Reflectorites
Here are excerpts for the period 27 April-5 May 2000, from the BBC
News website, with my comments in square brackets.
Steve
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_737000/737345.stm BBC
... 5 May, 2000 ... It pays to be nice. Can evolution explain why we would
give to a beggar? Being nice to other people can bring real rewards over
and above a warm satisfied glow, say scientists. Swiss psychologists have
been trying to figure out why human beings have evolved to co-operate
rather than act in a mostly selfish manner. They invented a laboratory
game...as the game developed, the researchers noticed that the most
generous players actually began to accumulate the most money. The
scientists conclude that doing good deeds increases the likelihood that
someone else will treat you better. [They] were testing a hypothesis known
as altruistic behaviour for indirect reciprocity. This is used to describe
situations where the rewards for unselfish behaviour come from sources
that are not immediately obvious. ... "If I observe you giving money to a
beggar then this theory would predict that I am more likely to give you
something later if you are in need just because I've seen that you are
generous to others. "This is called indirect reciprocity because you don't
benefit from the person to whom you gave the money and I don't benefit
from you." Such research could help us explain why altruism exists in a
Darwinian world of apparently "selfish genes". "Most of us understand
evolution as a struggle, a competition where everyone fights everyone
else," Dr Wedekind said. "There doesn't seem to be much place for
altruistic behaviour. But there are different hypotheses that could explain
why it pays for an individual to be nice to others in the long term." ... Most
research has focussed on two ideas. The first explains altruism with regard
to our close relations: helping our nearest and dearest promotes our own
genes. The second deals with direct reciprocity: if you help me, I will help
you. .... "We found that the students in a controlled lab situation behaved
as predicted. They're generous to those that were generous to others before
them," ... [Nothing better illustrates Darwinism's status as a pseudoscience
that its ability to explain everything and its opposite. If there is selfishness
in nature, that is evidence for Darwinism. But if there is *un*-selfishness in
nature, then that is evidence for Darwinism too! If Darwinism was false,
how would Darwinists ever know it?]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_735000/735715.stm BBC
... 4 May, 2000 ... Hubble finds missing hydrogen ... The Hubble Space
Telescope has been used to find much of the Universe's missing hydrogen.
For many years, astronomers have been hunting for the vast quantities of
hydrogen that were thought to have been "cooked up" in the Big Bang but
which have somehow managed to disappear into the empty blackness of
space. Now they think they have identified it - ironically by finding oxygen.
The HST used the light of a distant quasar - the core of an active galaxy -
to probe the intervening space. ... Astronomers believe at least 90% of the
matter in the Universe is hidden from view in an exotic "dark" form that
has not yet been seen directly. But more embarrassing is that, until now,
they have not been able to see most of the Universe's ordinary matter
either. ... Hubble's latest discovery will shed new light on the large-scale
structure of the Universe. The detection also confirms fundamental models
of how much hydrogen was manufactured in the earliest stages of the
Universe's birth. "This is a successful, fundamental test of cosmological
models," ... "This provides strong evidence that the models are on the right
track." ... Supercomputer models of the expanding and evolving Universe
show a web of gas filaments, with hydrogen, the simplest and lightest
element, concentrated along vast chain-like structures. Clusters of galaxies
form where the filaments intersect. The models predict that vast hydrogen
clouds flowing along the chains should collide and heat up, stopping the
formation of galaxies in the hottest regions. That would mean stars were
more commonly formed in the early Universe when the hydrogen was cool
enough to coalesce. ... [Interesting. I have no problem with this at all. But I
wonder how much credence we should place on claims that all this was
predicted by, and is therefore a test of, "cosmological models"? It seems to
me that there are so many different models floating around that one of
them is bound to closest to what is eventually observed. Maybe that's what
they mean by `Cosmic Darwinism'? :-)]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_736000/736059.stm BBC
... 4 May, 2000 ... Predators: The ultimate killing machines ... Life-
anddeath contests between hunter and hunted have been filmed for BBC
television in an entirely new way. ... Predators, a series of six half-hour
films starting on 4 May, uses miniaturised cameras mounted on the hunters
themselves to show the chase from their perspective. The series also uses
action replays and computer animations, allowing it to analyse the tactics of
predator and prey from every angle. It shows that both are often evenly
matched, with no room on either side for the slightest mistake. ... "What
we're trying to do in Predators is to take a tiny moment in time, the
moment when a predator detects, identifies, approaches and grabs its prey.
