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Science News on Saturday, November 22, 2008How Biology and Technology Shape <cite>Sex and War<cite>
Humans and chimps, our closest relatives, share a curious trait: We organize to kill members of our own species. A new book, Sex and War, delves into how the most intelligent apes on Earth, essentially alone in the animal kingdom, evolved the ability to organize for extreme violence. In this Wired.com interview with Hayden and Potts, they talk about the evolutionary adaptation that allows us to kill our enemies, how chimps and bonobos inform our knowledge of human nature, and why the most destructive weapon might be a hormone, not a bomb. Wired.com: Why did you write this book? Why sex and war as topics?
I was struck by how big a factor the desire for revenge for 9/11 seemed to be. I was struck by the momentum, the emotional momentum, in the rush to war. It seemed once we'd been talking about war for a while, it almost became inevitable, despite lots of logical arguments against going to war. I wanted to understand why that was. In the evolutionary psychology literature, you see that those are evolved predispositions. Those are behaviors that we see not just in our own times and in hunter-gatherer people, but, in fact, there are direct correlates we see in chimpanzees.
Wired.com: Why is it important that chimps also kill each other? What are we supposed to take from the presence of similar, violent behavior in chimps?
In the 1970s, Jane Goodall working at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, observed what came to be known as a chimpanzee war. This behavior has been documented several times by several different people. Chimpanzees are territorial and live in troops of male relatives, dominated by an alpha male. They spend a lot of their time foraging for food but the males also spend quite a bit of time patrolling their territory. And on occasion when they are patrolling the borders and come across the someone from a neighboring troop, if they have overwhelming force — four, five or six chimps attacking one — they will launch an attack on that chimpanzee and beat and bite and rip and tear the neighboring chimpanzee, killing or leaving it for dead.
The pattern is what we see in our warfare even today. It depends on surprise and on overwhelming force. The correlate for that would be the shock and awe of the invasion of Iraq. It also depends on a critical evolutionary innovation that allows war to happen. This behavior of intentionally gathering together and going out to kill members of our own species is an extremely rare behavior. Humans do it. Chimps do it. There is some evidence that wolves and hyenas do it. But it's pretty much a human and chimp innovation. You have a very intelligent animal and a social animal. And when you're a social animal, all of the evolutionary pressures are toward living in a group. There are hierarchies. There are mechanisms for resolving disputes in nonlethal ways. That can all be summed up under empathy. But humans and chimpanzees, when they are fighting an out-group, have the ability to turn off the empathy. By turning that off, you dehumanize the enemy or dechimpize the enemy.
Wired.com: Are there records of chimps who are more or less warlike? If so, what are the parameters that behavior?
When Goodall first observed these things, [people] said it was unnatural because they fed them bananas. Whenever there has been systematic study of chimps, there have always been episodes of same-species killing. Wired.com: You've studied the demographics of war. What types of societies are more likely to go to war? Obviously in a complicated set of social behaviors ... but it looks like this is a factor that counts for a proportion of the risk of having a war. We feel it's one of the factors that is open to variation. It's something we can deal with. We can slow population growth if we do it in a respectful way.
Most peoples, not the number of people, but the number of cultures, are monogamous. Men are intrinsically risk-taking and are less selective in their sexual partners and once you get this team aggression in a primate, a new set of things kick in. You add all those things together and you've got a pretty fearsome male animal. That's why I call testosterone the perfect weapon of mass destruction.
Wired.com: How has technology changed the nature of this warring behavior, its biology? Let me point to two things. One is the development of weapons that can kill from a distance. And it probably began by throwing a rock or a sharp stick. And then it was a sharp stick with something sharp on the end of it. In this purest form of battle, you have a small band of males ganging up on an enemy. When even four or five chimpanzees attack one chimp, there is a pretty high risk of being injured. Just like in a fistfight, it's rare you come out of a fist fight without a broken nose or a cracked knuckle. There's a pretty high bar for making that attack because there is a risk of death. But as a soon you can kill from a distance, that calculus begins to shift and that barrier begins to drop. You take it up a notch to a bow-and-arrow, and maybe that you can shoot from behind a tree, and you can kill without being detected yourself. Your risk goes down to near zero. So, what happens, as you increase the sophistication of the killing technology and your ability to kill from a distance, you decrease the barriers to launching an attack, so you increase the amount of war and violence. That's something you see through human history: The most warlike cultures and societies are the ones that have developed simple distance killing techniques ... Bows, slings, that sort of thing. At the extreme other end of technology, you've got nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction where that calculus is turned on its head. You have the potential of using your own weapon, but you also have what we've called for decades now, mutually assured destruction. The risk is so severe that it reverts back to the earlier calculus. If I use this weapon, it could come back on me. So, at the beginning of human technical innovation, you have simple technologies enabling warfare and making it more common and at the far end of it, you have technologies that flip that technology back to the early stages.
Wired.com: Could you point to any other specific technological leaps that really changed the nature of warfare? The balance of those different traits is such that perhaps all men have the ability to be warriors. We have the evolved traits necessary to turn off that empathy. But that doesn't mean there isn't any free choice and there is a lot of environmental circumstance. Nature provides the possibilities and nurture helps shape what actually happens. So, when it comes to terrorism, it only works because of technology, because a small number of people, almost always men, can use technology for leverage. Nineteen terrorists armed with sticks and stones could do very little to affect the United States of America. But 19 terrorists armed with jet fuel-laden aircraft ... The technology pushed their destructive capability way beyond where it would have been. Nineteen men against 300 million people. We would have never known they existed if they hadn't leveraged technology.
Technology has done many wonderful things for humankind through the years, but it also has been a central part of war. The technology of a time really defines the warfare of a time.
Wired.com: Does the study of the bonobos, another close primate relative of humans who are noted for their peaceful behavior, add anything to the discussion of sex and war? My very loving view of the human condition has room for the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Thank goodness we have both species ... If we just had chimpanzees, we might not be quite as hopeful. With the bonobos, we find a great deal of diversity of behavior. I think humans have the capacity for love and peaceful coexistence. The really hopeful thing of looking at war from the perspective of evolution is recognizing that war is built up from a set of evolved predispositions, but that doesn't make war inevitable. Yes, it is inherent, but it's not necessary and we can start looking at things that we can do in social policy that make war less likely and less brutal. You can look at it as trying to figure out what we can do and how we can shape our world so that our bonobo comes out more than our chimpanzee nature. And when you get right down to it, who wouldn't rather be a bonobo? Image: flickr/blueforce4116 See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:44 am The Science of the Future of War
TODAY'S MOST BRUTAL WARS are also the most primal. They are fought with machetes in West Africa, with fire and rape and fear in Darfur, and with suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and elsewhere. But as horrifying as these conflicts are, they are not the greatest threat to our survival as a species. We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species’s existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species. From hands and teeth tearing at isolated individuals, to coordinated raids with clubs and bows and arrows, to pitched battles, prolonged sieges, and on into the age of firearms, the impulse has remained the same but as the efficiency of our weapons has increased, the consequences have grown ever more extreme.
