Faster Than The Speed Of Light?

I'd like to put up this excellent short piece by W. Daniel Hillis, the renowned computer scientist and engineer. It was originally published in How Things Are: A Science Toolkit for the Mind by John & Katinka Brockman (1996), and it outlines the bare basics of why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. This may bring disappointment to sci-fi movie fans with a liking for 'time travel' movies, which often propagate the idea that time travel is possible after travelling faster than light speed. Far from shattering illusions of the possibility of doing so at some point in the future, this article actually serves as a quick crash course into a basic issue of physics. Slightly technical in the beginning but gets easier and easier to understand, eventually resulting in a realisation of learning. Enjoy.

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Special Relativity: Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?

You've probably heard that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but have you ever wondered how this rule gets enforced? What happens when you're cruising along in your spaceship and you go faster and faster until you hit the light barrier? Do the dilithium crystals that power your engine suddenly melt down? Do you vanish from the known universe? Do you go backward in time? The correct answer is none of the above. Don't feel bad if you don't know it; no one in the world knew it until Albert Einstein worked it out.

Image courtesy: Fx-1988

The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation is to understand the simple equation that you've probably seen before: e = mc². In order to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: i = 144f. The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (12² = 144). Another way of writing the same equation would be i = c²f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c² is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c² is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing. It turns out that just a little bit of mass is equal to a whole lot of energy, so in the equation, the conversion constant is very large. For example, if we measure mass in kilograms and energy in joules, the equation can be written like this: e = 90,000,000,000,000,000 m. This means, for example, that a charged-up battery (which contains about one million joules of energy) weighs about 0.0000000001 grams more than a battery that has been discharged.

If we work with different units, the conversion constant will be different. For instance, if we measure mass in tons and energy in BTUs, then c will be 93,856,000,000,000,000. (It happens to work out that the conversion constant in a particular set of units is always the speed of light in those units, but that is another story.) If we measure both energy and mass in what physicists call 'the natural units' (in which c = 1), we would write the equation: e = m, which makes it easier to understand; it just means that energy and mass are the same thing.

It doesn't matter whether the energy is electrical energy, chemical energy, or even atomic energy. It all weighs the same amount per unit of energy. In fact, the equation even works with something physicists call 'kinetic' energy, that is, the energy something has when it is moving. For example, when I throw a baseball, I put energy into the baseball by pushing it with my arm. According to Einstein's equation, the baseball actually gets heavier when I throw it. (A physicist might get picky here and distinguish between something getting heavier and something gaining mass, but I'm not going to try. The point is that the ball becomes harder to throw.) The faster I throw the baseball, the heavier it gets. Using Einstein's equation, e = mc², I calculate that if I could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour (which I can't, but a good pitcher can), then the baseball actually gets heavier by 0.000000000002 grams - which is not much.

Now, let's go back to your starship. Let's assume that your engines are powered by tapping into some external source, so you don't have to worry about carrying fuel. As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying 'massier' not 'heavier' since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns - the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this 'relativistic time contraction.')

The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier.

And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

Neuroscience and the Soul

Just spotted this letter published in the Feb 27 issue of Science. It addresses matters raised by non-materialist neuroscientists the Intelligent Design lobby about mind/body duality. I'm adding it here to my blog since this issue is one in which I am likely to participate in the future and so I would like to log as many instances of this "culture war" as possible. It is a hard task, but the logic of this letter is quite hard to refute in my opinion.

Neuroscience and the Soul

Science and religion have had a long relationship, by turns collegial and adversarial. In the 17th century Galileo ran afoul of the Church's geocentrism, and in the 19th century Darwin challenged the biblical account of creation. The breaches that open at such times often close again, as religions determine that the doctrine in question is not an essential part of faith. This is precisely what happened with geocentrism and, outside of certain American fundamentalist Christian sects, evolution. A new challenge to the science-religion relationship is currently at hand. We hope that, with careful consideration by scientists and theologians, it will not become the latest front in what some have called the "culture war" between science and religion. The challenge comes from neuroscience and concerns our understanding of human nature.

Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system. This first became clear in the realms of motor control and perception (1, 2). Yet, models of perceptual and motor capacities such as color vision and gait do not directly threaten the idea of the soul. You can still believe in what Gilbert Ryle called "the ghost in the machine" (3) and simply conclude that color vision and gait are features of the
machine rather than the ghost.

However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?

By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. "Nonmaterialist neuroscience" has joined "intelligent design" as an alternative interpretation of scientific data (4). This work is counterproductive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus' day (5, 6).

To be sure, dualism is intuitively compelling. Yet science often requires us to reject otherwise plausible beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. A full understanding of why Earth orbits the Sun (as a consequence of the way the solar system was formed) took another century after Galileo's time to develop. It may take even longer to understand why certain material systems give rise to consciousness. In the meantime, just as Galileo's view of Earth in the heavens did not render our world any less precious or beautiful, neither does the physicalism of neuroscience detract from the value or meaning of human life.

Martha J. Farah*
Center for Cognitive NeuroscienceDepartment of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mfarah@psych.upenn.edu

Nancey Murphy
School of Theology
Fuller Theological Seminary
Pasadena, CA
91182, USA

References

1. M. Jeannerod, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action (Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, 1997).
2. M. J. Farah, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision (Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, 2000).
3. G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949).
4. M. Beauregard, D. O'Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul (HarperCollins, New York, 2007).
5. N. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2006).
6. J. B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life (Baker, Grand Rapids, MI, 2008).

Oh-Oh-Obama!

Looks like the entire blogosphere is abuzz with the news of President Obama's reversal of the foolhardy Bush philosophy of restricting stem cell research. So there isn't much to say that everyone else hasn't already said, and will just join everyone in the celebrations and jubilations.

After the signing of this Executive Order, the federal funding ban is now lifted and scientist researchers will now have government support and tax dollars to carry out lines of research that will bring advances as amazing as the growing of new organs for transplantation. As for the neuroscience field, stem cells (from monkey teeth!) will achieve fabulous things such as stimulating the growth and regeneration of brain cells. In this one example, Huang et al. (2008) at Emory University implanted dental pulp stem cells from the teeth of rhesus macaque monkeys were placed in a murine hippocampus. Cells born 7 days after the implantation went on to form neurons and neural progenitor cells (NPCs), and by 30 days indications of astrogliosis were observed. Astrogliosis refers to an increase in the number of astrocytes, a type of glial cell that performs many supportive functions to the brain including tissue regeneration following injury, as well as maintenance of the blood-brain barrier. In short, monkey stem cells promoted growth, cell recruitment and maturation of of repair responses in mice brains. How great is that?!

There is already talk of stem cells being used in connection with Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's Disease. Who knows what the future will bring? Scientists have been seething that such positive and encouraging research has been stifled, if not blocked altogether, by the Bush administration's myopic and misguided view that has more concerns with, surprise surprise, political ideology and the religious right. And now, thanks to President Obama's move, research can go on and the (US) National Institutes of Health have four months to set guidelines. Not bad at all.

And what more, Obama has issued a presidential memorandum that protects scientific research from political influence. So hopefully no one will think of messing around in the future. Below is the official text of the memorandum:

Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.

The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.

By this memorandum, I assign to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (Director) the responsibility for ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement with scientific and technological processes. The Director shall confer, as appropriate, with the heads of executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and offices and agencies within the Executive Office of the President (collectively, the "agencies"), and recommend a plan to achieve that goal throughout the executive branch.

Specifically, I direct the following:

1. Within 120 days from the date of this memorandum, the Director shall develop recommendations for Presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch, based on the following principles:
(a) The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate's knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity;
(b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency;
(c) When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer
review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards;
(d) Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions;
(e) Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised; and
(f) Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decisionmaking or otherwise uses or prepares.

2. Each agency shall make available any and all information deemed by the Director to be necessary to inform the Director in making recommendations to the President as requested by this memorandum. Each agency shall coordinate with the Director in the development of any interim procedures deemed necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific decisionmaking pending the Director's recommendations called for by this memorandum.

