From David Warren-Smith:

Re: Brain lives at “edge of chaos” (March 18): The authors you describe have used brain imaging techniques to measure dynamic changes in the brain. This is a bit like saying lets use imaging techniques to observe the dynamic behaviour of electrical activity in a Pentium CPU chip between different programs running on a computer, in order to explain the behaviour of the Pentium chip. This seems very far fetched to me.

Trying to disguise a lack of understanding of the behaviour of the brain with a fancy expression like self-organized criticality is unconvincing and in this case not particularly conducive to a proper understanding of the problem. If you want a better starting point for research on brain activity you need to read my essay entitled “Intelligence-What it is and how it works”.

My essay is not about measuring intelligence but about the mechanism that produces it. Intelligence is the mechanism that enables animals, such as us humans, to function as independent creatures. I have been considering the question of intelligence produced by a biological brain and the significance of the peculiarities of the mechanism that produces it for some time. I see a well defined process involved, that describes the basics of the mechanism and draws relevant conclusions. Of course the authors of the concept that you describe might have a deeper concept that is not apparent from the brief description you give, which could put me out of order. Perhaps the authors you describe are developing their technique as a diagnostic tool and are not interested in mechanism.

In my view a degree of randomness is quite possible in the mechanism of the biological brain, but I see no need for calling on chaos as part of the description. A significant aspect of the function of the brain is to produce intelligence. The mechanism of intelligence is not a chaotic process. Another necessary aspect of the function of the brain is to produce perception. This is also not a chaotic process but part of physical consciousness. A physical description of biological intelligence is no weirder than the concept of self-organized criticality.

My essay is a cut down version of earlier work that I have arranged to reduce the technical content and make it easier to read. You would need to read the whole essay in order to criticise it. I intend to publish my essay if I can find someone prepared to publish it. I am prepared to send you a copy of my essay in PDF format if you specifically request it.

David Warren-Smith, MSc., CPEng.
Elizabeth Downs, near Adelaide South Australia

From Edward N. Haas:

Re: “Guilty look” in dogs mostly owners’ fantasy, study finds (June 15): 50 years ago, when I was a teenager, I had a pet hamster which I kept in a cage in the basement of my family’s house. One day, I went down to feed the hamster and discovered it was not in its cage. Immediately, I went searching around the basement for it. As I did so, I called it by name. Finding no trace of the hamster for quite some time, I decided to end the search. As I was about to climb the steps leading up from the basement, the family dog came to me and laid the dead hamster at my feet. He then backed up a bit and, with his tail between his legs and a slightly crouching position in his legs, he looked up at me. From the position of his tail and legs and the look in his eye, I had no doubt he was acknowledging his guilt and begging forgiveness for what he had done to the hamster. It was an experience which, to this day, leaves no doubt in my mind that at least some dogs are indeed capable of feeling guilt and remorse.

Let me tell you another story only vaguely connected with the above, but which illustrates clearly that animals have emotions. I live in the middle of several acres of land, and that entails the need to spend much time on the back of a large farm tractor bushhogging. At one time, I ran goats on my property, because, they do so good a job keeping the underbrush down, it left me with little need to spend time bushhogging. As you would expect, the goats reproduced. The mortality rate among the baby goats was abominable. Then, too, the mother goats would sometimes abandon their babies. From time to time, that meant I would have to bottle feed a goat or two for several weeks. There was one I called “Hoppy”. I fed him until I thought he could survive on his own on plants and then ceased bottle feeding him. A day or two later, I found him lying on the ground and, in his hair, I found a huge quantity of insects which numbered 3 or 4 per square inch of the goats pelt. I thought to myself: “Maybe this is an emotional reaction to my refusal to bottle feed him any further. In his animal mind, his mother has rejected him, and that has so depressed him, he’s decided to lie down and die.” So, I brought him a bottle of “milk”, and he immediately grabbed it and sucked it dry, got up, and, the next day, was free of insects. I continued to feed him for another week or two and, after that, he remained healthy until some dogs got him perhaps a year later. My experience with Hoppy was and is one which leaves me with no doubt that animals are very capable of some emotions we all too frequently imagine are limited to ourselves.

From Charles Douglas Wehner:

Re: Brain energy use proposed as key to understanding consciousness (June 17): In a study of data compression, I discovered a bedrock principle. Data clumping joins information together, delivering at the very least the nouns of the Chomsky Universal Grammar:

http://wehner.org/compress/index.htm

Because this concept is so fundamental (it is a tiny, tiny concept that is so small that one might miss it unless one delves into a study of it and discovers its remarkable properties), it has to be a fundamental law of nature.

Even such things as the “Theta Storm” of the roused brain are there. It is as fundamental to awareness as binary is fundamental to computers.