The nineteenth century was dominated by discoveries in chemistry, from dyes to dynamite. The twentieth century belonged to physics, from subatomic particles and black holes to nuclear weapons. The twenty-first century is set to see great advances in biological knowledge, from our growing understanding of the genome and stem cells to, it’s a shame to say, new and expanded forms of biological warfare. In the past, each iteration of the application of scientific discovery to warfare has produced more horrible and destructive weapons. Sometimes temporary restraint is exercised, as in the successful ban on poison gas in the Second World War, but such barriers burst easily, as the deliberate bombing of civilians in the same war attest. Human beings have always appropriated new ideas to build increasingly formidable weapons and there is no reason to think that competitive, creative impulse will disappear on its own. As weapons become ever more horrifying—and, with the rise of biological weapons, increasingly insidious—it is no longer enough just to limit the use of one killing technology or another. We need to limit the conditions that lead to war in the first place. It has become almost a cliché to note that we live in an increasingly complex and interdependent society. But this point is crucially important as we consider the future of war. Our cities once were fortresses, the walled sanctums where our ancestors sought refuge from marauders. The firebombing of the Second World War revealed a new urban vulnerability, but even that insecurity is nothing by today’s standards. We live in giant cities, supplied with piped water and electricity, with trains in tunnels and cars on elevated roadways, with fiber optics under the pavement and air-conditioning plants for buildings with windows that cannot be opened. Our new urban centers have the vulnerability to terrorism and attack built right into them. Any modern city can be held hostage by a single Unabomber, brought to a halt by nineteen fanatical men, or devastated by any small raiding party drawing on modern scientific knowledge, from malicious computer programming to radioactive “dirty bombs” to infectious bacteriology. To understand the dangerous future of these WMDs, we’ll first take a quick look at their history.
Despite the obvious horrors of gas warfare, the British began their
own chemical weapons research in 1916. They tested 150,000 compounds
including dichlorethyl sulfide, which they rejected as insufficiently
lethal. The Germans disagreed, and took up its development. On initial
exposure, victims didn’t notice much except for an oily or “mustard”
smell, and so the first men exposed to this “mustard gas” did not even
don their gasmasks. Only after a few hours did exposed skin began to
blister, as the vocal cords became raw and the lungs filled with
liquid. Affected soldiers died or were rendered medically unfit for
months, and often succumbed years or decades later to lung disease. At
first the British were outraged at its use, but later they sent
supplies of poison gas to their own troops in British India, for use
against By 1918, one-third of all shells being used in World War I were filled with poison gas. In all, 125,000 British soldiers were gassed, along with 70,000 Americans. Three weeks before the end of the war, the British shelled the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry with mustard gas. A young corporal named Adolf Hitler was blinded in the attack—and would later claim that the recovery of his sight was a supernatural sign he should become a politician and save “Germany.” The main motivating factor behind America’s Manhattan Project was fear—fear that Nazi Germany would develop the atomic bomb first. In the 1930s, a Hungarian theoretical physicist living in London, Leo Szilárd, foresaw that a nuclear chain reaction might be possible, and in December 1938, Otto Hahn in Germany conducted the crucial experiment confirming Szilárd's hypothesis. As a young German officer, Hahn had helped release the first chlorine gas at Ypres in 1915, but when the possibility of a nuclear weapon arose he had serious reservations, saying, “if my work should lead to a nuclear weapon I would kill myself.” (Lise Meitner, another physicist, was the first to understand the potential of nuclear fission. She worked with Hahn in Berlin before being expelled from Germany because she was Jewish, and she refused any part in the development of the American bomb.) But while virtually every physicist who saw the potential for nuclear weapons recoiled in horror, scientific genies which can be weaponized are always difficult to keep in their bottles, and impossible during wartime. By the time Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, science had advanced to the point that the best physicists in both Europe and America could see how an atomic bomb was scientifically possible. Soon, many would come to consider it necessary as well. A German effort to build the bomb was launched, and headed by Werner Heisenberg, famous for his “uncertainty principle” of quantum physics. Germany failed to make an atomic bomb by a wide margin, and there is some evidence, controversial to be sure, that Heisenberg and other German physicists had intentionally dragged their heels. Whether true or not, it hardly mattered—Szilárd was convinced the Nazis were making progress and that only the Americans could beat them to the nuclear finish line. He drafted a warning letter, and together with Albert Einstein sent it to President Roosevelt. The Manhattan Project soon followed. The U.S. tested its first atomic weapon in the New Mexico desert at 2:41 A.M. on May 7, 1945—just as the Allies were accepting Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. But the war with Japan raged on, and the new U.S. President, Harry Truman, struggled with the power he now controlled. “Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world...cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto],” he confided to his diary. “The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender.” In fact, Japan was on the verge of surrender and it might well have capitulated had they been told the Emperor could remain on his throne.* The Allies, however, insisted on unconditional surrender, and the Japanese refused. At 8:16 A.M. on August 6, a uranium-235 device called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima; a plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki two days later. On September 2, 1945, the Japanese formally surrendered. The genie was out of the bottle. Within months of the end of the war, Edward Teller, a Hungarian who was part of the team that had developed the U.S. bomb, was working on the hydrogen bomb, an even more powerful weapon. In the Soviet Union, Stalin had authorized work on an atomic bomb as early as 1942, and the Russians were helped initially by lease-lend shipments of uranium and other material from the U.S., and by Manhattan Project secrets leaked by the left-wing physicist Klaus Fuchs. His betrayal is said to have advanced the Soviet work by perhaps eighteen months, and captured German scientists added an extra boost after the war. Russia exploded her first atomic bomb just four years after the Americans. The British had their atomic bomb by 1953, the French by 1960, and the Chinese in 1964. Israel has never confirmed its membership, but is thought to have joined the nuclear club by the late 1970s.
