. Sometimes this tension creates an utter car-crash of metaphors. For example, in telling us how parents must reject the desire for a ‘close-as-can-be-replica’ (see above), she says they must ‘earn to have the stranger, not the copy, live by our side as though out of our side’. As though what? What else can ‘out of our side’ evoke if not, after all, a clone? And indeed, the first of all clones, Eve made from Adam’s rib! Why plunge us into that thicket? Does she really mean to? Please, what is going on? (Notice here that ‘copy’ = product of one parent’s genome alone; ‘stranger’ = product of both parents’ genomes. There is some odd asymptotic calculus here, quite aside from the fact that a ‘copy’ of one parent’s genome is surely then far more of a ‘stranger’ to the other parent.)
Then how about this: ‘We need to reflect on the meaning not only of the performance gesture of cloning but also the act of the imagination that surrounds the act in popular culture.’ Now, here’s a statement I do actually endorse; but what a tortured way to put it. Indeed, that is the very aim, in a sense, of the book for which I’m reading all this stuff. And it’s therefore with some gladness of heart that I see Zoloth giving me material to work on. ‘The whole point of ‘making babies’’, she says, ‘is not the production, it is the careful rearing of persons, the promise to have bonds of love that extend far beyond the initial ask and answer of the marketplace.’ How true. And how interesting, then, that for her the hypothetical cloned human (and, to pursue the logic, already the IVF baby) becomes not a person who can be born and reared with love but a mere product of the marketplace. That assumption, that prejudice, is just the thing that interests me.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Google Books suits me fine
It seems that Google Books is one of the talking points of the Frankfurt book fair this year. Angela Merkel has waded into the fray to condemn the enterprise, citing its (potential) violation of copyright. As an author, I ought to be right behind such denouncement of this fiendish ploy to make our words freely available to all.
Maybe I’m naïve, but so far I think that Google Books is a rather wonderful thing. For a start, I’m not aware that there is any way to actually download and print the stuff – and who on earth is going to want to read it in this format online? And it seems that none of the books is provided in its entirety – there are pages missing, which would be infuriating if you do plan to read the lot. But more to the point, so far Google Books has encouraged me to actually buy some books that I’d not have bought otherwise: in the course of my research, I can find titles that I’d never known existed, get a good idea of their contents and make the decision about purchase via the online secondhand sellers. My only other option, if I’d discovered the books at all, would have been to make a trip into the British Library, by which point I’d have probably ended up reading them there rather than bothering to buy them. (Besides, if a book is truly relevant and interesting, I want to own it – and thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s generally possible to do that for little more than the [inflated] cost of postage. Hopefully bookshops are benefiting from this too.)
And in the course of completing the endnotes section for my latest book, I’ve found Google Books a godsend. Inevitably there are quotes in my text that either I’ve not annotated correctly in my notes or for which I’ve never quite tracked down the original citation in the first place. With a text search in Google Books, I can locate them instantly in the books I have at home, rather than having to flick endlessly through the pages trying to find where the damned things were. Or I can, say, go straight to the original old texts by the likes of Walter Pater and discover the quote in its original context rather than at several removes. None of this does anything to deprive writers of sales, and indeed many of the relevant books are (at least in my case) old and out of copyright (and print), the authors long dead. As a result, I completed the endnotes in a couple of days, when they dragged on forever with my previous book. It was a telling indication of the way the technology has advanced, for the better, in just a couple of years. Personally, I’m looking forward to the Library of Babel that is Google Books expanding indefinitely.
Maybe I’m naïve, but so far I think that Google Books is a rather wonderful thing. For a start, I’m not aware that there is any way to actually download and print the stuff – and who on earth is going to want to read it in this format online? And it seems that none of the books is provided in its entirety – there are pages missing, which would be infuriating if you do plan to read the lot. But more to the point, so far Google Books has encouraged me to actually buy some books that I’d not have bought otherwise: in the course of my research, I can find titles that I’d never known existed, get a good idea of their contents and make the decision about purchase via the online secondhand sellers. My only other option, if I’d discovered the books at all, would have been to make a trip into the British Library, by which point I’d have probably ended up reading them there rather than bothering to buy them. (Besides, if a book is truly relevant and interesting, I want to own it – and thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s generally possible to do that for little more than the [inflated] cost of postage. Hopefully bookshops are benefiting from this too.)
And in the course of completing the endnotes section for my latest book, I’ve found Google Books a godsend. Inevitably there are quotes in my text that either I’ve not annotated correctly in my notes or for which I’ve never quite tracked down the original citation in the first place. With a text search in Google Books, I can locate them instantly in the books I have at home, rather than having to flick endlessly through the pages trying to find where the damned things were. Or I can, say, go straight to the original old texts by the likes of Walter Pater and discover the quote in its original context rather than at several removes. None of this does anything to deprive writers of sales, and indeed many of the relevant books are (at least in my case) old and out of copyright (and print), the authors long dead. As a result, I completed the endnotes in a couple of days, when they dragged on forever with my previous book. It was a telling indication of the way the technology has advanced, for the better, in just a couple of years. Personally, I’m looking forward to the Library of Babel that is Google Books expanding indefinitely.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Shaking hands with robots
[This is my forthcoming Material Witness column for Nature Materials, which seemed sufficiently low-tech to warrant inclusion here.]
Should robots pretend to be human? The plots of many science fiction novels and movies – most famously, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner – hinge on the consequences of that deception. Blade Runner opens with a ‘replicant’ undergoing the ‘Voight-Kampff’ test, in which physiological functions betray human-like emotional responses to a series of questions. This is a version of the test proposed by Alan Turing in a seminal 1950 paper pondering the question of whether machines can think [1].
But human-like thought (or its appearances) is only one aspect of the issue of robotic deception. There would be no need to test Blade Runner’s replicants if they had been made of gleaming chrome, or exhibited the jerky motions of a puppet or the stilted diction of an old-fashioned voice synthesizer. To seem truly human, a robot has to perform accurate mimesis on many (perhaps too many) fronts [2].
Today we might insist on a conceptual distinction between such mimicry and the real thing. But this was precisely what Turing set out to challenge in the realm of mind: if you can’t make the distinction empirically, in what sense can you say it exists? And in former times, that applied also to the other characteristics of humanoid machines. In the Cartesian world of the eighteenth century, when many considered humans to be merely elaborate mechanisms, it was not clear that the intricate automata which entertained salon society by writing and playing music and games were rigidly demarcated from humanity. Descartes himself refuted any such boundary, implying that automata were in a limited sense alive. In his Discourse on Method (1637) he even proposed a primitive version of the Turing test, based on the ability to use language and adapt behaviour to circumstance.
One of the most famous automata of that age was a mechanical flute player made by the virtuoso French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson, who unveiled it to wide acclaim in 1738. Not only did it sound right but its breathing mimicked human mechanics, and its right arm was upholstered with real skin [3]. This feat is brought to mind by a preprint by John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and colleagues, in which the mechanical properties of candidate ‘robot skin’ polymers (silicone and poyurethane) are tested for their likeness to human skin [4]. Can we make a robot hand feel human, the researchers ask? Not yet, at least with these materials, they conclude – in the process showing what a delicate task that is (a part of the feel of human skin, for example, comes from its hysteretic response to touch).
Underlying the research is the notion that people will be socially more at ease interacting with robots that seem ‘believable’ – we will feel queasy shaking hands if the touch is wrong. That’s supported by experience [5], but also in itself raises challenging questions about the proper limits of such illusion [6]. Arguably there are times when we should maintain an evident boundary between robot and person.
References
1. Turing, A. Mind 59, 433-460 (1950).
2. Negrotti, M. Naturoids (World Scientific, Singapore, 2002).
3. Stafford, B. M. Artful Science p.191-195 (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1994).
4. Cabibihan, J.-J., Pattofatto, S., Jomâa, M., Benallal, A. & Carrozza, M. C. Preprint http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0909.3559 (2009).
5. Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I. & Dautenhahn, K. Robotics Autonomous Syst. 42, 143-166 (2003).
6. Sharkey, N. Science 322, 1800-1801 (2008).
Should robots pretend to be human? The plots of many science fiction novels and movies – most famously, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner – hinge on the consequences of that deception. Blade Runner opens with a ‘replicant’ undergoing the ‘Voight-Kampff’ test, in which physiological functions betray human-like emotional responses to a series of questions. This is a version of the test proposed by Alan Turing in a seminal 1950 paper pondering the question of whether machines can think [1].
But human-like thought (or its appearances) is only one aspect of the issue of robotic deception. There would be no need to test Blade Runner’s replicants if they had been made of gleaming chrome, or exhibited the jerky motions of a puppet or the stilted diction of an old-fashioned voice synthesizer. To seem truly human, a robot has to perform accurate mimesis on many (perhaps too many) fronts [2].
Today we might insist on a conceptual distinction between such mimicry and the real thing. But this was precisely what Turing set out to challenge in the realm of mind: if you can’t make the distinction empirically, in what sense can you say it exists? And in former times, that applied also to the other characteristics of humanoid machines. In the Cartesian world of the eighteenth century, when many considered humans to be merely elaborate mechanisms, it was not clear that the intricate automata which entertained salon society by writing and playing music and games were rigidly demarcated from humanity. Descartes himself refuted any such boundary, implying that automata were in a limited sense alive. In his Discourse on Method (1637) he even proposed a primitive version of the Turing test, based on the ability to use language and adapt behaviour to circumstance.