... "These are really important moments for understanding how animals
work. Their senses, their bodies, their behaviours are all designed for these
moments." Hunters featured in the first film, The Ultimate Predators,
include cheetahs, crocodiles, golden eagles, great white sharks and spiders.
... The camera system used on a peregrine falcon weighs 100 grams. It has
a lens 10 mm wide, and is the smallest possible broadcast-quality camera.
It, the battery and transmitter were mounted on a harness. The transmitter
had a range of several hundred metres and a life of 30 minutes. It was only
when the film-makers "deconstructed and reconstructed" their footage that
they realised exactly what they had been watching. They discovered that a
sprinting cheetah spends 50% of its time with all four feet off the ground,
and that a diving gannet hits the water at 100 kilometres an hour. That
revelation required the use of a system similar to those mounted on military
missiles, a stripped-down, modified mini-camera in a reinforced housing. ...
The series also reports on one species of spider (Amaurobius) whose
young eat their own mother. It found that polar bears have the best sense
of smell in the bear family, and can detect a seal 64 km away. It takes four
days for a dog whelk to eat a mussel, which in the last ten hours undergoes
a series of fatal heart attacks. And it takes killer whales more than 30 years
to perfect their skill in beaching themselves to catch sealions. But David
Wallace insists that Predators is not gruesome: "There's very little blood
and gore in this. What we're really trying to do is celebrate the
magnificence of the predator - and the prey." ... [I like the bit about "Their
senses, their bodies, their behaviours are all *designed* for these moments"
magnificence of the predator - and the prey." ... [I like the bit about "Their
senses, their bodies, their behaviours are all *designed* for these moments"
(my emphasis)! Much as we humans might be repelled by the thought,
Psalm 104 makes it quite clear that the predator-prey relationship in
animals is a manifestation of the *wisdom* of God. My understanding is that
ecologists have discovered that predators actually *benefit* both their prey,
and the ecosystem as a whole.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_729000/729750.stm ...
BBC ... 28 April, 2000 ... Pictures of the early Universe Scientists have
produced the best evidence yet to show that the Universe is "flat". This
means the usual rules of Euclidean geometry taught in schools are observed
in the cosmos: straight lines can be extended to infinity, the angles of a
triangle add up to 180 degrees and the circumference of a circle is equal to
2pi times the radius, etc ... Enormous structures in the early Universe
which are invisible to the unaided eye become apparent when observed
using a telescope sensitive to light with millimetre wavelengths. ... It shows
the Universe as it makes its transition from a glowing 2,700 deg C plasma
to a perfectly transparent gas, a mere 300,000 years after the Big Bang. ...
They have produced highly accurate maps of the Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB) radiation, which has its origins in the very early stages
of the Universe. Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe was a hot,
dense "soup" in which sub atomic particles interacted strongly with
radiation. But there came a time - about 300,000 years after the Big Bang -
when the matter and radiation "decoupled". The matter went on to form
stars and galaxies. The radiation just spread out into space - where it still is
and can be detected as weak waves of radio frequency. This is the CMB
and it has a nearly uniform temperature across the entire sky: a very cold -
270.45 deg Celsius. But by mapping the tiniest of temperature fluctuations
in the CMB, first done by the Cobe satellite in 1991, astronomers can "see"
the distribution of matter in the early Universe. ... The team say their
analysis of the data strongly indicates that the geometry of the Universe is
flat, and not curved. This result is in agreement with a fundamental
prediction of the "inflationary" theory of the Universe. This theory
hypothesises that the entire Universe grew from a tiny subatomic region
during a period of violent expansion that occurred a split second after the
Big Bang. The enormous expansion would have stretched the geometry of
space until it was flat. The data from Boomerang, published in the journal
Nature, imply that the Universe will go on expanding forever and will not,
as one theory predicts, collapse back into a "Big Crunch". ... See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_727000/727073.stm ...