3. (a) Executive departments and agencies shall carry out the provisions of this memorandum to the extent permitted by law and consistent with their statutory and regulatory authorities and their enforcement mechanisms.
(b) Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

4. The Director is hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Sounds fairly reasonable.

Why Turning Out Brilliant Scientists Isn't Enough

A brilliant article by Prof. Robert Winston from New Scientist magazine (31 January 2009):

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THIS year sees the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow's influential Rede lecture on the "two cultures", in which he argued that the breakdown of communication between the sciences and the humanities was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. One of his premises - that those problems would be solved by better science - now seems a little naive. However, his point that the sciences and humanities need to learn to communicate better, and people to understand each other better across the divide, is as pertinent as ever.

In the UK, the issue of how scientists engage with - and, crucially, listen to - the public has become increasingly prominent since the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology held an inquiry into Science and Society in 1999. Before this, many believed that for people to trust more in the value of science, it would be enough for scientists simply to educate the public. These days it is widely understood that fostering public engagement - rather than just mere public understanding - is of key importance.

This makes sense. Most scientific research in the UK is paid for by the taxpayer, and when technologies have a negative impact the consequences can be profound for everyone. The scientific knowledge we pursue is public property. We scientists have a duty not merely to tell people what we are doing (a skill not taught as well as it should be in most universities), but also to listen to people's fears and hopes and respond to them, even when we feel their antagonism to be ill-founded. Being open in this way has been shown to have real advantages. A good example is the success of the ScienceWise project set up by Kathy Sykes at the University of Bristol, UK, which uses public dialogue to help policy-makers reach better decisions about science and technology issues.

A two-way dialogue - communication in the fullest sense - seems more likely than a one-way lecture to lead to a maturing of views and resolution of conflict. It can help scientists to accept that some public concerns may be justified, and that recognising them can improve their science; and it makes the public aware of the good intentions of scientists. If we show that we care about the ethical implications of our work, people are likely to be more sympathetic. Dialogue has been shown to be a much more constructive and valuable process than the web-based consultations and opinion polls that policy-makers previously relied on, and has been very successful in the public discussion about embryology and nanotechnology.

Science organisations have started to recognise that people need to think about these issues early in their careers. Many of the programmes run by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which this month relaunched as the British Science Association (BSA), increasingly encourage improved scientific literacy among school students.

Indeed the science community as a whole is starting to acknowledge that it must interact with the public more fully. When I started making science television programmes, I was frequently accused of dumbing down. After the BBC transmitted The Human Body series 10 years ago, I was painfully ostracised at scientific meetings and at the Royal Society, even though the series was viewed by around 19 million people in its first weeks and widely used as teaching material in schools. Now it is a delight that TV science programmes by colleagues such as Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey, Marcus du Sautoy of the University of Oxford and Kathy Sykes are seen by many scientists as valuable contributions to public engagement.

We need to do much more. We have a duty to conduct research to ensure that the ways we attempt to engage really do have an impact, yet there is still no consensus on the best way to conduct such studies. In the UK we must make certain that the increasing sums of money that bodies such as the research councils and the Wellcome Trust are prepared to spend on public engagement are not wasted.

University science education also needs to improve. We turn out excellent chemists, physicists and biologists, but their education is not always well-rounded. Too few science undergraduates explore the ethical issues of their subject, and young scientists often seem to think they deal in certainty and "the truth". The nature of science is much more complex. In this respect, the Beacons for Public Engagement initiative run by the UK Higher Education Funding Council and the research councils should be valuable, encouraging university students to be more involved with societal issues and researchers more open about their science and its implications.

C. P. Snow may have been right in arguing for better connection between science and the arts, but not necessarily about identifying two distinct cultures. The remarkable creativity of science is an integral part of human culture and it needs to be thought of in this way. We scientists can help bring this about by engaging with the wider world about what we do and its implications for society. We need to show that we too have human values. Snow would surely have approved.

Robert Winston is Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London.

War On Neuroscience? What War?

