Thinking about thinking

BBC's Horizon last night took a look back at its programmes about human intelligence.

The programme tried to draw an artificial line between human and animal intelligence, undermined by footage of chimpanzees co-operating, but did cover a lot of material, including the rather creepy Cyril Burt of the Eugenics Society attempting to link IQ to DNA, neolithic writing in a cave in South Africa and research into artificial intelligence.

Unusually for a science programme, it also had some laugh out loud moments, especially the wacky Robert Graham and his Nobel laureate sperm bank in California.

Fly me to the Moon

I'm quite excited at the news that the European Space Agency is hoping to land a robot-controlled probe on the Moon by 2018. The mission is seen as a first step towards humans landing on the Moon for the first time since 1972.

When people look back at the history of human exploration of our solar system, they'll surely wonder why we didn't visit our nearest neighbour for so long. Nixon's administration cut the budget for NASA's Moon missions in the early 70's - along with Lyndon Johnson's inner-city education programme - because of the spiralling cost of the war in Vietnam. Before that, most Americans watching men on the Moon expected to see a permanant base on the lunar surface within their lifetime.

The Moon landings are a bit like Concorde, an example of people co-operating to achieve something that is both technically complex and beautiful but which is then shelved because no-one wants to assume the cost of maintaining it on their own. If you were placing a bet, you'd have to say that the next person on the Moon will probably be Russian or Chinese.

Antarctic IPA

I was amused to read that a brewpub is sending beer to British scientists at the South Pole.

According to the Platform Tavern in Southampton, Pole-Axed IPA has been brewed strong to "survive the long and freezing journey to the Antarctic." It makes a change from the usual myth about India pale ale having to be strong to survive the sea journey through the tropics to the subcontinent where thirsty troops were waiting to gulp it down after it had been watered down by their officers.

If the scientists need to warm the bottles up, they could always try the trick used in the short story Ivy Day in the Committee Room by James Joyce and stick them in the fire.

Alfred Russel Wallace online

The works of the nineteenth century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace have just gone online.

Wallace is best known for his collecting trip to the Malay Archipelago that led to him producing a theory of evolution by natural selection around the same time, 1858, that Charles Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species. Wallace described how it came about in his autobiography:

"The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals? It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained."

Politically Wallace was an eclectic reformer who described himself as a socialist, a Spiritualist who argued for women's suffrage and the nationalisation of the land as well as speaking out against militarism, eugenics and currency being based on gold or silver. I like the line in his 1890 article Human Selection  where he writes, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent."

RIP Bernard Lovell

The physicist Bernard Lovell who died yesterday aged 98 was one of the pioneers of radio astronomy at Manchester University in the 1950's.

The trams going along Oxford Road interfered with the equipment so they set up their radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank in the Cheshire countryside south of Manchester. It's about twenty years since I last went round Jodrell Bank but as well as the telescopes themselves I remember the planetarium - apparently now demolished - being pretty impressive too.

According to this profile of him last year, Lovell "had the knack of explaining concepts of immense complexity as simply as possible; and he did it in a way that was never patronising, and never made his listener feel stupid."

The fat of the land

I've just watched the first episode of a new BBC series presented by Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Fat, about the roots of obesity.

In the early 1970's, US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz - a son of the soil from Indiana once memorably described as a "mental midget" - encouraged American farmers to expand with the slogan "Get big or get out."  The surplus maize they produced was then turned into a new high-fructose sweetener for the food industry called corn syrup.  As it was cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it was soon being added to fizzy drinks, bread and other foodstuffs.  Then in the late 1970's, the US food industry responded to Congressional criticism by introducing supposedly healthy low fat products in which the fat content was replaced with sugar.

Like the tobacco industry for decades, the food industry lobbyists Peretti met claimed that there was no evidence of a link between their products and obesity and it was simply a matter of personal reponsibilty - eating less, exercising more - rather than their marketing food that is both unhealthy and addictive. I was left wondering if these people actually believe what they are paid to say.

AI and language

BBC2 has dumbed down a lot in the last decade or so, shifting arts and music programmes to BBC4 and replacing them with cookery and interior design shows.  But it still manages to broadcast some thought-provoking stuff too and last night's episode of the science series Horizon was certainly that.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has still to reach the level where robots can think like humans do but we are further down that road than many people - including myself - had realised. By far the best bit was at the end when presenter Marcus Du Sautoy went to a lab where two robots are teaching each other a new language they have invented, making up words for movements, shapes and colours.  To paraphrase the 60's Chicago DJ Pervis Spann talking about people who don't like blues, if you weren't touched by the scene you've got a hole in your soul. Above all, it reminded me of one of my favourite films from childhood, Silent Running, in which hippy ecologist Bruce Dern teaches robots Huey and Dewey to garden on board a space ship containing the environmentally devastated Earth's last forest before killing his crewmates and then himself, blasting the forest on a journey into deep space.


One of the pioneers of AI, Seymour Papert, was incidentally a member of the Socialist Review Group when he lived in Britain in the 50's.