BBC ... 26 April, 2000 ... Universe proven flat. ... The measurements were
made using a very sensitive telescope suspended from a balloon 40,000
metres (131,000 feet) above Antarctica. The instrument flew around the
frozen continent between 29 December 1998 and 8 January 1999. It has
taken since then to process the one billion measurements. The calculations
alone would have taken six years to complete if run on a desktop
computer. On the Cray T3E supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, US, they took less than three weeks. [More on this
"flat universe" story. The claim that it "is in agreement with a fundamental
prediction of the `inflationary' theory" is vacuous because inflation
predicted the universe would slow down to zero: "when inflation was first
proposed and it was claimed that it predicts a universe with a critical
density (the density at which the universe is "flat" and its expansion slows
to zero at infinite time), but now I hear that a density 30 percent of that is
quite natural for inflation (a density at which the universe is "open" and
expands forever). I think inflation is a great concept, though I'm not sure
it's a scientific theory. Trefil: Why do you say it's not a theory? Paczynski:
At this point, there is enough freedom in the concept. It's flexible enough
that you cannot disprove it. No matter what comes from observation, you
can say, "It is consistent with the theory." ("Fast Forward: A Look at the
Next 25 Years," Astronomy, August 1998, p59). It would be different if
inflation predicted that the universe's expansion should be speeding up and
then astronomers looked and found that it was. But current cosmological
theory predicted the universe's expansion was speeding up. It's discovery
was a complete surprise. Sounds like more `Cosmic Darwinism'?]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_737000/737570.stm BBC
... 5 May, 2000 ... Problem patent reworded ... Scientists in the UK have
changed a controversial patent on a process for culturing human cells to
exclude it being used for cloning people. The changes follow an outcry
from campaigners who feared the original wording in the patent could have
allowed the process to be used for making copies of humans. The thirty-
five page patent application for genetically altering animal cells was
submitted by Edinburgh University and an Australian biotech company,
Stem Cell Sciences, and approved by the European Patent Office .... The
patent referred to "a method of preparing a transgenic animal" but failed to
specify "non-human" in the text. Anti-cloning campaigners and some
European governments said this was essential because "animal" can also
mean human in English scientific usage. ... The patent was probably also a
violation of EU guidelines that take effect on 31 July banning "processes
that would change the genetic identity of human organisms". ... Dr
Mountford stressed that the technology had never been intended for use on
people, but nevertheless praised Greenpeace for highlighting the wording
problem. The European Patent Office has described the error as an
embarrassment, and says it will take care to avoid similar oversights in the
future. Specific patents relating to the technology of cloning known as
nuclear transfer and intended for use on non-human animals was recently
granted by the UK Patent Office. ... [It is hard to believe this was a
mistake.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_728000/728088.stm ...
BBC ... 27 April, 2000 ... Cloning cattle reverses ageing Six cows cloned in
the US show signs of being biologically younger than their actual age ...
The fact that the process of cloning appears to reverse ageing is a major
surprise as Dolly, the cloned sheep, appears biologically older than her age.
The ability to produce young cells of any type may prove lifesaving for a
host of age- related disorders. ... If the same increase was seen in whole
organisms as was seen in the cells, then, Dr Lanza said: "For a human who
might naturally be able to live for 120 years, they could very well live to
200." However, the research breakthrough will lead to renewed questions
over the ethics and safety of cloning animals or humans, as well as the
ethics of extending the lifespan of people. Dr Lanza said: "We think it
would be premature and not safe to apply our work to humans at this point
and not ethical to use it for any other purpose than therapeutic reasons, i.e.
to alleviate suffering from disease." ... the medical implications are far-
reaching: "It's the first day in a new era in treating agerelated disease. We
could take one cell from a patient, make hundreds or thousands of young
cells and give them back a young immune system or give them back young
cartilage in their knees." ... However, producing those cells will almost
certainly involve creating cloned human embryos. These would not be
allowed to grow into babies but there remains strong opposition from some
groups. ... Scarisbrick said: "If this research hastens the drive towards
cloning using embryonic cells, which inevitably causes the death of a
human being, then we would deplore it. "We are totally opposed to cloning
of human beings for any purpose whatsoever." ... [There has been a lot of
hype in this area. About half the animals cloned have developed major
health problems and died young. Also cows and sheep are easier to clone
than most other mammalian species, and therefore it might be much more
difficult to clone human beings, apart from any ethical problems.]
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"Summarizing, one is left with ambivalent feelings. On the positive side,
one is amazed by the ready formation of several biologically significant
compounds, but it is discouraging that many important molecules resist
prebiotic synthesis in acceptable quantities." (Maynard Smith J. &
Szathmary E., "The Major Transitions in Evolution," W.H. Freeman:
Oxford UK, 1995, p.32).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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