Sunday, June 08, 2003

Memes? Are They Real? Peter A. Corning writes: Some universal Darwinists, Daniel Dennett, Gary Cziko and, most notably, psychologist Susan Blackmore in her new book The Meme Machine (1999), see this reductionist evolutionary dynamic at work in human societies as well. In cultural evolution, Blackmore claims, the replicators are hypothetical entities called memes, a term coined by Dawkins as a cultural analogue for genes. Dawkins intended it as a metaphor, but Blackmore (and others) argue that memes are real physical entities, like genes (DNA). Moreover, memes have a mind of their own; they compete among themselves "for their own sake" [Blackmore's emphasis]. Just as Dawkins characterized organisms as "machines" for making more genes, so every human is "a machine for making more memes....We are meme machines," Blackmore tells us. ... The trouble is, memes don't really exist as a distinct causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won't make it so; I predict that they will prove to be more elusive than the Higgs boson. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural "information", the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as "ideas", "inventions", "behaviors", "artifacts", etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as Edward Wilson's "culturgens". But as a shaper of cultural evolution independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions and judgments -- in short the minds -- of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phogiston and the heavenly aether.  (06/08/03) The Myth of High Oil Prices Andrew McKillop writes: Current world oil output of about 78 million barrels/day (Mbd) includes that by 24 producer countries whose output is well beyond peak, and falling, with some in decline at over 4%-per-year. Annual demand increase on a worldwide base is forecast by many influential sources (like the US EIA and OECD IEA) as likely to be above or close to 1.6 Mbd. In less than 6 years, at that rate of demand growth, a “new Saudi Arabia” is required to satisfy the increase in world demand. No “new Saudi Arabia” will be discovered, proven, developed and produced. As the special case of Iraq shows, major producers can almost overnight collapse, with restoration of production capable of satisfying even domestic needs still being quite far into the future at this time. Oil discoveries, rather than makeover and proving work on older fields, are at best one-fifth of annual consumption on a worldwide base. Underlying this is the simple fact of physical depletion of the world’s geological reserves of oil, as the world moves towards Peak Oil, or the absolute peak of production that can be achieved. This is probably below 85 Mbd. The expansion of nuclear electric power ... at one time believed to shield against rising oil prices through producing far-from-cheap energy ... is almost everywhere stalled, with the number of reactors in service actually declining (from 443 to 441) in the last 2 years. No genius is needed to decide what these and other facts strongly imply for oil prices. Using interest rate hikes to provoke a so-called ‘soft landing’ or controlled fall in economic activity, leading to a fall in oil demand and a fall of oil prices if producers do not cut back their export offer as demand shrinks, is a dangerous weapon at this time. World population growth continues at around 85 million persons per year and the world economy has changed since the early 1980s, and even since the 1990s in which oil markets were “awash with oil,” in the finance and business columns if not in the facts. The oil-lean service economies of the aging OECD countries have massively de-industrialized and outsourced their manufacturing activity, first to the Asian Tigers, and now to China, Brazil and India. This change will itself set a high floor to any worldwide falls in oil demand when or if the OECD bloc decided, foolishly, to engage a round of interest rate hikes to master the challenge of higher oil prices. (06/08/03) Farm Run-off Damages Barrier Reef New Scientist -- Inspired by the population studies that found a link between smoking and lung cancer, reef scientists have compiled what could be the most compelling evidence yet that farming is harming the Great Barrier Reef. ... Conservationists argue that the increased run-off of agricultural sediments, nutrients and chemicals has reduced coral cover and biodiversity in recent years.  ... Katharina Fabricius and Glenn De'ath of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, Queensland, have tried to inject some objectivity into the debate by applying an epidemiological technique first used to link smoking to lung cancer in the 1960s. They have compared the health of the reef at several locations close to agricultural areas with that at several others around 400 kilometres away. The scientists adapted six criteria that were used to pick up causal relationships between smoking and cancer. In their modified form, these included whether known biological facts support the hypothesis that poor water quality stresses coral; whether run-off is associated with poor coral health in different circumstances; and whether or not there is a clear relationship between the pollutant dose and the effect on the coral. Together, the results suggest a causal link between agricultural pollution, low coral biodiversity and poor recolonisation of the reef. They found, for instance, that hard coral biodiversity was almost twice as high on the reefs far from agricultural areas than on the reefs close by. In both areas, coral cover and biodiversity decreased as the dose of pollutants increased, says Fabricius. She plans to submit the work to the journal Ecological Applications. (06/08/03) Avoiding Heat or Bugs? New Scientist -- Humans may have lost their body hair to reduce their vulnerability to fur-loving parasites and therefore attract the opposite sex, a new evolutionary theory proposes. The nakedness of the human species is extremely rare among the 3000 or so living mammal species. Other naked mammals include elephants, walruses, pigs, whales and the bizarre naked mole-rat. A widely accepted view is that humans lost their hair to help control their body temperature as they evolved into upright creatures on the warm plains of the African savannah. But this theory has problems that researchers believe the new theory can solve. "The body cooling hypothesis is interesting, but some of the advantages in not having fur in the Sun become disadvantages at night," says Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK. Humans would lose too much heat at night, he says. "In animals, ectoparasites like biting flies, exert tremendous fitness costs - they really affect our health," he told New Scientist. "Our view is that hairlessness is an adaptation for reducing the ectoparasite load." (06/08/03) World's Drinking Water Running Low BBC Science -- The world's natural supply of underground water, on which two billion people depend, is being run down, according to the United Nations. Water tables are falling by about three metres a year across much of the developing world, according to a study by the UN Environment Programme (Unep). Launching its report on World Environment Day, the UN said governments must take immediate action to reverse the decline. "I hope this report will serve as a wake-up call concerning the human, social and economic consequences of squandering our vital underground water supplies," said Klaus Toepfer, Unep's executive director. Growing populations, industrialisation and more intensive farming are all contributing to a dramatic increase in the use of water. In Arizona, the amount of water being taken from the ground is twice what is replaced naturally, the report says. In parts of the Arabian Gulf, underground water sources are being contaminated by salty sea water pumped from the coast through leaky pipelines to boost city supplies. Developing countries in particular are using up groundwater at what the report calls "an alarming rate". (06/08/03) New Tool for Fighting Malaria BBC Science -- Scientists have discovered a way to kill the malaria parasite - by targeting its sweet tooth. Malaria kills 3,000 children every day and the parasite that causes the disease is becoming harder to treat as it develops resistance to more and more drugs. So scientists are striving to come up with new ways to combat the killer. A team from St George's Hospital Medical School in London, UK, are confident they have come up with one such solution. The malaria parasite needs sugar in the form of glucose to grow and multiply in human red blood cells where it lives. Lead researcher Professor Sanjeev Krishna said: "We have spent 10 years developing new ways of studying parasite transport proteins so that we could work out how to block the action of the glucose transporter. "This discovery proves for the first time that it is worth going after transport proteins of the malaria parasite and that parasites cannot live without this transporter working properly. "We are very excited about this research, as this new information gives us the potential to design new drugs against malaria." (06/08/03) 7:05:05 AM

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