However, the study shows that there is so much data that needs to be processed in real time, that “Brain Energy” is needed in large amounts. Indeed, for the silicon implementation, string-matching supercomputers are suggested.

Consciousness goes beyond awareness, however. The “awareness” of my new Calculus of Sets is just the awareness that something is different (a “differal”). Such differals can then be connected to one another by fibrous tissue in the brain, producing a “relational database” of Chomsky nouns.

Only after the relationship between the Chomsky nouns has been evaluated does true consciousness arrive.

I agree with the study “Brain energy use proposed as key to understanding consciousness” from Yale University.

From Ralph Frost:

Re: Brain energy use proposed as key to understanding consciousness (June 17): The article you announced dovetails nicely with an alternate trial theory of consciousness that I have been developing.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Ralph Frost

Link to your article posted at http://structuredduality.blogspot.com.

From Sylvia Valls:

Re: “Warrior gene” reported rife among young thugs (June 5): Have CEO’s currently operating throughout the world been tested for this gene? :--)
If not, will such a control group be used...

I bet you the incidence of this gene, if it exists, may be even higher among Bildebergers than among adolescents attempting to establish their territoriality. Let me know if you take me up on this test...

Dr. Valls (Sylvia Ma.)
Ph.D. Translations
www.institutosimoneweil.net
www.proz.com/pro/17707

From nic kle1 23@m sn.com:

Re: Dark matter doubters not silenced yet (Aug. 2, 2007): What kind of an experiment would need to be done to test for MOND in the lab? Could it be detected within a vacuum bell setup or would the earths gravity, solar system, galaxy etc. still have an effect on the assumed results. Is any testing possible here [earth] or is deep space the only realistic environment for proof?

From Jerry Wyatt:

Re: “Sounds” of individual molecules captured (Feb. 6, 2008): Sounds of individual molecules captured interests me. An analogy of deal people who are able to determine sound through vibrations such as the wood on a stringed instrument will give on different vibrations for different sound pitches. By the feel as well as putting it to the ear will enhance the vibrations to the mind.

I am not deaf nor has it been a study for me. This is merely my ideas about the subject. Would be honored to hear from you as to whether it holds water or not.

Thank you for the interesting posting.

From Frederick Colbourne:

Re: When evolution isn’t so slow and gradual (June 2): Swanne Pamela Gordon’s study indicated that adaptive changes might have been picked up by guppies in new environments. Clearly, the changes were transmitted to the descendants of the guppies that were observed at the beginning of the 8-year experiment. But has the DNA changed structurally (genetics) or has only the expression of the characteristics (epigenetics) changed?

Does this experiment tell us anything about the rate of Mendelian genetic inheritance or does it only contribute to epigenetics? Other experiments have suggested that epigenetic changes revert once conditions change. If this experiment has observed only epigenenetic changes, it does not inform theories of Darwinian evolution of descent by natural selection but instead confirms previous epigenetic research in other species.

From Brian Lee:

Re: When evolution isn’t so slow and gradual (June 2): the examples cited are not evolution. They are merely natural selection by which existing genetic information is merely re-shuffled to reflect different external traits that were already present in the genetic pool.

True evolution (if it exists) would be the appearance of entirely new, unique genetic information that arose through natural processes. These guppies cited in the article neither prove nor disprove anything about the kind of evolution Darwin claims created entirely new forms or functions from new genetic information. In this example, we start with guppies, and we end with guppies. No new forms or functions were created, and the observed “changes” were merely the outward expression of previously existing genetic traits.

“Evolution” as understood by common usage (and Darwin himself) is the supposed development of new life forms or functions by the addition of new genetic material that was not previously in existence. In other words, a fish gradually acquiring new genetic information over a period of time and eventually emerging as an amphibian. I strongly believe that this has never happened, nor will ever happen, because of a severe lack of hard evidence.

I know you will disagree, as all your articles espouse an evolutionary viewpoint, but at least please be consistent when showing examples of “evolution” which are clearly in reality only natural selection. This is merely a bait-and-switch tactic used to give credence to the idea of Darwinian evolution by equating a natural process occurring in the present with something that supposedly happened millions of years ago (another fallacy) as “proof”.

Brian Lee

From Barry Dennis:

Re: “Warrior gene” reported rife among young thugs (June 5): It wouldn’t surprise me to find the same gene in Policemen, Firemen, and professional solders (those who stay in beyond Guard or regular enlistment), lawyers, and others in high-risk or challenging occupations.
The same survival and pack behavior that society has tried to “devolve” is apparent is these groups as well.

This opens up a new discovery horizon; maybe an “organizational” gene in Accountants?

Profiling based on genetic sequences is in it’s infancy; there is much to come. Oh, and it may become possible to identify disparate sequences located in different places along the gene strand that are in fact inter-dependent, one supporting the other, even dependent on mutual reinforcement for “activation.”