Both Japan and the U.S. worked on biological weapons during World War II, and the Japanese used anthrax and plague bacteria against the chinese. U.S. research continued after the war until 1969, when President Richard Nixon renounced “the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and other methods of biological warfare.” The U.S. unilaterally destroyed its stockpiled biological weapons, a bold step which led to the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. But although the convention was ratified by 140 nations, it lacked policing capacity and within one year of its passage, the Soviet Union began the largest biological weapons program in history. Vladimir Pasechnick, who would defect to the U.S. in 1994, reported overseeing 400 research scientists working on the program in Leningrad, with another 6,000 professionals throughout the country involved in the manufacture of huge quantities of anthrax and smallpox. Iraq also ignored the 1972 convention and in 1990, just before the First Gulf War, a factory south of Baghdad manufactured 5,400 liters of botulinum toxin. The coalition forces had insufficient vaccines to protect their soldiers, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker used diplomatic channels to let Saddam Hussein know that the U.S. would launch a nuclear response if attacked with biological weapons. By the time of the Second Gulf War, Hussein’s biological weapon program had disintegrated. As a physician, I must say that I find germ warfare to be particularly loathsome. There are three possible levels on which it could be waged, each more distressing that the one before. First, a bacterium such as anthrax, which is very stable, could be sprayed or spread around a community. Anyone who inhaled it would come down with a non-specific fever and fatigue, which looks like the onset of flu but, left untreated, leads to fatal pneumonia. An anthrax victim, however, could not infect another person. Second, an infectious agent, such as smallpox, could be used to start an epidemic. Third, a new and terrible disease could be genetically engineered that not only infects, but also avoids detection and resists treatment with our current arsenal of vaccines and antibiotics. This final scenario is the most chilling of all. If anything qualifies as a miracle of modern medicine, it is the World Health Organization’s use of vaccination to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s. The last case of this ancient killer of millions was identified in October 1977 in Somalia. Yet the very fact of our medical triumph over smallpox makes it a particularly devastating weapon. The virus is highly infectious; causes severe, painful disease with a high rate of mortality; and unlike HIV, for example, is quite robust, and can persist in the environment for months or years. Unlike most viral diseases, it is possible to halt smallpox infection by vaccination after exposure. However, the smallpox vaccination must be given within the first forty-eight hours after exposure, and large-scale smallpox vaccination was stopped thirty years ago. A smallpox-based attack now could devastate a large population. But even if an outbreak were quickly contained, it would bring a nation to a halt and be exceedingly frightening and painful. All smallpox samples were supposed to be destroyed following eradication, with the exception of two batches. One is stored at the U.S. Centers for Disease control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, and the other at the Russian State Research Institute of Virology and Biotechnology outside Novosibirsk, Siberia. It is possible, however, that clandestine stocks were kept by Russia, Iraq, Israel, or some other countries, and shortly after 9/11, the World Health Organization decided to postpone the destruction of the final Russian and U.S. samples in case they are needed to provide scientific information to counter a bioterrorism attack in the future. Many other pox viruses and other infectious agents provided by nature could potentially be used as weapons. But the Frankenstein-like creation of novel germs is perhaps an even greater fear. A lethal virus might be assembled accidentally, as happened in Australia in 2000 when an experiment to sterilize rodent pests turned sour. The unintentionally lethal virus killed all the experimental animals, despite attempts at vaccination. And the deliberate quest to make germ warfare more effective by genetically modifying existing bacteria and viruses has already begun. Sergei Popov, a Russian molecular biologist who worked in the Soviet biological weapons program, developed a microbe with the potential to cause a slow death from multiple sclerosis. “We never doubted,” he said after defecting to Britain in 1992, “that we did the right thing. We tried to defend our country.” His words echo those spoken by Werner Heisenberg and other German nuclear scientists after the Second World War almost exactly. Biological agents need not kill to be effective terror weapons. In the case of rodent pest control, thought has been given to using a modified virus that would cause infected female animals to make antibodies against the coat surrounding their own eggs. As a pest control strategy, it would produce a generation of sterile rats. If a similar virus were developed against human beings, it might be years before a slowly emerging epidemic of infertility was even recognized as a deliberate attack. As one scientist has remarked, “the main thing that stands between the human species and the creation of a supervirus is a sense of responsibility among individual biologists.” With an ever-growing population of scientists with the skill to manipulate the genes of bacteria and viruses, “individual responsibility” may prove a gossamer defense indeed. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in many ways defined the mid-twentieth century. But in some ways we can learn even more from the nuclear confrontation that has played out on the Indian subcontinent. In 1948, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, despite being an advocate of non-aggression and ending atomic tests, admitted that, if threatened, “no pious statements will stop the nation from using it that way.” Nehru was right and on May 11, 1974, India detonated a plutonium bomb the size of the Hiroshima weapon. As the Indian threat increased, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, declared that his country would sacrifice everything to make an atomic bomb, “even if we have to eat grass or leaves or to remain hungry.” Many people in that impoverished nation did in fact remain hungry as Pakistan poured its meager resources into a weapons program, which finally resulted in a series of nuclear tests in March 1998. The disturbing lesson is that the technical and economic barriers to WMD acquisition are steadily dropping. The Manhattan project cost two trillion dollars in the money of the time, and involved an industrial effort as large as the whole of the U.S. automobile industry. Pakistan managed the same feat as an unstable third-world country with a fraction of the resources. If Iran and North Korea soon join the nuclear club, it will be in part thanks to nuclear secrets purchased from A. Q. Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani bomb. Perhaps most disturbing of all, there are thousands of pounds of high-grade nuclear material still in the former Soviet Union, left over from the cold War. Some is unaccounted for, and much of the rest is poorly secured, vulnerable to purchase or theft by terror groups. In much the same way, Germany’s World War I chemical weapons were produced by the most advanced chemical industry in the world at the time. The sarin gas released into the Tokyo subway by the Aum religious sect in 1995, which killed seven people and made 2,000 ill, was made by a single, poorly qualified biochemist, Seichi Endo. Also in 1995, an American survivalist purchased plague bacteria on the open market from the America Type culture collection for just $300. Whether used by nations against their enemies, or by small bands of terrorists bent on causing ever greater fear, there is simply too little we can do to stop WMDs and their effects once they have been constructed. Our best hope of security is to encourage and enforce control, while also redoubling our efforts to understand and counteract the conditions that might lead to their use in the first place. We have already stated several times that all team aggression, all raiding, and all wars are ultimately about resources, even if the combatants aren’t consciously aware of it. All life, in fact, at its most fundamental level is about competition for resources. Evolution has been driven by this competition for billions of years, and today’s animals, plants, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi all exist because they competed successfully with their rivals in the past. If we are to have any chance of avoiding the wars of tomorrow, as the destructive power of today’s weapons tells us we must, then we have to address this most basic of biological problems: The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe. Biology has invented a million ways for plants and animals to compete with each other. A tree may compete for light by growing taller; early mammals competed with dinosaurs by only coming out at night; humans and chimpanzees—especially the males—compete for food, space, and reproductive opportunities by fighting with each other. Human wars may come wrapped in a veneer of religion or political philosophy, but the battle for resources is usually just below the surface. When Pope Urban II exhorted the nobles of Europe to join the First Crusade, he contrasted the lands where they lived, which had “scarcely enough food for their cultivators,” with Palestine, where the crusaders would be able to appropriate land from the Infidels. In World War II, the need for land and resources was expressed as Hitler’s concept of lebensraum, or “living space.” “The aim [of] the efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war,” he wrote, “must be to win territory in the East for the German people.” The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because they knew they had to destroy the American Pacific fleet if they were to access the Indonesian oil they needed to supply their industries. As we saw earlier, while rapid population growth and massive unemployment in some settings, such as the Gaza Strip, do not cause wars or terrorist attacks by themselves, they certainly make them more likely.
Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Excavating an Anasazi site in the American Southwest dating from 1150 a.d., Brian Billman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found cooking vessels and the butchered remains of four adults and an adolescent. Sensitive immunological tests revealed evidence of human muscle protein in the pots; even more convincing, the same tests found evidence of human meat in preserved human feces found at the site. When food is scarce, competition becomes increasingly intense and cannibalism, like team aggression, aids survival. Critics have argued that the archaeological evidence for endemic violence in drought-ridden areas is too scattered and circumstantial to draw strong conclusions. A recent study of environment and warfare in contemporary Africa helps put that criticism to rest. Edward Miguel of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues Shanker Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti of New York University compared rainfall levels and incidents of civil conflict across the African continent, and found that as one increased, the other declined, with a statistical certainty of 95 percent. Interestingly, the effect was found across many different cultures and irrespective of whether the country was well or poorly governed. Competition for resources has led to violence everywhere we look. When Polynesian seafarers reached Easter Island about 1,300 to 1,700 years ago, they landed on a forested island full of flightless birds. By about 500 years ago, the trees had been cut down, the animals had all been eaten, and the clans, who identified themselves with the curious stone statues that still dot the island, fell to fighting each other. The population plummeted from an estimated 20,000 to just 2,000 by the time Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century. Here too we find archeological evidence of cannibalism, which lives on in the oral tradition of the islanders. A local insult used on Easter Island even today is, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.” The thought that rapid population growth could increase conflict is hardly new, and certainly Thomas Malthus accepted this relationship in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. As with so many efforts to interpret human behavior, however, the link between resource depletion and conflict has been obscured by extreme arguments. As Shridath Ramphal and Steven Sinding, then of the UN commission on Global Governance and the Rockefeller Foundation, write, “there has been considerably more heat than light in the international dialogue” and efforts have been made that “suit a political, as opposed to a scientific interest.” Those looking at the same landscape of facts but through different lenses end up sparring instead of seeking synthesis. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts, colleagues of ours at Berkeley, castigate writers such as Robert Kaplan, author of The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet, for making too direct a link between resource scarcity and conflict. They point out, citing Karl Marx (who did in fact get a few things right), that economic patterns also help determine who controls and who has access to resources. No doubt some conflicts could be avoided by a more equitable distribution of resources; there is nothing contradictory in arguing for greater social and economic equality while also recognizing that high birth rates can overwhelm the ability of a finite region to sustain its human population regardless of such equality. John May, the World Bank’s demographer for Africa, has drawn attention to the demographic pressure that had built up in Rwanda by the time of the 1994 genocide. The population of Rwanda was two million people in 1950, and on average each woman had almost 8 children. By 1994, average family size had fallen slightly to 6.2, but the population had quadrupled to almost eight million, resulting in a population density of 292 people per square kilometer, the highest in all of Africa. James Fairhead, an anthropologist from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, adds an economic dimension to the analysis. Preceding the Rwanda genocide, Fairhead points out, agricultural land prices had reached an astronomical $4,000 per hectare in a country where many people lived on less than $500 a year. “Land,” Fairhead concludes, “is worth fighting for and defending.” Tragically, the fighting which took place in 1994 left between 500,000 and one million dead. It was cast as an ethnic conflict, and senseless. Once its roots in resource competition are laid bare, however, the violent extermination of an identifiable outgroup takes on the all-too familiar logic of team aggression. Can all conflict be reduced beyond even team aggression and resource competition, down to the single factor of population growth? It’s not quite that simple, but a deeper investigation of the role of population increase shows quite clearly that growth rate and population demographics function as significant triggers for raiding, wars, and even terrorism. If we hope to reduce the number and severity of these violent incidents in our world, this is a relationship we need to understand. Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut and his Russian colleague Andrey Korotayev provide important quantitative insight into the dynamic connections between population growth and conflict. In a careful study of English, Chinese, and Roman history, they showed a statistical correlation between an increase in population density and warfare, although not surprisingly the impact of population growth was not immediate but took some time to develop. It is not the infant playing at the hearth but the hungry landless peasant twenty years later who causes the conflict. Adjusting for this and other variables (such as the fact that wars themselves tend to reduce population), and using robust data on population growth from church records in England along with historical data on conflict, Turchin and Korotayev found that intervals of relative peace and rapid population growth were followed by periods of conflict and slower population growth. Their study suggests that population growth accounts for a powerful 80–90 percent* of the variation between periods of war and peace. Even if the influence of population is substantially less than that, it remains outstandingly important. But here is the crucial point: Rapid population growth is not just an important cause of violent conflicts. In the contemporary world, population growth is a cause that can be contained by purely voluntary means. In the past fifty years the world has accommodated rapid population growth tolerably well, although as rising oil and food prices suggest, this may not be true in the future. The combination of the industrial revolution and science-based technology increased global wealth at an astonishing rate. We have been a little like those first people to cross into North America, or the Polynesians who first landed at Easter Island, in more ways than one, however. Presented with vast new supplies of food, energy, building materials, and luxury goods our forbears could never have imagined, we have gorged ourselves on consumption, and we have driven. Our global population from just one billion people in 1800 to six billion in 2000. We live in a globalized world now, and worldwide population is expected to increase to over eight billion by 2030. The evidence of that increase is now all around us, in our polluted environment, our warming climate, our disappearing rainforests, and our increasingly degraded farmland: We are, as a species, in the process of proving Malthus’s proposition that population will always outstrip resources. Has the age of rapid resource expansion really come to an end? Human ingenuity continues as unchecked as our population growth, and we will no doubt find ways to squeeze more food, water, and energy out of the existing supplies. But there are natural limits on how far efficiency and invention can take us. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of Peace and conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, and Ambassador Richard Benedick, who was the chief U.S. negotiator for the 1987 Montreal Protocol on atmospheric ozone levels, argue that resource wars will become increasingly common in many parts of the world in the twenty-first century.