Language in our nature?

In the mid-90's, I did a part-time course in teaching English as a foreign language at Manchester College of Arts and Technology. One of things we studied was theories of language acquisition and it's something I've been fascinated by ever since.  The mainstream theory of language aqcquisition since the 1970's - developed by Noam Chomsky, Stephen Krashen, Stephen Pinker and others - is centred on the idea of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a innate genetically transmitted ability unique to humans which allows children to instinctively learn their native language. This means that grammatical features (tenses, plurals etc.) appear in children at the same time whatever that language is.

I was interested therefore to read about a new book by one Daniel Everett which apparently seeks to overturn the LAD theory of language acquisition on the strength of a language called Pirahã spoken by around three hundred people in the Amzonian region of Brazil and which Everett claims doesn't include these grammatical features.

There are a number of holes that can be put in Everett's claims: he is the only non-native speaker of Pirahã and there is no way of knowing if what he says about the language is true (even if he thinks it is, there is no saying that the he has picked up all its nuances from the native speakers). He also seems to have oversimplified what Chomsky says about language acquisition in order to try to knock his theories down.  But the killer point to me - and one the Guardian review doesn't really deal with, possibly for reasons of undue politeness or liberal sensibilities - is that Everett is an evangelical Christian and former missionary who travelled to Amazonia to convert the native peoples and whose only reason for learning Pirahã was to translate the Bible into it.  Whatever Chomsky's political faults, I'd trust his rational judgements on language acquisition over Everett's any day of the week.

Beer writing and the Dunning-Kruger effect

I've been reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect recently. It's a theory put foward by psychologists of that name which basically states that less intelligent people overestimate their abilities because they're not bright enough to spot their mistakes while conversely more intelligent people underestimate their abilities for the opposite reason.

The effect can be seen in lots of different fields but one that strikes me as especially apt is beer writing.  On the one hand are people paid to write on beer who proclaim themselves "one of the world's leading beer writers" or "an internationally known authority on beer" while recycling myths or just making things up; on the other, unpaid bloggers like Ron Pattinson at Shut Up about Barclay Perkins and Martyn Cornell at Zythophile whose writing is based on extensive research in their spare time and rigorous analysis of primary sources, correcting their own misconceptions and overturning orthodox opinion where necessary.

The idea behind the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't a new one - I suppose it's a variant of the saying "An empty vessel makes most noise" - but it's good to have a scientific label to stick on it.

Higgs boson and the triumph of science

I don't pretend to understand the physics behind the experiments carried out at the CERN nuclear research centre in Switzerland but I'm still excited by today's announcement that scientists there think they may have seen a Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is thought to give other matter its mass (I think!).  What is just as interesting is that before the announcement the physicists at CERN said that if the Higgs boson could be shown not to exist they would have to rewrite the laws of particle physics from scratch.  This is still possible given the provisional nature of the results and mirrors the situation with the last publicly discussed results from CERN which seemingly showed particles travelling at more than the speed of light, contravening the theory of general relativity put forward by Einstein.

Science's willingness to treat evidence as provisional rather than immutable and completely rewrite its theories when new evidence becomes known is of course what makes it science - in contrast to the pseudoscience perpetrated by whacky Midwestern creationists - but those qualities should nevertheless still be celebrated by all rational people.

Out of Africa

I'd been looking forward to Origins of Us, the BBC2 series on evolution presented by Dr Alice Roberts which started last night.

A number of things struck me, not least the extent to which humans' relationship with the environment has shaped evolution.  It is now thought that climate change and a thinning out of the forests of East Africa led to our hominid ancestors standing upright in order to reach food on higher tree branches about two million years ago.  The closeness of human and chimpanzee DNA, with a common ancestor about five million years ago, makes us near relatives and also underlines how ridiculous it is to divide humanity into separate races based on differences in skin colour, language or culture.

As the fossil evidence becomes ever more extensive, I look forward with amusement to how religious creationists will try to convince the rest of us that we appeared as we are now six thousand years ago.

Language is our nature

Stephen Fry's new series on language started on BBC2 last night.  Having studied language acquisition years ago when I was doing a part-time teaching course at Manchester College of Arts and Technology, I was familiar with those whose theories he outlined, Chomsky, Pinker (and Krashen who surprisingly wasn't mentioned by name) but there was also a lot of interesting stuff about DNA and language.

Fry's pretty watchable whatever he's talking about and if you missed it I recommend watching it here.

Faster than light?

The news that scientists at the CERN research centre in Switzerland may have observed particles travelling at more than the speed of light raises some interesting possibilities.

While it's all very tentative and there may well be an explanation for why they appear to be doing something Einstein ruled impossible - such as taking a short cut through another dimension in space - it at least opens up the possibility of travelling backwards in time, and all the Star Trek-types dilemmas about the space-time continuum that would lead to.

It also reminds me of one of my favourite Muhammad Ali quotes about how he was so fast that when he turned the light off at night he was in bed before it was dark.