Barry Dennis
Woodstock, Maryland

From Michael Elson:

Re: “Language gene” alters mouse squeaks (May 28): I see that in your article on ‘Language Gene alters Mouse Squeaks’, references are made to ‘our own history’, ‘our split from chimpanzees’, etc. still to this very day believing that we are closely ‘related’ to the apes. Basic evolutionary theories state that evolution from one stage to the next replaces the initial stage by a more advanced stage, etc. ad infinitum. If that theory holds water (it is actually filled with holes... ) then how is it that apes still abound on the planet? They should have disappeared altogether. Please respond to this, since I have posed this question so many times in other letters I have written - not necessarily to World Science.

Again I have to point out that merely because we are different in our so-called ‘intelligence’, we appear (to us at least) to be so very superior to other animal life. I think this is insolent and lacking in the proper recognition for those other forms of life. We are the single most solitary form of life on this planet with every natural physical faculty that is far inferior to any other form of life from insects to sperm whales. We can only exist by making all the junk we have to drag about with us in order to survive. Watches, phones, clothes, pen and paper, GPS, knives, guns etc. etc. and we have to make our transportation means from the basic bicycle to fancy cars, aeroplanes and ships.

What a true marvel it is that every other form of life has easily survived without any of that artificial junk encumbering them. One has only to study the cockroach, the ant, the bees, the termites, the beetles and all other animals to see the ease and facility with which they can move about their environment hunting, tracking, climbing, navigating, carrying monumentally heavy items, running, flying, jumping, swimming, building homes and castles, fighting, and many of them are fearfully well armed and armoured - but carry nothing with them. Hundreds - probably thousands of insects have ‘built-in’ radar, night vision, barometric sensors, vibration detectors, range finders, UV sensors and maybe even infrared sensors - and - they are for the most part far, far stronger than even our strongest men. You name it - they’ve got it. They don’t need microscopes to examine the detail of whatever is being peered at; everything they examine is done with what they are equipped with in their heads and bodies. Their antennae, tongues and feet are highly sensitive and are capable of discovering much vital information as to what is inside seed pods for example, and anything else that piques their curiosity.

If we were to drag all that around with us, we’d bogged down with such weight that we’d be very hard pressed to even walk - and not very far at that. Yet we are so infatuated with ourselves that other life forms pale into insignificance. That is a serious indictment.

The 1899 Italian Fiat isn’t ‘related’ to the German 2009 Mercedes Benz. They both still have similar basic components and perform the same basic requirements. Both have humble beginnings. Apes have practically identical basic components to us human beings, but just as the Mercedes has far superior performance to the Fiat, there’s no way that their respective ‘DNA’ can be remotely compared. I’ve seen it stated that chimpanzee’s DNA has 98% similarity to ours. I don’t know how that is evaluated. When I look at a chimpanzee and watch his movements and listen to his unintelligible noises, I’m damned if I can see a 2% difference between him and me. In fact I evaluate 98% for me and 2% for the chimpanzee...

If ever there was even the remotest possibility of a link between us and the apes, it should surely by now have been discovered considering that apes are tree dwellers which limits the geographical parameters to equatorial latitudes. The fact that ‘cave men’ remains and fossils have been discovered certainly does not relate them to apes either, as science is so keen to theorize - in their desperate wish to be proven ape-related. I’d opt for extraterrestrial genetic engineering any day.

From Jon Loux:

Re: Warriors don’t always get the girl (May 12 ): Dear Sir, I am responding to your article on ‘Warriors Don’t Always Get the Girl. ’ I am of the opinion that the human race has been self domesticating over the past several tens of thousands of years and that this process has been unconscious, much like the initial domestication of plants and animals. It was not intentional, but was a natural part of forces in conflict. Your article seems to shed some light on this. I believe that social evolution has governors and that evolutionary traits, evolved randomly, are pared away if they are too strong or two weak. If too much altruism evolves in a community, it self destructs due to an excess of ‘free riders. ’ Alternately, if a society becomes too mistrustful, vengeful and violent, it can no longer support a threshold level of cooperation required to sustain a community and also self destructs. Athens was too nice, Sparta was too brutal.

Self domestication can also explain the huge societal friction between self sufficiency and dedication to the group as seen in literature, folklore, religion and myth. The Garden of Eden’s ‘fall’ from free range hunter-gatherers to sedentary herder-farmers, for instance. Today, we talk about ‘Sheeple’ as a bad thing, but do we really want feral humans? Herman Melville described angels (and us) as ‘well behaved sharks. ’ And of course there is the story of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. All these explore this dichotomy between wild human and civilized human. We are only half domesticated.