* Water, for example, is becoming a key constraint on development and quality of life in many places. Thanks to dwindling supplies and burgeoning populations, the Middle East and much of North Africa now have one-third as much water per capita as in 1960. Israel has already exploited 95 percent of the available water supply in the country, and uses it efficiently; there is no new supply to tap. In the Gaza Strip, seawater is contaminating groundwater supplies as fresh water is pumped out to supply the growing population. Egypt has depended on the Nile for irrigation, drinking water, and flushing its waste for thousands of years. But even that vast stream of water is now reaching its limits. Martha and I have watched millions of gallons of clear water pour over the Blue Nile falls near Bahir Dar in Ethiopia, and we have sat beside the origin of the White Nile at Jinja on Lake Victoria in Uganda. The two branches join at Khartoum in the middle of the Sudanese desert to make a vast, life-giving flow that has sustained forests, wildlife, and human populations since time immemorial. But by the time the Nile reaches the Mediterranean Sea, it is a sadly depleted shadow of its former self. In the year 2000, there were 170 million people in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, all dependent on the waters of the Nile. There is significant demand for family planning in these countries, but for cultural and political reasons, that demand remains largely unmet. The populations of these three countries will continue to expand rapidly from 190 million today to a UN-estimated 337 million people by 2050. Population will more than double, but there will be no new water supply—all 337 million will be dependent on a source that is already under strain. In a region with a volatile mix of cultures, religions, and ethnicities, the added stress of severe water shortages may well be the spark that sets the team aggression impulse ablaze on a vast and horrifying scale. And yet our consumption continues to increase. In recent decades, a billion new consumers have arisen in China, India, South East Asia, India, Brazil, Mexico, and parts of the former Soviet bloc. When the incomes of these newly affluent people are adjusted to take into account local purchasing power, their potential to buy better quality food, more consumer goods, and more automobiles will equal that of the U.S. While we should welcome the improved living standards and decreased poverty in many parts of the world, finite resources also make it essential that everything possible is done in the West and among the newly affluent to prevent runaway population growth. Norman Myers of Oxford University has shown that if the newly wealthy Chinese were to eat fish at the Japanese per capita rate, they would empty the seas, and if they used cars at the U.S. rate, they alone would consume today’s total global output of oil. In fifteen years, Martha and I have seen Beijing’s and Shanghai’s roads go from two-lane streets filled with bicycles to six-lane super-highways bursting with cars. The price of oil around the world continues to rise with the increased demand, and it is not going to fall to the low levels that Americans expected almost as a natural right just a decade or two ago. As competition for oil and other resources increases, will nations solve their differences through diplomacy, or through war? Optimists point out that some countries, such as the Netherlands, are densely populated but still maintain a high standard of living. The implication is that good government and modern technology can help prevent the worst problems of expanding populations. But such arguments overlook the fact that we all need space to grow the food we need, to collect the water we use, and to absorb the pollution we create. calculated realistically, the Netherlands has an ecological footprint fourteen times its area on the map, because it imports food for people and fodder for cattle, consumes drinking water that fell as rain in Switzerland, and pumps carbon dioxide from its power stations into the global atmosphere. For billions of years, evolution has been driven by competition caused by the simple fact that, left unchecked, all living things can reproduce faster than their environment can sustain. Our population growth today is largely unchecked by hunger, disease, or predators, and it is highly likely that our numbers and industrial demands have already exceeded the environment’s capacity to support them. Mathias Wackernagel in California, Norman Myers in England, and others calculate that we may have exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity as long ago as 1975. According to these calculations, we already need a planet 20 percent larger than the one we have. Such estimates are difficult to make and open to criticism. But it doesn’t take much more than an open set of eyes to realize that current human population growth and economic expansion are going to be impossible to sustain in the long term. competition for resources is about to increase markedly.
Human beings are animated by curiosity. This same impulse to investigate our surroundings which today drives the scientific enterprise originally adapted our ancestors to a harsh, competitive environment. But unfortunately, the mixture of curiosity, the tendency to overreact when threatened, and unquestioning loyalty to our ingroup has become a lethal combination in today’s world. We can expand the envelope of empathy to include greater numbers of people, but in times of war, or perceived threats to our safety, it too often collapses again.
Power, patriotism, and curiosity can drive even the most intelligent and informed men—and it is virtually always men—to turn new scientific discoveries into weapons of mass destruction. The witness of history seems to be that the predisposition to fight and to defend ourselves against attack is so powerful that human beings, once they perceive themselves to be in a life or death struggle of any kind, will always justify research and development of new weapons, however horrendous their effects. It is sobering to note how many winners of Nobel Prizes for science contributed directly or indirectly to the development of weapons of mass destruction—and how many achievements honored with a Nobel Peace Prize fell apart soon after they were awarded. If the Nobel Prize for physics is awarded for accomplishment, the Peace Prize seems very often to reward only effort. But this does not mean that true peace is impossible— so long as we understand the biology of war. We live in very different evolutionary times than any of our ancestors. After 3.5 billion years of competition, life on Earth has reached its carrying capacity. More competition at this point means fighting harder over a constantly dwindling pool of available resources. As we seek ways to solve our environmental crises, address the warming climate, and combat emerging diseases and global poverty, our very survival as a species requires finding more ways to cooperate rather than compete. And thanks especially to WMDs, the survival of our species now also means bringing an end to war as we know it. It is time to leave our history of team aggression behind. These are daunting challenges, to say the least. Each will require the commitment and individual efforts of literally billions of our fellow humans, as well as many careful, specific programs put into effect by entire populations. But there is one action that we must take, individually and as a world, if any of the others are to be successful. It directly contradicts some of our deepest evolutionary programming, but if we are to survive as a species, we must stabilize or even reduce population size. As we’ll see in the coming chapter, to a very large extent that means recognizing that the natural tendencies of men are not consistent with the survival and well-being of their sexual partners, their children, and future generations to come. The most aggressive and violent aspects of men’s inherited behaviors—summarized in the predisposition to team aggression—too often overshadow the more benign aims of women, especially that to have surviving and healthy children. Fortunately, women’s impulses and aims are also based on deep evolutionary programming. All we have to do is create the conditions that allow them to be expressed. Image credit: 1. UNICEF photo/Pierre Holtz 2. Library of Congress: American soldiers in WWI protecting themselves from poison gas. 3. A nuclear test from archive.org. flickr/sandcastlematt 4. A chimpanzee at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. flickr/wordman1 Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:19 am New Longevity Drugs Poised to Tackle Diseases of Aging
Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease: All have stubbornly resisted billions of dollars of research conducted by the world's finest minds. But they all may finally be defied by a single new class of drugs, a virtual cure for the diseases of aging. In labs across the country, researchers are developing several new drugs that target the cellular engines called mitochondria. The first, resveratrol, is already in clinical trials for diabetes. It could be on the market in four years and used off-label as an all-purpose longevity enhancer. Other drugs promise to be more potent and refined. They might even be cheap. "It's going to revolutionize western medicine," said Doug Wallace, a pioneer of mitochondrial medicine at the University of California at Irvine. "All the things that are common for an aging society, and nobody worried about when they died of infectious disease," he said, could be treated. If the idea of a cure-all sounds fantastic, that's because it is. History is littered with failed wonder drugs, elixirs of youth and miracle cures. But these new drugs have shown tremendous promise in mice. And though success in animals is far from a guarantee for humans, the research has gone from tantalizing curiosity to a possible foreshadowing of human health care in the 21st century. As fewer people in the West die of infectious diseases, these new mitochondrial drugs could prevent a wide range of age-related illnesses, though they likely won't extend the lifespans of healthy individuals. Not long ago, the silver-bullet approach was disregarded, and it's still far from achieving a consensus in the scientific community. But standard research approaches to cancer, dementia and heart disease have provided relatively small benefits, and evidence has continued to accumulate in favor of Wallace and like-minded researchers who advocate a mitochondrial theory of disease. The new drugs work by stimulating enzymes that regulate the function of mitochondria. Hundreds of these structures are found in every cell in the body, ceaselessly converting glucose into usable energy. But over time, mitochondria degenerate. They lose strength and efficiency, releasing highly reactive oxygen molecules that bind easily with other molecules and wreak cellular havoc. In the last year, mitochondrial malfunction was associated with heart
disease, just as it's also been associated with Alzheimer's disease and
diabetes. Researchers verified that the cellular changes produced by
caloric restriction — a longevity-enhancing dietary intervention — are enjoyed by
mice taking resveratrol, the first and best-known mitochondrial drug. Resveratrol, which also occurs naturally in red wine, didn't extend the maximum lifespan of the mice,
but it did protect them from the ravages of aging. Most recently, a
next-generation longevity drug with the same molecular target as
resveratrol allowed mice to gorge on high-fat food for four months
without gaining weight or developing diabetes. Early-stage human trials of resveratrol for diabetes appear promising and have been expanded. Those trials are led by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts , which claims to have several compounds in its pipeline that are stronger than resveratrol. The company was purchased last year by GlaxoSmithKline, signaling how seriously mitochondrial medicine is now taken by the pharmaceutical industry. According to Sirtris CEO Christoph Westphal, every major drug company is now researching mitochondrial targets. For many sober-minded scientists, the question is no longer whether an intervention in age-related diseases will happen, but when. And they say it could be soon. "Enough evidence has come out to suggest that, since we've now accomplished this successfully in other species, there's reason to think we could do it in people," said Stephen Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois public health and aging expert, who recently co-authored a British Medical Journal article on the near future of anti-aging research. Olshansky also co-authored an upcoming analysis of American demography in 2050 as part of a $3.9-million MacArthur Foundation research project on aging in America. The analysis assumes a multi-target breakthrough against the diseases of aging. "We genuinely think it's going to happen," he said. "We said that we not only believe it's possible, but should be aggressively pursued as the new approach to health and disease prevention for this century." But not everyone is so enthusiastic. Steve Austad, a University of Texas gerontologist who warned two years ago against thinking of mice "as small little furry humans with long tails," is still unconvinced and doesn't think that mitochondria will be an easy drug target. University of Southern California gerontologist Valter Longo noted associations between mitochondria and health aren't yet as firm as their proponents suggest. "As far as aging itself and the major diseases of aging are concerned, such as cancer and Alzheimer's, we really have no idea how important mitochondrial damage is to it. It's not clear that major diseases are caused by mitochondrial damage, though that's still a good bet for where to go," Longo said. He added that resveratrol does appear promising for obesity and diabetes. There's also the issue of side effects. Resveratrol has proven safe in animals and early clinical trials, but much more testing is required. As a cautionary, Longo offered the example of his own research on caloric restriction and genetic manipulation of IGF-1, a cell-growth-regulating gene. In simple organisms, it's produced the most-dramatic life extension ever seen — yeast lived 10 times its normal lifespan — but a group of Ecuadorians who naturally have that mutation have severe growth deficits and other health problems. Even Longo, however, thinks resveratrol will enjoy some success in the near future, and mitochondrial approaches are being steadily embraced within the medical research community, which has been largely frustrated in its disease-by-disease, gene-centered approach. "The approach we've taken is to go one disease at a time," said Olshansky. "We've created national institutes to go after all these major diseases, and every time we identify a new gene, or do something that lets us attack disease a little more efficiently than before, everyone jumps up and says we've succeeded and that's wonderful." Such research is important, said Olshansky, but not as promising as hitting diseases at a common root. And though he won't yet commit to resveratrol as a wonder drug, he suspects that mitochondria-targeting drugs will provide a breakthrough. The most important question now, he said, is how much the drugs will cost. Harvard gerontologist David Sinclair, who co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and first showed resveratrol's effect on mice, says the drug will be inexpensive. Since the company is testing its own formulation as a diabetes drug, it will need to be priced at just a few dollars per dose, competitive with other diabetes treatments. People who use it off-label for other diseases would pay the same price. But that's still speculative, said Olshansky, and there's no guarantee of resveratrol's efficacy. To make sure of success, he said, there needs to be a massive public investment in research. "We believe we know how much it will cost to generate an intervention that slows aging in people," he said. "It will cost about $3 billion. It could be developed in enough time to influence the health and longevity of baby boomers. And any intervention that helps them will help all subsequent generations." This may seem far-fetched. The makers of resveratrol and other mitochondrial medicines are merely the latest scientists to promise easy and universal health in a bottle. But everything is unproven until it's proved. "Powered flight research was fruitless until it wasn't," said Aubrey de Grey, founder of the longevity-research-sponsoring Methuselah Foundation. "The harder we try, the sooner we'll succeed." Image: The Fountain of Youth / Lucas Cranach the Elder Video: A mouse taking resveratrol (right) runs twice as far as a control mouse in the laboratory of David Sinclair / a4m1510 See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 11:55 pm Ex-Hermaphroditic Strawberries Form Evolutionary 'Missing Link'
Insight into the mystery of sexual difference has come from a strange place: hermaphroditic strawberries that evolved the ability to spawn single-sex offspring. Researchers documented how members of Fragaria virginiana become male or female depending on the combination of genes they inherit from a hermaphroditic parent. Hermaphrodites have both male and female reproductive systems. "Our study provides a window into when those genetic regions are just beginning to form, and how selection might act on them," said study co-author Tia-Lynn Ashman, a University of Pittsburgh plant biologist. The findings, published in Heredity, agree with prevailing hypotheses about the emergence of sexual difference. The details of that emergence — not just male peacock tails or spider sizes, but sex itself — are one of the lasting mysteries of science. The strawberries' transformation began with autosomes: chromosomes that are identical in both sexes. (In humans, most chromosomes are autosomes, with the exception of the X- and Y-chromosome.) Hermaphrodites possess only autosomes, yet certain mutations produced single-sex offspring in the strawberries. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that such a mechanism would be necessary to establish the genetic preconditions of male and female. In an accompanying commentary, University of Miami botanist Richard Moore called the findings a "missing link." According to Ashman, becoming male or female allows creatures to avoid genetic deficiencies caused by inbreeding. It also lets them focus their energies in a reproductively beneficial way. "The individual no longer has to make allocation decisions — should it produce eggs or sperm, seeds or pollen?" she said. "They can put all their investment into one role, and be better at it — getting their pollen out farther, making more sperm." Ashman will next study the emergence of sex in papaya and asparagus. A ‘missing link’ in the evolution of sex chromosomes [Heredity] Image: Fragaria virginiana / J&U Botanist WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 11:37 pm Eye Flicker Explains 'Enigma' Optical Illusion