One of the most famous automata of that age was a mechanical flute player made by the virtuoso French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson, who unveiled it to wide acclaim in 1738. Not only did it sound right but its breathing mimicked human mechanics, and its right arm was upholstered with real skin [3]. This feat is brought to mind by a preprint by John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and colleagues, in which the mechanical properties of candidate ‘robot skin’ polymers (silicone and poyurethane) are tested for their likeness to human skin [4]. Can we make a robot hand feel human, the researchers ask? Not yet, at least with these materials, they conclude – in the process showing what a delicate task that is (a part of the feel of human skin, for example, comes from its hysteretic response to touch).
Underlying the research is the notion that people will be socially more at ease interacting with robots that seem ‘believable’ – we will feel queasy shaking hands if the touch is wrong. That’s supported by experience [5], but also in itself raises challenging questions about the proper limits of such illusion [6]. Arguably there are times when we should maintain an evident boundary between robot and person.
References
1. Turing, A. Mind 59, 433-460 (1950).
2. Negrotti, M. Naturoids (World Scientific, Singapore, 2002).
3. Stafford, B. M. Artful Science p.191-195 (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1994).
4. Cabibihan, J.-J., Pattofatto, S., Jomâa, M., Benallal, A. & Carrozza, M. C. Preprint http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0909.3559 (2009).
5. Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I. & Dautenhahn, K. Robotics Autonomous Syst. 42, 143-166 (2003).
6. Sharkey, N. Science 322, 1800-1801 (2008).
Monday, October 05, 2009
What toys can tell us
[My latest Muse for Nature news…]
Sometimes all you need to do scientific research is string, sealing wax and a bit of imagination.
When Agnes Gardner King went visiting her uncle William one November day in 1887, she found him playing. He was, she wrote, ‘armed with a vessel of soap and glycerine prepared for blowing soap bubbles, and a tray with a number of mathematical figures made of wire.’ He’d dip these into the tray and see what shapes the soap films made as they adhered to the wire. ‘With some scientific end in view he is studying these films’, wrote Agnes [1].
Her uncle was William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian age. His ‘scientific end’ was to deduce the rules that govern soap-film intersections, so that he might figure out how to divide up three-dimensional space into cells of equal size and shape with the minimal wall area. It was the kind of problem that attracted Kelvin: simple to state, relevant to the world about him, and amenable to experiment using little more than ‘toys’.
This kind of study is brought to mind by a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by George Whitesides and colleagues at Harvard University. In an effort to understand how polymer molecules fold and flex, they have built strings of beads and shaken them in a tray [2]. There are three types of bead: large spherical or cylindrical beads of Teflon and nylon, and small ‘spacer’ beads of poly(methyl methacrylate).
They are designed to mimic real polymers in which different monomer groups interact via forces of attraction and repulsion. When agitated on a flat surface to mimic thermal molecular motion, the Teflon and nylon beads develop negative and positive electrostatic charges respectively, and so like beads repel while unlike beads attract.
This simple ‘beads-on-a-string’ model of polymers replicates, in toy form, a mathematical description of polymers used to understand their conformational behaviour [3], such as the way the polypeptide chains of proteins fold into their compact, catalytically active ‘native’ structure. With some modification – using cylindrical beads of various lengths, so that optimal pairing of oppositely charged beads happens when they have the same length – the model can be used to look at how RNA molecules fold up using the principles of complementary base-pairing between the bases that form the ‘sticky’ monomers.
The beauty of it is that the experiments are literally child’s play (the interpretation requires a little more sophistication). Even the simplest formulations of the mathematical theory are tricky to solve – but the beads, say Whitesides and colleagues, act as an ‘analog computer’ that generates solutions, allowing them rapidly to develop and test hypotheses about how folding depends on the monomer sequence.
Whitesides has used this philosophy before, making macroscopic objects with faces coated with thin films that confer different types of mutual interaction so as to explore processes of molecular-scale self-assembly driven by selective intermolecular forces [4]. This sort of collective behaviour of many interacting parts can give rise to complex, often unexpected structures and dynamics, and is difficult to describe with rigorous mathematical theories.
It’s really a reflection of the way chemists have thought about atoms and molecules ever since John Dalton used wooden balls to represent them around 1810: as hard little entities with a characteristic size and shape. Chemists still routinely use plastic models to intuit how molecules fit together. And these investigations have long gone beyond the pedagogical to become truly experimental. The great crystallographer Desmond Bernal studied the disorderly packing of atoms in liquids using ball-bearings, and, with chalk-dusted balls of Plasticene squeezed inside a football bladder, repeated the 1727 experiment by Stephen Hales on packing of polyhedral cells that was itself a precursor to Kelvin’s investigations. (Bernal called them, apologetically, ‘rather childish experiments’ [5]).
In more recent years, model systems of beads and grains have been used as analogues of the most unlikely and complex of phenomena, from earthquakes and exotic electronic behaviour [6] to the phyllotactic growth of flower-heads [7]. Aside from the obvious issue of how closely these ‘toys’ mimic the theory (let alone how well the theory mimics reality), these approaches stand at risk of offering phenomenology without true insight: with an ‘analytical’ solution to the equations, it can be easier to discern the key physics at play. But when applied judiciously, they show that creativity and imagination can trump mathematical prowess or number-crunching muscle. And they also help underline the universality of physical theory, in which, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘The sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies.’ [8]
References
1. King, A. G. Kelvin the Man p.192 (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1925).
2. Reches, M., Snyder, P. W. & Whitesides, G. M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA advance online publication 10.1073/pnas.0905533106 (2009).
3. Lifshitz, I. M., Grosberg, A. Y. & Khokhlov, A. R. Rev. Mod. Phys. 50, 683-713 (1978).
4. Bowden, N., Terfort, A., Carbeck, J. & Whitesides, G. M. Science 276, 233-235 (1997).
5. Bernal, J. D. Proc. R. Inst. Great Britain 37, 355-393 (1959).
6. Bak, P. How Nature Works (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).
7. Douady, S. & Couder, Y. Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 2098-2101 (1992).
8. Emerson, R. W. The Conduct of Life, p.202 (J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1908).
Sometimes all you need to do scientific research is string, sealing wax and a bit of imagination.
When Agnes Gardner King went visiting her uncle William one November day in 1887, she found him playing. He was, she wrote, ‘armed with a vessel of soap and glycerine prepared for blowing soap bubbles, and a tray with a number of mathematical figures made of wire.’ He’d dip these into the tray and see what shapes the soap films made as they adhered to the wire. ‘With some scientific end in view he is studying these films’, wrote Agnes [1].
Her uncle was William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian age. His ‘scientific end’ was to deduce the rules that govern soap-film intersections, so that he might figure out how to divide up three-dimensional space into cells of equal size and shape with the minimal wall area. It was the kind of problem that attracted Kelvin: simple to state, relevant to the world about him, and amenable to experiment using little more than ‘toys’.
This kind of study is brought to mind by a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by George Whitesides and colleagues at Harvard University. In an effort to understand how polymer molecules fold and flex, they have built strings of beads and shaken them in a tray [2]. There are three types of bead: large spherical or cylindrical beads of Teflon and nylon, and small ‘spacer’ beads of poly(methyl methacrylate).
They are designed to mimic real polymers in which different monomer groups interact via forces of attraction and repulsion. When agitated on a flat surface to mimic thermal molecular motion, the Teflon and nylon beads develop negative and positive electrostatic charges respectively, and so like beads repel while unlike beads attract.
This simple ‘beads-on-a-string’ model of polymers replicates, in toy form, a mathematical description of polymers used to understand their conformational behaviour [3], such as the way the polypeptide chains of proteins fold into their compact, catalytically active ‘native’ structure. With some modification – using cylindrical beads of various lengths, so that optimal pairing of oppositely charged beads happens when they have the same length – the model can be used to look at how RNA molecules fold up using the principles of complementary base-pairing between the bases that form the ‘sticky’ monomers.
The beauty of it is that the experiments are literally child’s play (the interpretation requires a little more sophistication). Even the simplest formulations of the mathematical theory are tricky to solve – but the beads, say Whitesides and colleagues, act as an ‘analog computer’ that generates solutions, allowing them rapidly to develop and test hypotheses about how folding depends on the monomer sequence.
Whitesides has used this philosophy before, making macroscopic objects with faces coated with thin films that confer different types of mutual interaction so as to explore processes of molecular-scale self-assembly driven by selective intermolecular forces [4]. This sort of collective behaviour of many interacting parts can give rise to complex, often unexpected structures and dynamics, and is difficult to describe with rigorous mathematical theories.
It’s really a reflection of the way chemists have thought about atoms and molecules ever since John Dalton used wooden balls to represent them around 1810: as hard little entities with a characteristic size and shape. Chemists still routinely use plastic models to intuit how molecules fit together. And these investigations have long gone beyond the pedagogical to become truly experimental. The great crystallographer Desmond Bernal studied the disorderly packing of atoms in liquids using ball-bearings, and, with chalk-dusted balls of Plasticene squeezed inside a football bladder, repeated the 1727 experiment by Stephen Hales on packing of polyhedral cells that was itself a precursor to Kelvin’s investigations. (Bernal called them, apologetically, ‘rather childish experiments’ [5]).