My master’s dissertation may be of interest to you. In it I created a computer simulation of the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a group phenomenon to explore some aspects of this idea.

You can find this here.

I have a regular (rarely updated) blog at:

http://philosopherspeashooter.blogspot.com/

Thank you for your time.

From John Schreiber:

Re: Acupuncture found to beat “usual” care for back pain (May 11): The headline “Acupuncture found to beat “usual” care for back pain” does not appear to be supported by the research as you describe it. More accurate would be; “Any attention found to beat ‘usual’ care for back pain”.

The description did not say that “real” acupuncture performed better than “sham” acupuncture. And, I would be willing to bet that it did not really compare “usual” care with acupuncture, it compared “usual” care with acupuncture or acupuncture like extra attention and “usual” care. It would have been unethical and impractical for the researchers to prohibit the test groups from also receiving “usual” care, so we can assume that they did not. Therefore, the three test groups received “usual” and acupuncture, the other received only “usual” care.

Because there is no testable theoretical basis for one part of the test treatment - acupuncture, but there is an established and tested theoretical basis the other - placebo effects, especially on subjective measures like lower back pain, I feel that saying that acupuncture has been show to “beat” another is mistaken.

From Kevin McCready:

Re: Acupuncture found to beat “usual” care for back pain (May 11): It’s the placebo, stupid.

From Archie C. Swindell:

Re: Acupuncture found to beat “usual” care for back pain (May 11, 2009): At least two key questions are not addressed in your review, or perhaps in the article itself.

(1) What statistically significant differences exist among treatment groups, at various post-treatment times and by repeated measures analysis?

(2) Why were the obvious controls not run? -- either needle insertion or toothpick manipulation at sites selected randomly, or selected by a therapist to have NO effect on back pain? When this kind of control has been run in other studies, acupuncture at incorrect sites had the same effect as at “correct” sites.
This whole article is further definitive support for a mechanism widely know to therapy researchers: “placebo effect”.

Archie C. Swindell, PhD.

From Barry Dennis:

Re: A seat of wisdom in the brain? (April 24): First, I’m not a neuroscientist.
It occurs to me that the method of knowledge acquisition and the “conditioning” associated with that knowledge-the reflexive action that occurs when that knowledge is retrieved-has much to do with it’s repository.

It is one thing to sit in a classroom, read that the action in response to an attack is reflex certain; it is another, and I suspect more limbic, to experience that same attack in person, and deal with a later re-occurrence, retrieving that knowledge. It may be one reason why flight-combat simulators are a shade slower in response than what pilots experienced in actual combat have reported.

In any case, I suspect that survival knowledge, when experienced in the course of survival, is differently stored and accessed than say page-turning knowledge.

I also think that survival knowledge “goes deeper” and offers greater “reach” in it’s retrieval because of more synaptic reinforcement. It just makes sense.

I would bet that the pathways and retrieval of survival knowledge is more accessible and more rapidly retrieved, having something, in part, to do with their actual location in the brain.

I also suspect that the training techniques of visualization and repetition, perhaps enacted in different scenarios, can raise the “value” thence the accessibility if certain knowledge. Maybe boxers could be tested?
Then there is always the “age” thing.
If the brain and it’s various functions are indeed like a muscle, how do we continue to exercise survival functioning as we age, and what value does that contribute to overall health?

Barry Dennis
Woodstock, Maryland
1-443-319-4444

From Herbert Gintis:

Re: A seat of wisdom in the brain? (April 24): This report is an example of neuroscientific gullibility. The authors offer a highly speculative idea of the regions of the brain associated with “wisdom.” This is far froms plausible. The authors locate brain areas the function when wisdom-related tasks are performed. This is like saying that chemists revealed the nature of “beauty” by showing that great painters use three main “colors” and they participate in different degrees in making a “beautiful” painting.

Herbert Gintis
Santa Fe Institute and Central European University
Northampton,MA
http://people.umass.edu/gintis

From Gilbert Schultz:

Re: A seat of wisdom in the brain? (April 24): Does a sperm have wisdom, knowing how to swim to meet the ovum? Does the ovum have wisdom, knowing how to attach itself to the uterus? Embryology reveals that there is a marvelous intelligence at play, far beyond the grinding mechanics of the intellect.

There is an intelligence that obviously suffuses all the activities of the universe.

In our struggle to understand, we miss the obvious fact that this intelligence even advises the conceptualizations about the brain, and a thought about it being somehow more important than anything else. Much how mankind believes it is more important than other creatures. Some of those creatures are obviously far more intelligent than us in many ways. Does not the body heal itself, in many cases, quite well if it is left to do its job? As soon as a finger is cut, the bodies intelligence IMMEDIATELY begins to repair the damage, on a microscopic level. ‘We’ can aid this healing in some way but it is not the ‘person’ that does the healing.