When the eye movements, called microsaccades, were suppressed, test subjects reported that the Enigma illusion — an illustration that seems to flicker and turn — remained stationary. Scientists don't yet understand exactly how microsaccades contribute to vision, but they seem to help us perceive peripheral details while fixated on an object. (To experience this yourself, focus on the dot in the image at right. The fixation will reduce your microsaccades and cause the surrounding circle to fade.) "Our subjective experience is that sometimes our eyes move, and sometimes they don't. But they're moving all the time," said Susana Martinez-Conde, a visual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Martinez-Conde's findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do more than explain a neat trick. They also suggest an answer to an optical controversy: whether motion in static images originates in our eyes or our brains. The eyes have it. "If we can prove that microsaccades are involved, this rules out the hypothesis that the illusion comes solely from the visual cortex. It may be involved, but the illusion starts with the eye," she said. Martinez-Conde still doesn't know exactly how microsaccades create the false perception of motion. She suspects that each slightly differing peripheral image either displaces or is superimposed over the previous image, resulting in movement. Further research is needed on the causes, she said, but her findings may be immediately insightful: Microsaccade disorders may underlie some vision disorders. "Individuals could produce too many microsaccades, or not enough," said Martinez-Conde. "But they're not typically studied in eye exams."
Microsaccades drive illusory motion in the Enigma illusion [PNAS] ' Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 10:21 pm NASA Test-Fires Next-Gen Ejector Seat
Welcome to the next generation of "ABORT!" NASA test-fired the latest ejector seat for the Space Shuttle replacement this week, sending flames shooting into the Utah sky. To get the crew away from the launch rocket in case of an emergency, the Launch Abort System motor delivers half a million pounds of thrust; by design, it burns through more than half of its fuel in just three seconds, which will mean the astronauts in the escape vehicle will have to endure G-force of several times a standard Shuttle launch. The new abort system will provide astronauts with a way to escape a catastrophic disaster during ascent. American manned spacecraft have Via > @Nasa_Edge See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 8:33 pm The Crusade to End a Horrific Disease Costs 10 Cents Per Person
Massive donations from GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, made the victory possible according to a report this week in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Both companies provided antiparasitic pills, 1.3 billion of them, for the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis. The disease, caused by nematodes that colonize the lymphatic system, affects at least 120 million people worldwide. As the worms reproduce, they cause ulcers and extreme swelling. The antiparasitic Albendazole kills the parasites by damaging microtubules in their intestines and brains. Another drug, Ivermectin, can destroy their nervous systems. Each treatment costs less than 10 cents and often has additional benefits, ridding its recipients of infections including lice, roundworm, and hookworm. Half a billion people will receive the parasite-killing medications this year alone. By 2020, the disease may be history. Photo: Wuchereria bancrofti worms are among the main causes of lymphatic filariasis. Credit: Centers for Disease Control Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Nov 2008 | 8:39 am Hairspray exposure may increase birth defect riskScientists have found preliminary evidence that exposure to hairspray during the first three months of pregnancy increases the risk of a common genetic deformity in baby boys. The team found that the risk of hypospadias - a defect in which the urinary opening forms on the underside of the penis - increased from 4 in 1,000 boys to 9.6 in 1,000 when the mother was exposed to hairspray during her work. The team also found that folic acid, which mothers are advised to take during early pregnancy to avoid neural tube defects, seems to prevent hypospadias. Taking the supplement led to a 36% decrease in risk. Contrary to previous research, the scientists found that a vegetarian diet did not increase a mother's risk of giving birth to a boy with hypospadias. Prof Paul Elliott, head of epidemiology and public health at Imperial College London, said the study was too preliminary to draw firm conclusions. "My view personally is that people shouldn't be overly worried about this in terms of everyday use [of hairspray]." His team conducted a telephone survey of 471 women whose sons had been diagnosed with hypospadias and 490 randomly selected women who had given birth to boys in the same period. They asked about occupational exposure to various chemicals and other lifestyle factors such as household income, vegetarianism and smoking. One theory for why hairspray might affect a child's development involves chemicals called phthalates. The EU banned their use in cosmetics in 2005, after the boys in the study were born. Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 1:23 am Ben Goldacre: I have a cold, and I know that there is almost nothing I can do, except sit it outI have a cold (and they're worse than you remember when you're well). Throughout the nation, homeopaths and self-declared nutrition therapists are celebrating. More importantly, I know that there is almost nothing I can do, except sit it out, and wait. Vitamin C will shave a few hours off it, at high doses, like 7g a day, which I can happily live without. Although literally anything I try will appear, to me, to work: because unless I'm seroconverting with HIV (not that I'm prone to hypochondria) I will get better anyway. This is the natural history of the illness, and it's true with most things. When your back pain is at its worst and you visit your doctor - or your friendly local spoonbender - it's bound to get better, because these things come in cycles, or as statisticians say, they "regress to the mean". You can look at regression to the mean mathematically, if you like. On Bruce Forsyth's Play Your Cards Right, when Brucey puts a three on the board, the audience all shout: "Higher!" because they know the odds are that the next card is going to be higher than a three. "Do you want to go higher or lower than a jack? Higher?" "Lower!" So I could take homeopathy. Or I could, equally stupidly, harass my GP for antibiotics, even though they are ineffective in treating a viral cold. In one study, prescribing antibiotics rather than giving advice on self-management for sore throat resulted in an increased overall workload through repeat attendance. If a GP prescribed antibiotics for sore throat to 100 fewer patients each year, they calculated: 33 fewer would believe that antibiotics were effective, 25 fewer would intend to consult with the problem in the future, and 10 fewer would come back within the next year. If you were an alternative therapist, or a drug salesman, you could turn those figures on their head and use them as a blueprint to drum up more trade: because we are all prone to see patterns where there is none, and more than that, to believing that our actions have results. This was demonstrated in a chilling experiment several decades ago. Subjects were recruited to play the role of a teacher trying to make a child arrive on time for school at 8.30am. They sat at a computer, on which it appeared that each day, for 15 consecutive days, a child would arrive at some time between 8.20 and 8.40. Since this was a psychology experiment, the subjects were lied to: they did not know that the arrival times were entirely random, and predetermined before the experiment began. Nevertheless, participants thoughtfully deployed punishments for lateness, and rewards for punctuality. When they were asked at the end to rate their strategy, 70% concluded that reprimand was more effective than reward in producing punctuality from the child. It's a touching testament to their own beliefs about the world. These people were convinced that their actions had an impact on the punctuality of the child, even though the arrival time was entirely random. The joy is, you have no way of knowing how many areas of your life this experiment might be relevant to. Now I'm going to dangle some goat entrails around my neck and get chanting. • Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:40 am Stewart Dakers: Face to faithStewart Dakers: Faith and science need a collective reformation to celebrate the power of loveSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:40 am Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supplyRich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies. The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports. "These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals. Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year. "In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We're used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much." At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries. According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors. Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply. Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields. Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar's land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas. Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors. "If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam's head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don't see any place for the small farmers." Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land." Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations. Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I'd say 'you are taking a very big risk'. Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don't learn the lessons of history." Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:40 am Nasa veteran offers tips to British students on how to walk in spaceBritain may be scorned for refusing to send humans into space, but from next week it will have the next best thing: its own university course on how to be an astronaut. Staff at Leicester University have called in a former Nasa astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, a veteran of five space shuttles, to teach the course which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbox. Hoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble space telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and an announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut team. Britain has never had an astronaut train through ESA because its funding covers only robotic missions and ground-based astronomy. "There's a strong student interest," Hoffman said. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency." Hoffman will draw attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers that could be sent out from a moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites. The Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers, at which human space exploration will be discussed. Martin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage. "They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap?" Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:39 am Astral discovery: Copernicus skeleton identifiedScientists appear to have solved a mystery that has lasted more than 400 years by identifying the skeleton of Nicolaus Copernicus, founder of modern astronomy. The key to the puzzle were two strands of hair found in Sweden among the 16th-century scientist's papers, and a tooth and femur bone that were taken from the remains of a man found in the chancel of Frombork Cathedral in northern Poland four years ago. Copernicus was a priest at the cathedral. Reconstruction of the skull found in an unmarked grave showed it resembled portraits of him made during his lifetime and also matched the age when he died. DNA testing proved the hairs, tooth and bone were from the same person, leading scientists to conclude the remains were, almost without doubt, those of Copernicus. Copernicus turned on its head the concept held by the establishment for more than 1,000 years that the sun orbited the earth and planets, proving it was the other way round. His theories led to conflicts with the powers of the day that remained unresolved when he died in seclusion in 1543. Archaeologists dug up the skeleton in 2004 and sent it to forensic experts who reconstructed its facial features. But attempts to match DNA from the skeleton with the remains of Copernicus's bishop uncle Lukas Watzenrode, who was also buried in the church, failed. The breakthrough came after the discovery of a book with notes made by Copernicus, in which the Swedish geneticist Marie Allen from Uppsala University found two hairs. She was able to isolate the cells that were subsequently matched to genes of the Frombork skeleton. Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 22 Nov 2008 | 12:39 am UK university launches astronaut courseBritain may be scorned by other nations for steadfastly refusing to send humans into space, but from next week it will have its own university course on how to be an astronaut. Staff at the University of Leicester have called in former Nasa astronaut Jeff Hoffman – a veteran of five space shuttle missions – to teach the course, which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbag. Hoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The UK government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and is due to announce its conclusions by the end of the year. The announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut corps. A British astronaut has never trained through Esa because the UK's funding of space only runs to robotic missions and ground-based astronomy. "There's a strong student interest in this despite the fact that the British government has not supported human participation in spaceflight," Hoffman told the Guardian. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency." Hoffman will draw particular attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers, which could be sent out from a manned moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites. The Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers at which human space exploration will be discussed. Martin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage. They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap? "Only a very few people are ever going to become astronauts, even if the UK was fully signed up to human space flight. Most people won't get to do it, but they will become highly qualified physicists and engineers and will get involved in the space industry in different roles. What we want them to come out with is a real grasp of practicalities of living and working in space and what we need to do in the future." Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 21 Nov 2008 | 6:09 pm Why bees are the most invaluable speciesBees were last night declared the most invaluable species on the planet at the annual Earthwatch debate. The audience heard from five eminent scientists who battled it out for fungi, bats, plankton, primates and bees. While of course all species are invaluable for our ecosystem, the debate is designed to raise awareness about conservation by asking the audience to vote for just one of the species to receive a fictitious cheque for one trillion pounds to be spent on their conservation. It comes us no surprise that the audience voted to save the bees. Who would want a world without honey, flowers, and third of everything we eat including chocolate and coffee? Not me. Some 250,000 species of flowering plants depend on bees for pollination. Many of these are crucial to world agriculture. Bees increase the yields of around 90 crops, such as apples, blueberries and cucumbers by up to 30%, so many fruits and vegetables would become scarce and prohibitively expensive. In addition, many of our medicines, both conventional and alternative remedies, come from flowering plants. And cotton is another essential product pollinated by the bee, so we could say goodbye to cheap T-shirts and jeans. But it's not just the human race that would suffer. Spare a thought for the poor birds and small mammals that feed off the berries and seeds that rely on bee pollination. They would die of hunger and in turn their predators – the omnivores or carnivores that continue the food chain would also starve. We could survive on wind-pollinated grains and fish, but there would be wars for control of dwindling food supplies. South America's ancient Mayan civilisation is thought to have died of starvation. Although other insects and animals do pollinate – such as bats, butterflies and even wasps – |