In more recent years, model systems of beads and grains have been used as analogues of the most unlikely and complex of phenomena, from earthquakes and exotic electronic behaviour [6] to the phyllotactic growth of flower-heads [7]. Aside from the obvious issue of how closely these ‘toys’ mimic the theory (let alone how well the theory mimics reality), these approaches stand at risk of offering phenomenology without true insight: with an ‘analytical’ solution to the equations, it can be easier to discern the key physics at play. But when applied judiciously, they show that creativity and imagination can trump mathematical prowess or number-crunching muscle. And they also help underline the universality of physical theory, in which, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘The sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies.’ [8]
References
1. King, A. G. Kelvin the Man p.192 (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1925).
2. Reches, M., Snyder, P. W. & Whitesides, G. M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA advance online publication 10.1073/pnas.0905533106 (2009).
3. Lifshitz, I. M., Grosberg, A. Y. & Khokhlov, A. R. Rev. Mod. Phys. 50, 683-713 (1978).
4. Bowden, N., Terfort, A., Carbeck, J. & Whitesides, G. M. Science 276, 233-235 (1997).
5. Bernal, J. D. Proc. R. Inst. Great Britain 37, 355-393 (1959).
6. Bak, P. How Nature Works (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).
7. Douady, S. & Couder, Y. Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 2098-2101 (1992).
8. Emerson, R. W. The Conduct of Life, p.202 (J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1908).
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
In Praise of Erasmus
I’m aware that I risk derision and worse by saying, with attempted insouciance, that I have just been reading Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, but never mind that; he has rather wonderful things to say about ‘those who court immortal fame by writing books’:
“But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius [the learned] or Laelius [the not-so-learned] pass judgement don’t seem to me favoured by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years, and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill will, denial of pleasure, premature old age, and early death, and any other such disasters there many be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or other purblind scholar.”
I get a little comfort from knowing that the literary world was as crabby and self-obsessed five hundred years ago. But even then they had their Dan Browns:
“The writer who belongs to me [Folly] is far happier in his crazy fashion. He never loses sleep as he sets down at once whatever takes his fancy and comes from his pen, even his dreams, and it costs him little beyond the price of the paper. He knows well enough that the more trivial the trifles he writes about the wider the audience which will appreciate them, made up as it is of all the ignoramuses and fools. What does it matter if three scholars can be found to damn his efforts, always supposing they’ve read them? How can the estimation of a mere handful of savants prevail against such a crowd of admirers?”
“But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius [the learned] or Laelius [the not-so-learned] pass judgement don’t seem to me favoured by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years, and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill will, denial of pleasure, premature old age, and early death, and any other such disasters there many be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or other purblind scholar.”
I get a little comfort from knowing that the literary world was as crabby and self-obsessed five hundred years ago. But even then they had their Dan Browns:
“The writer who belongs to me [Folly] is far happier in his crazy fashion. He never loses sleep as he sets down at once whatever takes his fancy and comes from his pen, even his dreams, and it costs him little beyond the price of the paper. He knows well enough that the more trivial the trifles he writes about the wider the audience which will appreciate them, made up as it is of all the ignoramuses and fools. What does it matter if three scholars can be found to damn his efforts, always supposing they’ve read them? How can the estimation of a mere handful of savants prevail against such a crowd of admirers?”
Punishment is different in China
[This is my latest Muse article for Nature News. I have the feeling that I’ve encountered guanxi several times in a personal context, and it certainly is hard for a Westerner to figure out what is really going on.]
Doing business abroad is not like doing it at home. A tough, no-nonsense approach will get results in New York but may be seen as rude and aggressive in Tokyo, where business negotiations are a mixture of ceremony and courtship designed to avoid direct confrontation. In Japan, an apparent ‘yes’ can mean ‘no’, and there are sixteen ways of avoiding having to say ‘no’ directly [1]. So negotiations there are long-winded, ambiguous and, to outsiders, plain baffling.
Traditional economics makes no concessions to such cultural differences. Its models tend to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ view of human interactions, in which choices and strategies are based on the cold logic of ‘utility maximization’: whatever gets you the best deal. But behavioural economics, which sets out to investigate how real people conduct their decision-making, is undermining that picture. Now a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA reports that Chinese people respond quite differently to Americans in transactions that contain the threat of punishment for uncooperative behaviour [2].
Yi Tao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology in Beijing and his coworkers have looked at how Chinese university students play a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is the classic model system in game theory for studying two-person interactions that include a temptation to cheat. The game awards points according to whether the two players decide to cooperate or ‘defect’. Two defections – the players both try to cheat each other – elicit a low payoff, while both players are better rewarded if they cooperate. However, if player 1 cooperates while player 2 defects, then player 1 is the sucker, getting the worst possible payoff, while player 2 does best of all.
The ‘logical’ way to play this game is always to defect, because that gives you the best payoff whatever your opponent does. Yet if the game is played repeatedly, players realise that they can both score more highly if they agree (tacitly) to cooperate. Thus cooperation can arise from self-interest.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) – which was devised during the Cold War in a US think tank but was anticipated in the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – has been used to show how altruism can develop in animal communities and human society. This kind of game theory is also central to economic analysis of competitive markets.
It’s generally necessary for PD players to encounter one another repeatedly before the long-term benefits of mutual cooperation become apparent. That’s why, the theory suggests, we cultivate good relations with our neighbours and local shops. But in 2002, behavioural economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter in Switzerland showed that cooperation may also emerge without repeated encounters if there are opportunities to punish defectors [3]. In those experiments, groups of players were given a sum of money to invest in a project, and the group was jointly rewarded according to the level of investment. Freeloaders can enjoy the group reward without investing. But if such selfish behaviour can be punished with fines, it is suppressed. Punishment is typically used insistently: players will do so even at a cost to themselves.
Gächter and his coworkers have investigated whether attitudes to punishment in this ‘public goods’ game differ across cultures [4]. They compared the amount of expenditure on punishment for players in 15 different countries, including the US, China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They found that the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment, and cooperation overall, was strongest in democratic countries with a long tradition of market economies.
The behaviours in this case were similar in the US and China. But Tao and his coworkers show this doesn’t mean American and Chinese people regard or employ punishment in the same way. The participants in their study played the straightforward iterated PD, but with the added provision that each player could opt to punish rather than to cooperate or defect. Punishment deducts several points from the other player, but also costs the punisher. Ill-gotten gains from defection can be cancelled by being punished in the next round.
This might be expected to promote cooperation – and when other researchers tested the game on US students last year, that’s what they found [5]. But in China, punishment made virtually no difference to the amount of cooperation: it was, if anything, slightly lower than in control games without that option.
Tao’s team says this probably reflects the fact that, in China, individuals conduct transactions by cultivating so-called guanxi (literally ‘closed system’) networks of two-person relationships based on empathy and mutual understanding. That might sound chummy, but in fact guanxi is a delicate dance in which feelings of friendship, obligation and guilt are patiently probed and manipulated to reach the desired goal. Since the rules of the PD-with-punishment allow for nothing of this sort, there’s nothing to link cooperation to punishment.
All the same, reputations are important to guanxi networks, so in the public-goods game [4] where reputation (for reciprocity, say) may come into play, punishment is restored as an operative force – making the US and Chinese behaviours more similar, although for different reasons.
One implication is that it’s dangerous to extrapolate from lab tests of behavioural economics to evolutionary questions – for example, to ‘explain’ the adaptive role of punishment in human society. Economic behaviour too can evidently depend on the ‘culture’ in which it happens. For example, economists are divided on the issue of how incentives affect productivity, because real-world experience sometimes seems at odds with what behavioural tests imply. But that’s no longer surprising if behaviour varies according to the system of norms within which it is enacted. It’s a reminder that a search for economic and behavioural ‘first principles’ may be doomed to fail.
References
1. D. W. Hendon, R. A. Hendon & P. Herbig, Cross-Cultural Business Negotiations (Quorum, Westport CT, 1996).
2. Wu, J.-J. et al., Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 10.1073/pnas.0905918106 (2009).
3. Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Nature 415, 137-140 (2002).
4. Herrmann, B., Thöni, C. & Gächter, S. Science 319, 1362-1367 (2008).
5. Dreber, A., Rand, D. G., Fudenberg, D. & Nowak, M. A. Nature 452, 348-351 (2008).
Doing business abroad is not like doing it at home. A tough, no-nonsense approach will get results in New York but may be seen as rude and aggressive in Tokyo, where business negotiations are a mixture of ceremony and courtship designed to avoid direct confrontation. In Japan, an apparent ‘yes’ can mean ‘no’, and there are sixteen ways of avoiding having to say ‘no’ directly [1]. So negotiations there are long-winded, ambiguous and, to outsiders, plain baffling.
Traditional economics makes no concessions to such cultural differences. Its models tend to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ view of human interactions, in which choices and strategies are based on the cold logic of ‘utility maximization’: whatever gets you the best deal. But behavioural economics, which sets out to investigate how real people conduct their decision-making, is undermining that picture. Now a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA reports that Chinese people respond quite differently to Americans in transactions that contain the threat of punishment for uncooperative behaviour [2].
Yi Tao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology in Beijing and his coworkers have looked at how Chinese university students play a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is the classic model system in game theory for studying two-person interactions that include a temptation to cheat. The game awards points according to whether the two players decide to cooperate or ‘defect’. Two defections – the players both try to cheat each other – elicit a low payoff, while both players are better rewarded if they cooperate. However, if player 1 cooperates while player 2 defects, then player 1 is the sucker, getting the worst possible payoff, while player 2 does best of all.