Tissues begin to organize themselves and pull the wound back together. Antibodies are animated. An amazing activity goes on below our normal observation. A doctor merely organizes conditions for the body to do its healing in a better way. We imagine the existence of an ‘entity in here’ somewhere who can do all kinds of things. That self-centered activity is often destructive. Look at the world situation and the fear and destruction of mankind.
Do you tell the lungs to breath? Do you tell the heart to beat? No. Start running and the breathing and the heat beat adjust themselves naturally. The natural functions go on without ‘your’ intervention. Postulations about the nature of consciousness are simply the intellect struggling to explain itself. If you simply take a moment to be conscious of consciousness, the intellect is quietened and in that clear space of knowing, everything is clear and obvious, without postulations and theories. Wisdom is pure understanding and true understanding is silent and wordless.

It is the activity of knowing, not the known or the knower, which are simply concepts that merely appear and disappear.

The only thing you are absolutely certain of is the fact of your own being - this immediate presence of being aware.
THAT is not a thought. The axis of being is a concept of being an ‘I’. Cognitive researchers have spent over 30 years attempting to find this ‘I’ or what it is. It is an appearance.
There are no distinct ‘entities’ anywhere. The universe stands before your eyes. as long as you take yourself to be separate from its wholeness, then the mind will simply turn upon a habit of belief.

It may seem confronting to look at these ‘things’ but isn’t it better align oneself with what is obviously true, than to go off on a tangent with theories and postulations?
These thoughts appear naturally, and I don’t claim them as ‘mine’. They have a natural intelligence - it is not common sense.common sense has been infiltrated by a thousand erroneous beliefs.

From Chris Heneghan:

Re: Keeping slim is good for the planet, say scientists (April 20): Have they taken account of the many billions of tons of CO2 stored as body fat, and the catastrophic effect this might have if released into the atmosphere?

From Sylvia María Valls:

Re: Keeping slim is good for the planet, say scientists (April 20): “In nearly eve­ry coun­try in the world, av­er­age body mass in­dex—a meas­ure of obes­ity—is ris­ing. Be­tween 1994 and 2004 the av­er­age male body mass in­dex in Eng­land in­creased from 26 to 27. 3, the re­search­ers said. The av­er­age female body mass in­dex rose from 25. 8 to 26. 9, about 3 kg, or al­most 7 pounds, heav­i­er. Hu­man­kind is get­ting steadily fat­ter.”

Well, but would not the such rise in body mass over a ten year period (1. 3 for men and 1. 1 rise in the body mass index) be accounted for by the fact that we are all getting older and that getting fatter goes with getting older?... or is there no reason for people to get heavier over the years?... Do the Vietnamese remain skinny as they get older... ?

From Joyce Peterson:

Re: New “longevity gene” spurs hopes of long life (May 2, 2007): In Canada, some provinces have a number of centenarians. Nova Scotia is one of these provinces. (Some of my relatives lived to be 100 or more, i.e.age 107. I am of Irish, Scottish and English heritage Some of those who were originally born and lived in Nova Scotia, moved to Alberta and Saskatchewan and Ontario for example.

Also in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia are a number of those from German decent.

Nova Scotia is not a large province and has a lot of history.

The Parrsborough Shore Historial Society, Box 98, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, B0M 1S0 has a lot of heritage information, and might be able to help you, should you be interested in investigating this more.

Joyce Peterson
Scarborough, Ontario

From Vance Hawkins:

Re: Vindictiveness doesn’t pay, study finds (March 30): When ever people write articles like this, and on other topics such as whether the glass is half full or half empty, or about how important “attitude” is -- eg -- how much better a good attitude is thtn a bad one -- I always cringe.

How do you know which came first -- the chicken or the egg? Perhaps the “positive attitude” came AFTER acceptance. Perhaps the “poor attitude” came after denial of desire, and NOT before.

From a scientific perspective -- “half empty” is EQUAL to “half full”. One is NOT better than the other as they are idensitcal! ATTITUDE of the researcher alone skews and enhances the result in favor of the “half full” container.

Now I do NOT hold a grudge, I do NOT believe in “vengeance”. I move on... But the belief that vengeance holds a person back sounds a lot like “karma” and the “half full” argument. I wonder how the researcher decided that the people bent on vengeance “learned” to be vengeful -- perhaps it DID succeed for them, at some point earlier in their lives? Perhaps those who “just let it pass” learned that attitude earlier in their lives from Christian values of “turn the othr cheek” -- a strategy often used by “losers” to fail to fight back. But you say they win in the end... hmmm...

So many variables come into play I wonder how your conclusions can be drawn without controlling all the many variables that might have first come into play generations ago, that affect the attitudes of the people today who participated in that test.