The ‘logical’ way to play this game is always to defect, because that gives you the best payoff whatever your opponent does. Yet if the game is played repeatedly, players realise that they can both score more highly if they agree (tacitly) to cooperate. Thus cooperation can arise from self-interest.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) – which was devised during the Cold War in a US think tank but was anticipated in the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – has been used to show how altruism can develop in animal communities and human society. This kind of game theory is also central to economic analysis of competitive markets.
It’s generally necessary for PD players to encounter one another repeatedly before the long-term benefits of mutual cooperation become apparent. That’s why, the theory suggests, we cultivate good relations with our neighbours and local shops. But in 2002, behavioural economists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter in Switzerland showed that cooperation may also emerge without repeated encounters if there are opportunities to punish defectors [3]. In those experiments, groups of players were given a sum of money to invest in a project, and the group was jointly rewarded according to the level of investment. Freeloaders can enjoy the group reward without investing. But if such selfish behaviour can be punished with fines, it is suppressed. Punishment is typically used insistently: players will do so even at a cost to themselves.
Gächter and his coworkers have investigated whether attitudes to punishment in this ‘public goods’ game differ across cultures [4]. They compared the amount of expenditure on punishment for players in 15 different countries, including the US, China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They found that the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment, and cooperation overall, was strongest in democratic countries with a long tradition of market economies.
The behaviours in this case were similar in the US and China. But Tao and his coworkers show this doesn’t mean American and Chinese people regard or employ punishment in the same way. The participants in their study played the straightforward iterated PD, but with the added provision that each player could opt to punish rather than to cooperate or defect. Punishment deducts several points from the other player, but also costs the punisher. Ill-gotten gains from defection can be cancelled by being punished in the next round.
This might be expected to promote cooperation – and when other researchers tested the game on US students last year, that’s what they found [5]. But in China, punishment made virtually no difference to the amount of cooperation: it was, if anything, slightly lower than in control games without that option.
Tao’s team says this probably reflects the fact that, in China, individuals conduct transactions by cultivating so-called guanxi (literally ‘closed system’) networks of two-person relationships based on empathy and mutual understanding. That might sound chummy, but in fact guanxi is a delicate dance in which feelings of friendship, obligation and guilt are patiently probed and manipulated to reach the desired goal. Since the rules of the PD-with-punishment allow for nothing of this sort, there’s nothing to link cooperation to punishment.
All the same, reputations are important to guanxi networks, so in the public-goods game [4] where reputation (for reciprocity, say) may come into play, punishment is restored as an operative force – making the US and Chinese behaviours more similar, although for different reasons.
One implication is that it’s dangerous to extrapolate from lab tests of behavioural economics to evolutionary questions – for example, to ‘explain’ the adaptive role of punishment in human society. Economic behaviour too can evidently depend on the ‘culture’ in which it happens. For example, economists are divided on the issue of how incentives affect productivity, because real-world experience sometimes seems at odds with what behavioural tests imply. But that’s no longer surprising if behaviour varies according to the system of norms within which it is enacted. It’s a reminder that a search for economic and behavioural ‘first principles’ may be doomed to fail.
References
1. D. W. Hendon, R. A. Hendon & P. Herbig, Cross-Cultural Business Negotiations (Quorum, Westport CT, 1996).
2. Wu, J.-J. et al., Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 10.1073/pnas.0905918106 (2009).
3. Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Nature 415, 137-140 (2002).
4. Herrmann, B., Thöni, C. & Gächter, S. Science 319, 1362-1367 (2008).
5. Dreber, A., Rand, D. G., Fudenberg, D. & Nowak, M. A. Nature 452, 348-351 (2008).
Friday, September 25, 2009
Darwin on screen
For a limited time only, I can be heard on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves talking about the new Darwin biopic Creation. The film is worth watching, but don’t expect any revelations. New Scientist got a bit hot under the collar about the use of ‘supernatural’ imagery – Darwin’s dead daughter Annie, it says, returns as a ghost. Well, not really: there’s never any doubt that this is Darwin’s mind talking to itself. It’s fanciful, perhaps even sentimental in the end, but hardly an affront to reason. It’s a fairer complaint, though, that this ‘makes for a cartoon account of the writing of On the Origin of Species’, especially given that the book was published 8 years after Annie died.
For a limited time only, I can be heard on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves talking about the new Darwin biopic Creation. The film is worth watching, but don’t expect any revelations. New Scientist got a bit hot under the collar about the use of ‘supernatural’ imagery – Darwin’s dead daughter Annie, it says, returns as a ghost. Well, not really: there’s never any doubt that this is Darwin’s mind talking to itself. It’s fanciful, perhaps even sentimental in the end, but hardly an affront to reason. It’s a fairer complaint, though, that this ‘makes for a cartoon account of the writing of On the Origin of Species’, especially given that the book was published 8 years after Annie died.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Truly wonderful
It’s official, then: the Royal Society Science Book Prize goes to The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. The decision was announced yesterday, and the Guardian is apparently going to put online a podcast of the press conference at which my fellow judges and some of the shortlisted authors discussed science books and science writing in general. I almost felt sorry for the other candidates being up against a book as good as Richard’s: it was a wonderful shortlist, but The Age of Wonder left us all awestruck in its erudition, imagination and – despite what you might imagine from the subject and the size of the book – its readability. It is a glorious read, with something to enjoy on every page (and don’t skip the footnotes!). I was slightly nervous that the other judges might deem it too ‘historical’ to count as a science book, but happily they had no such qualms. The book looks at several strands of science that emerged in the early nineteenth century, all of which allied themselves with the Romantic spirit of wonder, awe and the sublime: for example, the geographical journeys of discovery by Joseph Banks, Mungo Park and others, William Herschel’s telescopic observations, Humphrey Davy’s chemical inventiveness, and the origins of hot-air ballooning. One of the very special attributes of this book is that it makes science sound breathtakingly exciting – not only then, but still.
Both Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and Jo Marchant’s Decoding the Heavens have received well deserved praise elsewhere (here and here) (as the other two Brits, they were the other shortlisted authors present at the ceremony). But I’d like to put in a shout for all the other three candidates too, and especially for Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, which we all agreed was exquisite, making a tricky subject (evo-devo) very accessible and engaging. The memory of being confronted with three boxes stuffed full of books is now fading, and I’m left feeling lucky to have been involved in this process.
It’s official, then: the Royal Society Science Book Prize goes to The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. The decision was announced yesterday, and the Guardian is apparently going to put online a podcast of the press conference at which my fellow judges and some of the shortlisted authors discussed science books and science writing in general. I almost felt sorry for the other candidates being up against a book as good as Richard’s: it was a wonderful shortlist, but The Age of Wonder left us all awestruck in its erudition, imagination and – despite what you might imagine from the subject and the size of the book – its readability. It is a glorious read, with something to enjoy on every page (and don’t skip the footnotes!). I was slightly nervous that the other judges might deem it too ‘historical’ to count as a science book, but happily they had no such qualms. The book looks at several strands of science that emerged in the early nineteenth century, all of which allied themselves with the Romantic spirit of wonder, awe and the sublime: for example, the geographical journeys of discovery by Joseph Banks, Mungo Park and others, William Herschel’s telescopic observations, Humphrey Davy’s chemical inventiveness, and the origins of hot-air ballooning. One of the very special attributes of this book is that it makes science sound breathtakingly exciting – not only then, but still.
Both Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and Jo Marchant’s Decoding the Heavens have received well deserved praise elsewhere (here and here) (as the other two Brits, they were the other shortlisted authors present at the ceremony). But I’d like to put in a shout for all the other three candidates too, and especially for Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, which we all agreed was exquisite, making a tricky subject (evo-devo) very accessible and engaging. The memory of being confronted with three boxes stuffed full of books is now fading, and I’m left feeling lucky to have been involved in this process.
Friday, September 11, 2009
The soul and the embryo
Perhaps you noticed this article in the Guardian last year by David Albert Jones, a bioethicist at St Mary’s College, part of the University of Surrey. I didn’t, but plenty did, judging from the feedback.
But it came to my attention after having just read Jones’ 2004 book The Soul of the Embryo, as research for my next book. It’s a very interesting survey of how this issue – whether embryos have souls, when they get them, where they come from, what happens to them – has been debated in Christian theology throughout the ages.
It is also an unintentionally revealing portrait of the mixture of bad logic, warped and misrepresentative argumentation that seems to pervade the Catholic rejection of embryo research. In the language of the Telegraph reader: I am appalled.
Oh, there are the little deceits, such as his insinuation without evidence that IVF clinics routinely seek to overproduce embryos so that they have plenty for research purposes. (For one thing, no embryos can be used in research without the permission of the donors.) Or the sudden switch, when we reach the modern discussion of abortion, from the almost universal use of ‘embryo’ and ‘fetus’ earlier in the book to ‘unborn child’ – or even just ‘child’.
But far worse is the perverse logic and the unprincipled cherry-picking of facts and arguments. Now, I can fully understand how someone might reach the conclusion that, from the moment of fertilization, an embryo is a human being and is entitled to the basic right of being allowed to live – and that abortion is therefore murder, as is discarding of human embryos in any form. It’s a point of view, so to speak. If you believe that the embryo has the same status as a newborn child, and that killing is always wrong, then that’s a consistent position.