From Linda Weir:

Re: Bird can “read” human gaze (April 2): I am an artist who habitually notices birdlife on rooftops as I draw from upper floor windows aand highspots around the harbour.

Jackdaws have started flourishing here in st. ives cornwall, they are adorable creatures, gentle and reserved, they hop daintily. when I feed the birds here in my high garden, the seagulls descend in a shocking crush, the jackdaws come down quite late in the spree, pay a lot of attention, pick up the bits, are unhurried, unagressive and together in pairs.

They like the guttering of rooftops and find little things, maybe seeds or hatching insects. They are like ‘the child who has his own’ blessed and unhurried by the ministrations of people. A city girl, I was shocked by their beautiful blue eyes and good looking appearance, neat feathers, and reserved and elegant behaviour.

From Meredith Liben:

Re: Bird can “read” human gaze (April 2): In my experience, my dogs use eye contact in a savvy and deliberate way to communicate desires - toward the door to go out, toward the drinking pail when they are thirsty and it is out, toward the cabinet where biscuits are stored. I’ve read other research in your articles about dogs’ ability to influence human decision-making. I find I can do the same in reverse and get them to look at my object if I glance at them and quickly glance to an object and then back to make eye contact.

I got the idea from reading research gathered by Stanley Cohen (How to Speak Dog).

From Michael Elson:

Re: Crabs suffer, remember pain, study finds (March 27): Now that article is right up my street. I’ve long held the belief that all creatures feel pain, which is in direct contradiction to what we were taught in school. Mainly, “all cold blooded creatures do not feel pain.” Ever since I first heard that - 65 years ago - I didn’t believe it. In consequence of that I have always without exception, treated all living creatures with care, especially the smaller little animals, right down to insects - my favourite little creatures.

I am nauseated when I see on TV, those fishing boats off Alaska catching thousands of huge crabs. The men just throw them in the air into a metal container 20 feet away. I am positive that many legs and eyes get smashed, as well as the shells being cracked too. Proportionately, I’d just love to hurl one of those men into the air, to land in a steel box 100 yards away. I strongly doubt that he would survive. Pity - I’d like him to feel the pain.

Science isn’t as smart as they would have us believe, and very many people think scientists are REAL smart people. That kind of person represents those who don’t have opinions themselves, and are quick to spout science quotes to their friends without a single thought about the veracity of the subject or statement, purporting to be ‘well informed’. They must be very dull people, not to mention thoroughly ignorant.

Pain surely is of universal survival importance.

So what’s so valuable about warm blooded creatures feeling pain and reacting to it, versus the ‘expendable’ cold blooded creatures who supposedly do not? I think the problem is that we don’t have instruments powerful enough to register pain in little creatures - very especially those poor frogs who give their very lives in the most horrible fashion in those vivisection classes at schools and colleges, but more so in my favourite little animals - the insects. I’ve seen insects handled extremely cruelly on TV where legs and wings are pulled off a living fly or other unfortunate little creature, and it horrifies me that grown adults can do such a thing. If you are a scientist, please let me rip off one of your arms whislt you are being held captive strapped on a dissecting table.

From Dr. S. M. Sapatnekar:

Re: Vindictiveness doesn’t pay, study finds (March 30): While the observations in the study are interesting, interpretation is difficult to generalize. While negative tit-for-tat may looked down in lower and middle level, what about the top brass? In the Power game, it is the unpredictabilty and potential to cause harm stand out as qualities to acquire and sustain power. Unprovoked assaults and retaliation disproportionatly larger than provocation inspires awe.common man hates it initially, yet surrenders.

Dr. S. M. Sapatnekar
Mumbai, India

From Satya:

Re: Bird can “read” human gaze (April 2): Lots of birds can read the human eye to some extent. Butterfies and house flies can also read human eye. Red robins and swallows have been my most recent experience.

I have noticed that most animals can detect when you are looking at them. This happens particularly when they feed. This is because they are most vulnerable at feeding time.

Other animals read the eye so they can defend their food while eating. You might notice a dog snarling at another dog at feeding time. This is very interesting if you get a wild dog and give it food. The dog will snarl at you as you look at it feeding but calm down when you look away.

From Rick A Harris:

Re: Astronomers catch a “shooting star” (March 25): “Hitting such a fragile asteroid with an atomic bomb, as Bruce Willis did in the 1998 movie Armageddon, would merely turn it in to a deadly swarm of shot gun pellets.” ... is incorrect. Shotgun pellet sized objects hitting our atmosphere at any speed would be harmless. At high speeds, they would burn up quickly. At low speeds they would drop to the surface at a terminal velocity that would harm virtually nothing. A “rain” of shotgun pellet sized stone would be no more harmful than hail, except for planes in flight and the cleanup afterwards!