It means, as a corollary, that you are an unconditional pacifist, and must consider that papacy wrong and unethical not to share this position. That, somehow, does not seem to be Jones’ view.
Ah, so perhaps you feel that, no, one can’t simply say one should never in any circumstances kill, but that one should not in any circumstances kill something as small and weak and vulnerable as an embryo. So OK, we can now get into an issue of relative merits: there are circumstances in which it is alright to kill, but this isn’t one of them. Then you can no longer take refuge in absolute prohibitions, and must instead be ready to place things on the balance. Why is it wrong to prevent the further development of a ball of cells that might or (more probably, as IVF statistics make clear) might not implant in a womb (even though it is never going to have the opportunity to do so anyway) in order to find a way of alleviating some extreme human suffering? What is the ethical calculus that leads you to this position? Not only does Jones fail to explain it, he fails even to consider it. The only mention he makes of the medical potential of embryo and stem-cell research is to say that it has been exaggerated by its supporters. This man is said to be a bioethicist, remember.
But OK, he is opposed to the destruction of any embryo. It must follow that he opposes the attempted production in IVF of any more embryos than would be implanted – which means two, in the UK. This would, at a stroke, cause IVF success rates – already pretty low, at 20-30 percent – to plummet. But that would of course be a pretty unpopular course, and so Jones keeps quiet about it. After all, it would seem a bit harsh, wouldn’t it – and he is very keen not to appear harsh or unfeeling.
Now, you might have spotted that all of this takes no account of the soul. Indeed, for there is absolutely no reason why it should. But for Christian readers, all the arguments seem likely to carry so much more weight if we can get the soul in there as soon as possible. Give the embryo a soul, Jones seems to imply, and it is ethically unassailable. And so he marshals arguments for why Christian theology supports the notion of ‘ensoulment at conception’.
The problem is that the Bible is all but silent on the issue of when, how or to what degree ensoulment happens during embryogenesis. So the story must be constructed by indirect inference. This is where the façade of logic really starts to unravel. I can’t go through all the reasons for that – they are too plentiful – but here’s a taste.
One of the key arguments rests on the example of Christ as an embryo. To some theologians (Jones downplays this), the image of Christ in the womb was unsettling, particularly if it meant we were forced to regard him as a developing embryo (even in ancient Greece it was clear that embryos acquire their form gradually). So some considered Christ to have been created fully formed – as a kind of homunculus – at the moment of the Immaculate Conception, and just to have grown bigger. Jones, on the other hand, is prepared to contemplate an embryonic Christ, but stresses that the Bible emphasizes his humanity and rules out the notion that Jesus could ever have been a less-than-fully-human embryo. But souls are always possessed by humans, and so if, as the Bible says, Jesus was as fully a human as any of us, then we too must be fully human, and thus in possession of a soul, from conception. This insistence on Jesus’s humanity rules out the possibility that there could have been something exceptional about his embryonic status – indeed, this whole argument hinges on being able to make the case against this exceptionalism, so that what is true of the embryonic Jesus is necessarily true of us. (I know what you’re thinking – is this a modern theologian, and not some obsessive medieval scholastic debating angels on pinheads? Bear with me.) But the problem with that is that it overlooks a few other things that do seem to rather set the embryonic Christ apart from your run-of-the-mill embryo:
1. He is the son of God
2. He is in a virgin’s womb
3. He was created without human sperm
Oh yes, he was different like that, but otherwise, you know, just like us.
Oh, souls. They’re amazing, once you start to think about them. One common objection to the ‘ensoulment at conception’ notion, says Jones, is that some embryos become twins. Where does the other soul come from? He admits this is a bit tricky: does the old soul die and two new ones get added to the two embryos (but then where is the ‘dead’ being from which the old soul fled)? Or does one embryo get to keep the old soul, and the other get given a new one? Or maybe God knew that the embryo would split, and so added two souls in the first place? ‘The problem with twinning seems less our inability to tell a ‘soul story’ and more the inability to judge between these stories’, says Jones. ‘Until more is known empirically, it is difficult to know what sort of story to tell.’ No, that is not the problem. The problem is that it is transparently obvious that you will indeed inevitably end up doing just that – telling a story. In other words, once the ‘facts’ are known, Jones is confident that a story can be tailored to fit them. I’ve no doubt that is true – and equally, no doubt that any theological justification for it will be a masterpiece of post hoc inference. That’s to say, any such ‘story’ will be not only scientifically untestable (we’re talking about souls here, after all), but also theologically unverifiable In the process, incidentally, it seems likely to turn God’s supposedly mysterious creation of beings into high farce: ‘Oops, looks like we need another one of those souls over here.’
(Note also that, while the twinning issue seems like a minor wrinkle to the debate, it played an important role in swaying the opinion of some people involved in the debate around embryo research in the British Parliament between the Warnock Report in 1984 and the HFE Bill in 1990. They were not so ready as Jones to sweep it under the carpet.)
It was with growing dismay that I realised, as I read on, that Jones was not merely exploring changing ideas about what the soul is and where it comes from; he felt he was telling us some literal truths about this, just as if explaining the origin and evolution of species. What this means is that he pursues some arguments with the fine-toothed rigorous logic of the philosopher, but quickly moves on or changes the subject as soon as some gaping flaw in the logic presents itself. Some theologians, says Jones, have worried about the idea that, if all embryos have souls, then most of the souls in heaven are those of embryos that never developed further. What are they like? And what form do their bodies take in the Resurrection? ‘This is not an easy question’, he admits, and leaves it there. But is it a question at all?
Jones suggests that the soul of an individual being is in some ways synonymous with that individual’s life. That makes it easy enough to argue that it’s in the embryo from conception, which is arguably the moment that a ‘potential new life’ appears. But it also forces him to slip out the fact that plants too must have a soul – though not the rational soul of humans, naturally. Presumably God puts them there too. So when does a cutting acquire its new soul? Given that it is a clone (literally), does it need a new one? Hm, no answer.
Or take this, from an article by Jones in Thinking Faith, the online journal of British Jesuits on why the latest Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill (now an Act, of course) is such a terrible thing:
“It is more difficult to know what to think about ‘true hybrids’ which are the most extreme kind of human-animal embryo permitted by the Bill. True hybrids are made by mixing sperm and egg from different species and would be 50% human and 50% of some other species. This raises the issue about whether there is something wrong with crossing the species barrier. This is easiest to see if we ask what would be wrong with bringing a half-human half-chimpanzee to birth. The primary issue here is not how much protection to give to a ‘humanzee’, it is whether we should allow scientists to create humanzees in the first place (this was actually attempted by soviet and other scientists in the 1920s but happily none succeeded). The act of creating true hybrids seems to be inhuman. It fails to respect our humanity.”
I agree with Jones that making a fully developed ‘humanzee’ (if it were possible) would not do a lot for our dignity, and I can think of no reason why it would be desirable. But I wonder what kind of soul Jones thinks God would give it. Or how God would decide the issue. Or how we might decide how God would decide the issue. Better to evade the matter by saying that scientists shouldn’t do it in the first place.
I don’t object to the fact that, in bringing a Christian perspective to these bioethical issues, one has to accept that the issue of souls might arise. That goes with the territory, just as one would have to accept that in other contexts Christians may want to invoke notions of heaven, resurrection and so forth. But if, say, the latter were to happen, I think we might reasonable expect now that we would not be forced to contemplate such questions as how big heaven is and where it might be found. I think we can hope that theologians have moved beyond this sort of medieval literalism. But Jones’ view of souls has not – they are still entities (albeit immaterial) that have to be injected into living beings at some point in time, and accounted for in quantitative terms. To many people, the idea of a soul does seem to carry some valuable meaning, perhaps bound up with notions of individuality and human dignity. I can live with that. But once you start trying to make ‘soul’ a precise concept, it seems you’ll inevitably end up with this sort of absurdity.
This matters partly because people like Jones are the sort who will get their voices heard in these bioethics debates. But it rankles me most of all because he ends up cloaking his position in the seductive mantle of Christian compassion for ‘the least of these little ones’, while – as so often in these cases – refusing to think compassionately about the other side of the coin: the compassion in treatments for disease and infertility (not to mention any consideration of the role and experience of women). In other words, ideological principles before people.
Perhaps you noticed this article in the Guardian last year by David Albert Jones, a bioethicist at St Mary’s College, part of the University of Surrey. I didn’t, but plenty did, judging from the feedback.
But it came to my attention after having just read Jones’ 2004 book The Soul of the Embryo, as research for my next book. It’s a very interesting survey of how this issue – whether embryos have souls, when they get them, where they come from, what happens to them – has been debated in Christian theology throughout the ages.
It is also an unintentionally revealing portrait of the mixture of bad logic, warped and misrepresentative argumentation that seems to pervade the Catholic rejection of embryo research. In the language of the Telegraph reader: I am appalled.
Oh, there are the little deceits, such as his insinuation without evidence that IVF clinics routinely seek to overproduce embryos so that they have plenty for research purposes. (For one thing, no embryos can be used in research without the permission of the donors.) Or the sudden switch, when we reach the modern discussion of abortion, from the almost universal use of ‘embryo’ and ‘fetus’ earlier in the book to ‘unborn child’ – or even just ‘child’.
But far worse is the perverse logic and the unprincipled cherry-picking of facts and arguments. Now, I can fully understand how someone might reach the conclusion that, from the moment of fertilization, an embryo is a human being and is entitled to the basic right of being allowed to live – and that abortion is therefore murder, as is discarding of human embryos in any form. It’s a point of view, so to speak. If you believe that the embryo has the same status as a newborn child, and that killing is always wrong, then that’s a consistent position.
It means, as a corollary, that you are an unconditional pacifist, and must consider that papacy wrong and unethical not to share this position. That, somehow, does not seem to be Jones’ view.
Ah, so perhaps you feel that, no, one can’t simply say one should never in any circumstances kill, but that one should not in any circumstances kill something as small and weak and vulnerable as an embryo. So OK, we can now get into an issue of relative merits: there are circumstances in which it is alright to kill, but this isn’t one of them. Then you can no longer take refuge in absolute prohibitions, and must instead be ready to place things on the balance. Why is it wrong to prevent the further development of a ball of cells that might or (more probably, as IVF statistics make clear) might not implant in a womb (even though it is never going to have the opportunity to do so anyway) in order to find a way of alleviating some extreme human suffering? What is the ethical calculus that leads you to this position? Not only does Jones fail to explain it, he fails even to consider it. The only mention he makes of the medical potential of embryo and stem-cell research is to say that it has been exaggerated by its supporters. This man is said to be a bioethicist, remember.
But OK, he is opposed to the destruction of any embryo. It must follow that he opposes the attempted production in IVF of any more embryos than would be implanted – which means two, in the UK. This would, at a stroke, cause IVF success rates – already pretty low, at 20-30 percent – to plummet. But that would of course be a pretty unpopular course, and so Jones keeps quiet about it. After all, it would seem a bit harsh, wouldn’t it – and he is very keen not to appear harsh or unfeeling.
Now, you might have spotted that all of this takes no account of the soul. Indeed, for there is absolutely no reason why it should. But for Christian readers, all the arguments seem likely to carry so much more weight if we can get the soul in there as soon as possible. Give the embryo a soul, Jones seems to imply, and it is ethically unassailable. And so he marshals arguments for why Christian theology supports the notion of ‘ensoulment at conception’.
The problem is that the Bible is all but silent on the issue of when, how or to what degree ensoulment happens during embryogenesis. So the story must be constructed by indirect inference. This is where the façade of logic really starts to unravel. I can’t go through all the reasons for that – they are too plentiful – but here’s a taste.
One of the key arguments rests on the example of Christ as an embryo. To some theologians (Jones downplays this), the image of Christ in the womb was unsettling, particularly if it meant we were forced to regard him as a developing embryo (even in ancient Greece it was clear that embryos acquire their form gradually). So some considered Christ to have been created fully formed – as a kind of homunculus – at the moment of the Immaculate Conception, and just to have grown bigger. Jones, on the other hand, is prepared to contemplate an embryonic Christ, but stresses that the Bible emphasizes his humanity and rules out the notion that Jesus could ever have been a less-than-fully-human embryo. But souls are always possessed by humans, and so if, as the Bible says, Jesus was as fully a human as any of us, then we too must be fully human, and thus in possession of a soul, from conception. This insistence on Jesus’s humanity rules out the possibility that there could have been something exceptional about his embryonic status – indeed, this whole argument hinges on being able to make the case against this exceptionalism, so that what is true of the embryonic Jesus is necessarily true of us. (I know what you’re thinking – is this a modern theologian, and not some obsessive medieval scholastic debating angels on pinheads? Bear with me.) But the problem with that is that it overlooks a few other things that do seem to rather set the embryonic Christ apart from your run-of-the-mill embryo:
1. He is the son of God
2. He is in a virgin’s womb
3. He was created without human sperm
Oh yes, he was different like that, but otherwise, you know, just like us.
Oh, souls. They’re amazing, once you start to think about them. One common objection to the ‘ensoulment at conception’ notion, says Jones, is that some embryos become twins. Where does the other soul come from? He admits this is a bit tricky: does the old soul die and two new ones get added to the two embryos (but then where is the ‘dead’ being from which the old soul fled)? Or does one embryo get to keep the old soul, and the other get given a new one? Or maybe God knew that the embryo would split, and so added two souls in the first place? ‘The problem with twinning seems less our inability to tell a ‘soul story’ and more the inability to judge between these stories’, says Jones. ‘Until more is known empirically, it is difficult to know what sort of story to tell.’ No, that is not the problem. The problem is that it is transparently obvious that you will indeed inevitably end up doing just that – telling a story. In other words, once the ‘facts’ are known, Jones is confident that a story can be tailored to fit them. I’ve no doubt that is true – and equally, no doubt that any theological justification for it will be a masterpiece of post hoc inference. That’s to say, any such ‘story’ will be not only scientifically untestable (we’re talking about souls here, after all), but also theologically unverifiable In the process, incidentally, it seems likely to turn God’s supposedly mysterious creation of beings into high farce: ‘Oops, looks like we need another one of those souls over here.’
(Note also that, while the twinning issue seems like a minor wrinkle to the debate, it played an important role in swaying the opinion of some people involved in the debate around embryo research in the British Parliament between the Warnock Report in 1984 and the HFE Bill in 1990. They were not so ready as Jones to sweep it under the carpet.)
It was with growing dismay that I realised, as I read on, that Jones was not merely exploring changing ideas about what the soul is and where it comes from; he felt he was telling us some literal truths about this, just as if explaining the origin and evolution of species. What this means is that he pursues some arguments with the fine-toothed rigorous logic of the philosopher, but quickly moves on or changes the subject as soon as some gaping flaw in the logic presents itself. Some theologians, says Jones, have worried about the idea that, if all embryos have souls, then most of the souls in heaven are those of embryos that never developed further. What are they like? And what form do their bodies take in the Resurrection? ‘This is not an easy question’, he admits, and leaves it there. But is it a question at all?
Jones suggests that the soul of an individual being is in some ways synonymous with that individual’s life. That makes it easy enough to argue that it’s in the embryo from conception, which is arguably the moment that a ‘potential new life’ appears. But it also forces him to slip out the fact that plants too must have a soul – though not the rational soul of humans, naturally. Presumably God puts them there too. So when does a cutting acquire its new soul? Given that it is a clone (literally), does it need a new one? Hm, no answer.
Or take this, from an article by Jones in Thinking Faith, the online journal of British Jesuits on why the latest Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill (now an Act, of course) is such a terrible thing:
“It is more difficult to know what to think about ‘true hybrids’ which are the most extreme kind of human-animal embryo permitted by the Bill. True hybrids are made by mixing sperm and egg from different species and would be 50% human and 50% of some other species. This raises the issue about whether there is something wrong with crossing the species barrier. This is easiest to see if we ask what would be wrong with bringing a half-human half-chimpanzee to birth. The primary issue here is not how much protection to give to a ‘humanzee’, it is whether we should allow scientists to create humanzees in the first place (this was actually attempted by soviet and other scientists in the 1920s but happily none succeeded). The act of creating true hybrids seems to be inhuman. It fails to respect our humanity.”
I agree with Jones that making a fully developed ‘humanzee’ (if it were possible) would not do a lot for our dignity, and I can think of no reason why it would be desirable. But I wonder what kind of soul Jones thinks God would give it. Or how God would decide the issue. Or how we might decide how God would decide the issue. Better to evade the matter by saying that scientists shouldn’t do it in the first place.
I don’t object to the fact that, in bringing a Christian perspective to these bioethical issues, one has to accept that the issue of souls might arise. That goes with the territory, just as one would have to accept that in other contexts Christians may want to invoke notions of heaven, resurrection and so forth. But if, say, the latter were to happen, I think we might reasonable expect now that we would not be forced to contemplate such questions as how big heaven is and where it might be found. I think we can hope that theologians have moved beyond this sort of medieval literalism. But Jones’ view of souls has not – they are still entities (albeit immaterial) that have to be injected into living beings at some point in time, and accounted for in quantitative terms. To many people, the idea of a soul does seem to carry some valuable meaning, perhaps bound up with notions of individuality and human dignity. I can live with that. But once you start trying to make ‘soul’ a precise concept, it seems you’ll inevitably end up with this sort of absurdity.
This matters partly because people like Jones are the sort who will get their voices heard in these bioethics debates. But it rankles me most of all because he ends up cloaking his position in the seductive mantle of Christian compassion for ‘the least of these little ones’, while – as so often in these cases – refusing to think compassionately about the other side of the coin: the compassion in treatments for disease and infertility (not to mention any consideration of the role and experience of women). In other words, ideological principles before people.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Francis Collins and his God – but no, not more of that New Atheist stuff…
[Well, not really. This is the pre-edited version of my latest column for Prospect.]
The unanimous praise for President Obama’s scientific appointments is faltering. When in January he offered the position of surgeon general to the ‘media doctor’ Sanjay Gupta of CNN, many considered it a lightweight choice. In the event Gupta declined, and Obama’s new nominee, Alabama community physician Regina Benjamin, has raised no eyebrows.
But the nomination of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, the US biomedical research organization, is more controversial. At face value, Collins looks an obvious choice: former leader of the Human Genome Project, he has a proven track record of large-scale management, and commands respect from peers by remaining scientifically active rather than becoming a pen-pushing adminstrator. Geneticist Eric Lander has called him ‘a superb choice for an NIH director’, while others praise him as a ‘scientist’s scientist.’