From Kenneth Saxe :

Re: Schizophrenia reassessed as fixation on self (Jan. 23): I enjoyed reading the article “Schizophrenia reassessed as fixation on self”.

I have seen articles indicating that there is some evidence that cigarette smoking is ‘self-medicating’ for Schizophrenia.

It would be cool if this could be further validated by the MRI brain scans. And if indeed smoking give comfort due to suppressing that region of the brains overactivity, what else may have same affect.

Kenneth Saxe
Configuration Management Analyst

From Edward Medalis:

Re: God and science not an easy mix for many (Dec. 15): As a non religious person I am definitely among those that are not able to mix gods and science.

Notice that I said gods and not god. In todays cultures the word god mostly refers to the monotheistic god of Abraham.

However, over our history humans are said to have invented at least 2500 gods. To my mind all are equally supported by facts.

At the end of the article here author Jesse Pres­ton makes the following statement.

“To be com­pat­ible, sci­ence and re­li­gion need to stick to their own ter­ri­to­ries, their own ex­planatory space.” But “re­li­gion and sci­ence have nev­er been able to do that, so to me this sug­gests that the de­bate is go­ing to go on. It’s nev­er go­ing to be set­tled.” My comments are: I do not believe there is a real debate in the hard core camps. This is because the god(s) folks think faith trumps all other thought and the science folks do not. The science people work from evidence, reason and probability. The god folks are incapable of understanding that faith is not evidence, is unreasonable, and has nothing to do with probabilistic thought. Faith on a particular issue either exists or it does not. I fail to see that faith has any “explanatory space”. All it can ultimately say is “because it is written” in one or another unsubstantiated text or it is what “I think”.

Faith is, by definition, independent of evidence, reason, and probability. Faith is an absolute belief regardless of anything that scientific method might offer when looked at in the short term. However, from a long term perspective it is obvious that faith has been forced to concede turf to science. The total turf is all of existence and the percentage that the faithful are bold enough to claim has and will continue to dwindle. The total turf contains all of us and the percentage of educated humans controlled by the delusions of faith also continues to recede. Until the faith folks all become extinct due to natural causes I hope that the human species can avoid being wiped out by their irrational deeds due to their irrational thoughts. Of course, all of those that claim to be religious are not equally afflicted by myth and superstition and whatever debate does exist is within the minds and interactions of this muddled confused group.

The issue can only be resolved by education and this only works with people who have a mind that is open enough and the courage to face probable reality. What we think is real is a moving target that can only be approached by an open mind, scientific method, and courage. I live and swim in a sea of change and probability and am as comfortable as I can possibly be.

For those that cannot be comfortable in that environment and in order to function need to bury their consciousness in the solid unchanging firmament of faith, I can only offer my sympathy for their mental condition.

From Michael R. (ma rz6 2 AT yah oo.c om):

Re: Brain lives at “edge of chaos” (March 18, 2009): It was surprising, but reassuring to my own theoretical speculations, to see the original work of Per Bak and Kan Chen (Self-Organized Criticality in Complex Systems), returning to the fore in this type of brain research. Their research, which I first read of in Scientific American back in the late 1980’s, has rich application possibilities.

Likewise, however, Stuart Kaufman’s work on Poised Systems (Anti-Chaos in Gene Networks; published not long after the Criticality article, also in Sci Am) would be, conceptually, just as useful in terms of description of behavior. Kaufman posited “poised systems” as existing on the “threshold of order and chaos”, and also posited an “anti-chaos” (opposing complete system breakdown/failure) function to this behavior.

Both owe a bit of gratitude to the late Ilya Prigogine’s work on higher order restructuring (which I predict will make a comeback in this field), and which describes the global behavior of numerous complex systems existing in a “far from equilibrium” state, and, how said systems transition from this state to “higher order” states. The researchers are no doubt familiar with this work (I assume), but might want to revisit it, perhaps to save them some time.

Regarding the article’s last paragraph: I submit that one approach would be using brain scans of people engaged in a learning process (and/or creative process; with control for non-learning/passive cognitive sates), and use statistical/visual comparisons to formulate the conceptual model. For a more artful/poetic description of this, view my short essay, The ‘Art of Learning’, on my chaosmosis (dot) net website... just follow the writing and essays links.

Michael R.

From Kay Walker:

Re: Language of music may really be universal (March 20): This is comes from some very intriguing research- it seems intuitively right, although the computing involved is a bit beyond me these days! The neurologist/physician, Oliver Sacks, has always noted the effect of music on humans, especially those with different brain configurations from the usual- the recent book “Musicophilia” provides a lot of qualitative “evidence” for the culture-free effects of music. As a naive student, I did a little experiment to see whether time was perceived to pass differentially according to the amount of dissonance (to Western ears) of music played during a set time interval. My reasoning was that more traditional Western classic scales might sound more harmonious and “relaxing” in mood, so time would seem to pass more quickly than with more “dissonant” and 12-tone scales as the bases for the pieces I chose.

Sure enough my student subjects estimated that more time had passed with the dissonant pieces. I’ll have to examine the literature to see if someone has had a go at this using the computational biology paradigm!

Kay Walker
Adelaide, S. Australia

From Alan Coady:

Re: Language of music may really be universal (March 20): While I have always felt music to be the universal language, I am alightly uneasy with the notion that the ability to identify happiness/sadness is a good way to go about proving this. The problem is that each of these emotions is more or a spectrum than a fixed state. For example, assuming it is agreed that both serenity and elation are happy states, it is unlikely that any musician would portray these moods using similar music. The same would be true when trying to convey a wistful mood as opposed to a tragic mood.

Alan Coady
Edinburgh

From Steven C. Anderson:

Re: Warning: warning labels may enhance lure of raunchy video games (March 5): Clearly a study to confirm common sense and the obvious. Weren’t these researchers ever children? How large a grant did they receive for confirming this marvelous insight?

Steven C. Anderson
Professor Emeritus
Department of Biological Sciences
University of the Pacific
Stockton, California 95211, USA
http://swasiazoology.tripod.com

From Miguel Melgar:

Re: Faith found to reduce errors on psychological test (March 6): As always, religious people twist statistics to their liking.

It is not god it is fellowship. Those that enjoy healthy fellowship are healthier and last longer. Most non-believers do not belong to any organization that supplies healthy fellowship, at least no in the USA.

Fellowship is the word, NOT god.

From Pieter Folkens:

Re: Rock-throwing zoo chimp stocked ammo in advance: study (March 10): It should be noted that similar behavior (that is, spontaneous plans for future events) has been documented in dolphins for a couple of decades now.

There was a dolphin at Marine World/Africa USA in the 70s and 80s who was trained to retrieve trash from the tank and received a food reward. On many occasions a trainer would come up on deck to a clean tank, completely devoid of trash, and a dolphin with a bit of trash in its mouth asking for the reward. Monthly food review showed that this dolphin was being feed more than the rest. An observer was put below at a viewing port to see if something unusual was going on.

It turned out that this dolphin had a stash of trash in a container lodged in a corner of the pool full of trash. Whenever a trainer came to the deck, the dolphin dutifully went to the stash and took a bit to present to the trainer. It was also noted that the dolphin would reduce large trash items into smaller bits for the stash to last longer.

This dolphin was the first unambiguous evidence that an animal other than primates can make spontaneous plans for future events.

Pieter Folkens
Alaska Whale Foundation/Society for Marine Mammalogy

From Arnold Broese:

Re: Rock-throwing zoo chimp stocked ammo in advance: study (March 10): The conclusion that this monkey “planned” ahead, is too hastily jumped at. As humans we tend to view the thought processes of other species as similar to our own. A squirrel collecting nuts for the winter is not employing a conceptual (abstract) idea of the future, but is rather responding to inner drives which interact with the environment.

In the case of the monkey, the association of stones with safety and self protection, is enough to inspire collecting a pile. Animals live on the perceptual level, not the abstract level. They can see two stones, but cannot grasp the concept “two”. In the same way, the monkey associates stones with protection on the perceptual level. However, to jump to the conclusion that the monkey has applied an abstract thought such as “future”, is not warranted when the simple explanation of association will suffice.

The day that another species is able to count in the abstract, such as consistently being able to fetch the required number of items, is the day it will have been proved that animals can think in concepts.

From Ken Converse:

Re: Faith found to reduce errors on psychological test (March 6): To my mind this explains a lot about how we see those on the “religious right” able to ignore science and even ignore all kinds of social and human rights abuses. They are certain about their beliefs and cannot be bothered by the details of “reality”. I see this as another nail in the coffin of religion and all the damage that it does.

From Gary:

Re: Faith found to reduce errors on psychological test (March 6): the only part of this story that I can say is true is... “re­li­gious peo­ple or even peo­ple who simply be­lieve in the ex­ist­ence of God show sig­nif­i­cantly less brain ac­ti­vity....”

the truth hurts.

From Deborah Hall:

Re: Doodling gets its due: tiny artworks may help recall (March 2): used to doodle in all my classes at a terrible 2nd rate boarding school in South West England In the 1950’s, and was regularly punished with lines for doing so. It would seem that children do a lot of things instinctively. I still always do it when telephoning. Now I know why.

Deborah Hall
Little Paradise
Self-catering Accommodation
www.littleparadise-sa.com