So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, Collins’ 2006 book The Language of God. He is outspoken, even evangelical, about his Christian faith. Even that might not have been a problem if Collins had not appeared to equivocate about ‘old-time religion’ issues such as the interpretation of the Fall and the possibility of divine intervention in evolution. Some scientists are troubled by what one can find on such issues on the website of the BioLogos Foundation, established by Collins to reconcile science and religion.
Collins will step down from BioLogos before taking up his new role, and some of his colleagues offer reassurances that they have never seen his scientific judgement clouded by his religious beliefs. But with the crippling religious opposition to stem-cell science in researchers’ minds, this may not be enough to dispel concern. Collins has become a figure of almost obsessive loathing among the ‘New Atheist’ scientists seeking to combat the religiosity of American life.
Biologist P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota, whose Pharyngula blog is a flagship of New Atheism, calls Collins’ BioLogos ‘an embarrassment of poor reasoning and silly Christian apologetics’ and worries that ‘he will use his position to act as a propagandist for Christianity.’ Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls Collins ‘an advocate of profoundly anti-science beliefs.’
But Myers offers what might be in the end a more compelling reason to question Collins’ appointment: ‘he represents a very narrow, gene-jockey style of research, which… often exhibits a worrisome lack of understanding of the big picture of biology.’ He’s not alone in fearing that Collins’ enthusiasm for ‘big science’ – especially genomic stamp-collecting – will leach funding from smaller but more intellectually guided areas, such as environmental and systems biology. Collins will initially have plenty of cash to spread around – the NIH was granted a one-off sum of $10.4 bn as an economic stimulus until September 2010 – but things will get leaner, and it will take boldness and vision to find space for innovation rather than more safe but dull genome-crunching.
*****
It’s disconcerting astronomers almost to the point of embarrassment that a scar the size of the Earth has turned up unexpectedly on Jupiter. The dark ‘bruise’ in the giant planet’s dense atmosphere is evidence of some gigantic impact, presumably an asteroid or comet. The last time this happened, in 1994, it was widely anticipated and supplied a cosmic fireworks display both exhilarating and sobering: the fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ploughed into the planet, leaving a trail of scars each of Armageddon proportions. But this wasn’t exactly a case of ‘there but for the grace of God’, so much as a reminder of Jupiter’s role as our guardian angel. The strong gravitational tug of the gas giant is thought to suck up many lumps of wandering debris that would otherwise pose a threat to Earth. Some researchers even think that the existence of a big brother to mop up impactors could be a condition of habitability for Earth-like planets around other stars.
All the same, we’d like to see such events coming. But no one foresaw the dark smudge in Jupiter’s south polar region until it was spotted by an amateur astronomer in Australia on 19 July. Word spread almost at once, and within less than a day two large infrared telescopes in Hawaii had seen the same spot, glowing brightly with sunlight reflected by the material thrown up through the jovian atmosphere.
We still don’t know what caused it, however. It could have been a faint icy comet, or a rocky asteroid. Jupiter also acquires blotches from storms, but none tends to look like this. It’s going to be tough now to figure out how big the impacting body was, or how much energy was released, especially as Jupiter’s winds will soon wipe away the traces. The similar ‘holes’ left by Shoemaker-Levy 9 were probably made by fragments several hundred metres wide: on Earth, that wouldn’t wipe us out, but it would make an almighty bang.
*****
Has anyone visited the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics recently? It’s well worth it: led by some heavyweight astrophysicists, it hosts seminars for specialists every Friday, as well as regular public talks and outreach events open to all. But you won’t get there by air, road or rail, because MICA exists nowhere on Earth. It is the first professional research organization to be based exclusively in virtual reality, in Second Life. The potential of virtual worlds to bring together scientists for meetings and conferences without leaving their desks has been much heralded. But MICA takes that more seriously than most. Its seminars happen in a pleasant, wooded outdoor amphitheatre looking conspicuously like the Californian coast. It has to be said that the audience is rather better looking than it tends to be in reality too.
[Well, not really. This is the pre-edited version of my latest column for Prospect.]
The unanimous praise for President Obama’s scientific appointments is faltering. When in January he offered the position of surgeon general to the ‘media doctor’ Sanjay Gupta of CNN, many considered it a lightweight choice. In the event Gupta declined, and Obama’s new nominee, Alabama community physician Regina Benjamin, has raised no eyebrows.
But the nomination of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, the US biomedical research organization, is more controversial. At face value, Collins looks an obvious choice: former leader of the Human Genome Project, he has a proven track record of large-scale management, and commands respect from peers by remaining scientifically active rather than becoming a pen-pushing adminstrator. Geneticist Eric Lander has called him ‘a superb choice for an NIH director’, while others praise him as a ‘scientist’s scientist.’
So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, Collins’ 2006 book The Language of God. He is outspoken, even evangelical, about his Christian faith. Even that might not have been a problem if Collins had not appeared to equivocate about ‘old-time religion’ issues such as the interpretation of the Fall and the possibility of divine intervention in evolution. Some scientists are troubled by what one can find on such issues on the website of the BioLogos Foundation, established by Collins to reconcile science and religion.
Collins will step down from BioLogos before taking up his new role, and some of his colleagues offer reassurances that they have never seen his scientific judgement clouded by his religious beliefs. But with the crippling religious opposition to stem-cell science in researchers’ minds, this may not be enough to dispel concern. Collins has become a figure of almost obsessive loathing among the ‘New Atheist’ scientists seeking to combat the religiosity of American life.
Biologist P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota, whose Pharyngula blog is a flagship of New Atheism, calls Collins’ BioLogos ‘an embarrassment of poor reasoning and silly Christian apologetics’ and worries that ‘he will use his position to act as a propagandist for Christianity.’ Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls Collins ‘an advocate of profoundly anti-science beliefs.’
But Myers offers what might be in the end a more compelling reason to question Collins’ appointment: ‘he represents a very narrow, gene-jockey style of research, which… often exhibits a worrisome lack of understanding of the big picture of biology.’ He’s not alone in fearing that Collins’ enthusiasm for ‘big science’ – especially genomic stamp-collecting – will leach funding from smaller but more intellectually guided areas, such as environmental and systems biology. Collins will initially have plenty of cash to spread around – the NIH was granted a one-off sum of $10.4 bn as an economic stimulus until September 2010 – but things will get leaner, and it will take boldness and vision to find space for innovation rather than more safe but dull genome-crunching.
*****
It’s disconcerting astronomers almost to the point of embarrassment that a scar the size of the Earth has turned up unexpectedly on Jupiter. The dark ‘bruise’ in the giant planet’s dense atmosphere is evidence of some gigantic impact, presumably an asteroid or comet. The last time this happened, in 1994, it was widely anticipated and supplied a cosmic fireworks display both exhilarating and sobering: the fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ploughed into the planet, leaving a trail of scars each of Armageddon proportions. But this wasn’t exactly a case of ‘there but for the grace of God’, so much as a reminder of Jupiter’s role as our guardian angel. The strong gravitational tug of the gas giant is thought to suck up many lumps of wandering debris that would otherwise pose a threat to Earth. Some researchers even think that the existence of a big brother to mop up impactors could be a condition of habitability for Earth-like planets around other stars.
All the same, we’d like to see such events coming. But no one foresaw the dark smudge in Jupiter’s south polar region until it was spotted by an amateur astronomer in Australia on 19 July. Word spread almost at once, and within less than a day two large infrared telescopes in Hawaii had seen the same spot, glowing brightly with sunlight reflected by the material thrown up through the jovian atmosphere.
We still don’t know what caused it, however. It could have been a faint icy comet, or a rocky asteroid. Jupiter also acquires blotches from storms, but none tends to look like this. It’s going to be tough now to figure out how big the impacting body was, or how much energy was released, especially as Jupiter’s winds will soon wipe away the traces. The similar ‘holes’ left by Shoemaker-Levy 9 were probably made by fragments several hundred metres wide: on Earth, that wouldn’t wipe us out, but it would make an almighty bang.
*****
Has anyone visited the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics recently? It’s well worth it: led by some heavyweight astrophysicists, it hosts seminars for specialists every Friday, as well as regular public talks and outreach events open to all. But you won’t get there by air, road or rail, because MICA exists nowhere on Earth. It is the first professional research organization to be based exclusively in virtual reality, in Second Life. The potential of virtual worlds to bring together scientists for meetings and conferences without leaving their desks has been much heralded. But MICA takes that more seriously than most. Its seminars happen in a pleasant, wooded outdoor amphitheatre looking conspicuously like the Californian coast. It has to be said that the audience is rather better looking than it tends to be in reality too.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The weather forecast
[Here’s the pre-edited version of my review of Giles Foden’s new book Turbulence, which appears in the latest issue of Nature.]
Turbulence
Giles Foden
Faber & Faber, 2009
353 pages, £16.99
ISBN 978-0-571-20522-6
It’s a rare enough thing to encounter a novel based around one of your favourite obscure scientists; but when two of them appear in the same book, you feel Christmas must have come early. Add to this a plot that hinges on one of my pet nerdy topics – fluid dynamics – and I couldn’t help suspecting that Giles Foden had written Turbulence especially for me.
The result is compelling. Whether it fully works as fiction is another matter, to which I’ll come back. But Foden’s book one of the most attractive additions to the micro-genre of science-in-fiction for a long time.
Fluid dynamics features here in the context of weather prediction. That may seem like deeply unpromising material for a gripping story, but Foden has dramatized what has been called the most important weather forecast every made: that for the D-Day landings, the invasion of continental Europe at Normandy by the Allied forces towards the end of the Second World War. General Eisenhower, in overall command of the operation, had to be sure that the crossing of the English Channel would not be disrupted by bad weather. And he needed that information about five days in advance – a length of time that stretches today’s forecasting techniques to their limit, and which was in all honesty beyond the capability of the primitive, pre-computer prediction methods of meteorologists in 1944. Adding to that the need for a low tide to evade the German sea defences, the task confronting the Allies’ weather experts was all but impossible.
Foden tells this story through the eyes of Henry Meadows, a (fictional) young academic attached to the forecasting team led by British meteorologist James Stagg. The process by which Stagg and his fractious colleagues, including the brash American entrepreneur Irving Krick and the arrogant but astute Norwegian Sverre Pettersen, made their decision occupies the final third of the book. Stagg and Pettersen both published their own accounts in the 1970s.
Before that, Meadows is sent to rural Scotland to glean some vital clues about forecasting from the leading authority of the day, the difficult genius Wallace Ryman. Ryman is a fictionalized version of Lewis Fry Richardson, who Foden rightly calls ‘one of the unsung heroes of British science’ (he is perhaps best known for his work on fractal coastlines). Like Richardson, Ryman is a Quaker whose experiences in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in the First World War have convinced him that war must be avoided at any cost. He therefore shuns collaboration with the military, and Meadows has to pursue his mission by stealth – an attempt that he mostly bungles in spectacular style.
In Scotland Meadows also runs into the second wayward genius in the book, this time without a pseudonymous disguise: Geoffrey Pyke, the man behind the Habbakuk project to build gigantic aircraft carriers out of ice reinforced with wood pulp. This so-called Pykrete is extraordinarily resistant to impacts and melting. There is also a fleeting appearance by ‘Julius Brecher’, a döppelganger for Max Perutz, who assisted Pyke during the war. This part of the plot may strike readers as far-fetched if they don’t know that it is quite true.
The more serious problem, however, is that Habbakuk feels like something Foden couldn’t resist cobbling on simply because it is such a striking tale. It’s certainly entertaining, and the portrayal of Pyke rings true, but there’s no real need for any of it in the plot, despite the framing device that has Meadows recounting his wartime exploits on board an ice ship built in 1980 for an Arab sheikh. When Meadows joins Pyke in London only to see the project terminated a week later, it feels like a cul-de-sac.
One could carp at a few other points of creaky plotting or narrative – Foden sometimes seems over-concerned to ensure that the reader gets the point, telling us twice why ‘Habbakuk’ is misspelled and revealing the purpose of a subplot about blood analysis in three successive encounters on the same day. But these are quibbles in a book that does a splendid job of animating a buried story of scientific endeavour and triumph. It is no mean feat to make meteorology sound both heroic and intellectually profound.
In any book like this, one has to ask whether the author succeeds in creating scientists who are fully fleshed individuals. In some ways Foden complicates his task by making Meadows explicitly withdrawn (the result of a childhood trauma in Africa) and awkward. One might argue that Meadows’ constant recourse to the turbulence metaphor and his narrow frame of reference skirt the caricature of a dry scientific life. Brecher similarly refracts everything through the prism of his own research topic (blood), while Ryman is the crabby boffin and Pyke the dotty one. But there’s motive in all this. Through Meadows we sense the dour, buttoned-up character of wartime Britain. And when he talks about turbulence and hydrodynamics, there is none of the breezy ‘beginner’s guide’ flavour that is the usual hallmark of undigested authorial research. Foden had the immense benefit of advice from his father-in-law Julian Hunt, one of the world’s leading experts on turbulence and meteorology and, fittingly, a recipient of the Lewis Fry Richardson medal for nonlinear geophysics. Skilfully balancing fact and fiction, Turbulence is a tale that is dramatic, intelligent and convincing.
[Here’s the pre-edited version of my review of Giles Foden’s new book Turbulence, which appears in the latest issue of Nature.]
Turbulence
Giles Foden
Faber & Faber, 2009
353 pages, £16.99
ISBN 978-0-571-20522-6
It’s a rare enough thing to encounter a novel based around one of your favourite obscure scientists; but when two of them appear in the same book, you feel Christmas must have come early. Add to this a plot that hinges on one of my pet nerdy topics – fluid dynamics – and I couldn’t help suspecting that Giles Foden had written Turbulence especially for me.
The result is compelling. Whether it fully works as fiction is another matter, to which I’ll come back. But Foden’s book one of the most attractive additions to the micro-genre of science-in-fiction for a long time.
Fluid dynamics features here in the context of weather prediction. That may seem like deeply unpromising material for a gripping story, but Foden has dramatized what has been called the most important weather forecast every made: that for the D-Day landings, the invasion of continental Europe at Normandy by the Allied forces towards the end of the Second World War. General Eisenhower, in overall command of the operation, had to be sure that the crossing of the English Channel would not be disrupted by bad weather. And he needed that information about five days in advance – a length of time that stretches today’s forecasting techniques to their limit, and which was in all honesty beyond the capability of the primitive, pre-computer prediction methods of meteorologists in 1944. Adding to that the need for a low tide to evade the German sea defences, the task confronting the Allies’ weather experts was all but impossible.
Foden tells this story through the eyes of Henry Meadows, a (fictional) young academic attached to the forecasting team led by British meteorologist James Stagg. The process by which Stagg and his fractious colleagues, including the brash American entrepreneur Irving Krick and the arrogant but astute Norwegian Sverre Pettersen, made their decision occupies the final third of the book. Stagg and Pettersen both published their own accounts in the 1970s.
Before that, Meadows is sent to rural Scotland to glean some vital clues about forecasting from the leading authority of the day, the difficult genius Wallace Ryman. Ryman is a fictionalized version of Lewis Fry Richardson, who Foden rightly calls ‘one of the unsung heroes of British science’ (he is perhaps best known for his work on fractal coastlines). Like Richardson, Ryman is a Quaker whose experiences in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in the First World War have convinced him that war must be avoided at any cost. He therefore shuns collaboration with the military, and Meadows has to pursue his mission by stealth – an attempt that he mostly bungles in spectacular style.
In Scotland Meadows also runs into the second wayward genius in the book, this time without a pseudonymous disguise: Geoffrey Pyke, the man behind the Habbakuk project to build gigantic aircraft carriers out of ice reinforced with wood pulp. This so-called Pykrete is extraordinarily resistant to impacts and melting. There is also a fleeting appearance by ‘Julius Brecher’, a döppelganger for Max Perutz, who assisted Pyke during the war. This part of the plot may strike readers as far-fetched if they don’t know that it is quite true.
The more serious problem, however, is that Habbakuk feels like something Foden couldn’t resist cobbling on simply because it is such a striking tale. It’s certainly entertaining, and the portrayal of Pyke rings true, but there’s no real need for any of it in the plot, despite the framing device that has Meadows recounting his wartime exploits on board an ice ship built in 1980 for an Arab sheikh. When Meadows joins Pyke in London only to see the project terminated a week later, it feels like a cul-de-sac.
One could carp at a few other points of creaky plotting or narrative – Foden sometimes seems over-concerned to ensure that the reader gets the point, telling us twice why ‘Habbakuk’ is misspelled and revealing the purpose of a subplot about blood analysis in three successive encounters on the same day. But these are quibbles in a book that does a splendid job of animating a buried story of scientific endeavour and triumph. It is no mean feat to make meteorology sound both heroic and intellectually profound.
In any book like this, one has to ask whether the author succeeds in creating scientists who are fully fleshed individuals. In some ways Foden complicates his task by making Meadows explicitly withdrawn (the result of a childhood trauma in Africa) and awkward. One might argue that Meadows’ constant recourse to the turbulence metaphor and his narrow frame of reference skirt the caricature of a dry scientific life. Brecher similarly refracts everything through the prism of his own research topic (blood), while Ryman is the crabby boffin and Pyke the dotty one. But there’s motive in all this. Through Meadows we sense the dour, buttoned-up character of wartime Britain. And when he talks about turbulence and hydrodynamics, there is none of the breezy ‘beginner’s guide’ flavour that is the usual hallmark of undigested authorial research. Foden had the immense benefit of advice from his father-in-law Julian Hunt, one of the world’s leading experts on turbulence and meteorology and, fittingly, a recipient of the Lewis Fry Richardson medal for nonlinear geophysics. Skilfully balancing fact and fiction, Turbulence is a tale that is dramatic, intelligent and convincing.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Don’t call me sir
The Financial Times has a little article on the Royal Society Science Book Prize, on the back of an interview with Jared Diamond. In the process, they have given me a knighthood. Kind, but more than a little unlikely. I suspect I have been granted it on loan from Tim Hunt, who is chairing the judging panel. He can have it back now.
The Financial Times has a little article on the Royal Society Science Book Prize, on the back of an interview with Jared Diamond. In the process, they have given me a knighthood. Kind, but more than a little unlikely. I suspect I have been granted it on loan from Tim Hunt, who is chairing the judging panel. He can have it back now.
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