After the initial shock of reading the article about Creationism's declaration of war on neuroscience, I thought I had better give some of my own thoughts. It would be very easy (and also very lazy) to rant on as many have already done by condemning them as "stupid" and IDiots (ID = Intelligent Design, IDiots = advocates of ID) although I do feel that way sometimes. One of my favourite science writers, Steven Novella, has written an excellent two-part review of the article and also provides some of the background behind the controversy:

Reports of the Demise of Materialism Are Premature

Reports of the Demise of Materialism Are Premature - Part II

This whole affair annoys me deeply because, as a general researcher, I am bound to keep up with all the latest developments in the field so as to maintain my own standard of knowledge as well as being properly equipped to deal with issues that I come across. What to speak of any patients I may eventually treat! And now I am going to have to take a greater care with what I read. Of course due care and caution needs to be taken with what we anyway, such as whether experimental studies have been carried out by using a fairly rigorous methodology and whether the (statistical) data really do support the conclusions, but now every time I read a paper that presents somewhat startling or surprising results I'm going to have a niggly little voice in the back of my head asking, "Did an IDiot write this?"

I've already had some disturbing run-ins with IDiotic papers (blogged here) and I still shudder at the memory. Aside from all that, though, is the disturbing possibility of how old notions of neuroscience are proposed for ressurrection (for want of a better term!) in order to substantiate this new 'battle', implicated in the very term 'non-material neuroscience' that is being thrown around by them suggests that they are on a mission to decry 'material' neuroscience as if it is a bad thing. What any good neuroscientist would know through years of private practice and research is that a duality between the two doesn't exist: the mind is the brain and vice versa. This is experienced even in empirical ways where we see a patient suffering from brain injury very often undergoes variable personality changes. The effect of any changes of course depends on the severity of the injury, and cases like these have been known about and treated for nigh on two centuries already (as per the incredible case of Phineas Gage). In short, an injury (or deficiency) to an important part of the brain generally causes the patient to exhibit behaviour that is synonymous with the injury or deficit at hand. The important point about cases like these, and which is often missed, is that it is possible to suggest that fundamental things such as 'thoughts' and 'personality' which are usually thought of in abstract terms can be said to have a material origin.

This point is very unpalatable for those who tend to a spiritual or otherwise New-Agey outlook on life, and who would be given to beliefs or sentiments that favour a sense of being a controller of one's own destiny. One certainly can exhibit control over certain areas in ones life, but this isn't about which outlook, viewpoint or worldview is correct or superior. This is about simple facts. And these facts make it clear that a material viewpoint is the only real path one can take to understanding issues of neuronal importance. Any reasonable person who gives a moment's thought to the concept will be able to understand that all our experiences - sensory, emotional, somatic, metaphysical - are processed only through the brain. Thus, even at the outset, the idea of a "non-material neuroscience" as propounded by Schwartz, Beauregard, and those of their ilk, is defeated.

But for me, this is one of those areas where science and philosophy merge to such an extent that it becomes a big blur. What the ID movement is trying to do is ressurrect "Cartesian dualism" which, put simply, is Rene Descartes' idea that mind and body are separate. Applied to neuroscience, this translates as the mind being a separate and different 'entity' from the brain tissues that host it. He summed up this idea in the famous saying, "cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am." According to Descartes, the mind and the body were composed of different types of substances just as oil and water. How could this be? We can see from our own experience that if we think about kicking someone up their bum and have our minds instruct our foot to do so, signals are sent to the leg that prepares and allows our foot to take aim and kick. Conversely, our bodies can also have an effect on our minds; a cut on the hand, for instance, may be painful enough to send distress signals to our brains and perhaps lead us into a state of panic. It seems that there is some ostensible connection between our bodies and minds.

Although Descartes insisted on their being separate entities and didn't adequately answer how these connections take place, Cartesian dualism, the theory that espouses these views, has come to explain these connections as a form of interactionism, that the (separate) body and mind interacted with each other in some way. In what ways they do that also hasn't been adequately explained. There are other types of dualism of course.

Perhaps the explanations above may go some way in explaining the shortcomings of the dualist theory, and why monism, the conception of the mind and the brain being one entity, is a much better model to use in trying to understand neuroscientific issues and problems. This kind of view is apparent in many modern descriptions of mind: 'Minds are simply what brains do' (Minsky, 1986); "'Mind is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out' (Claxton, 1994); Mind is 'the personalisation of the physical brain' (Greenfield, 2000). To quote Susan Blackmore:

"Such descriptions make it possible to talk about mental activities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate mind. This is probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think of 'mind' today, but there is much less agreement when it comes to consciousness." - Consciousness: An Introduction, 2007 (p. 13).

And this is in fact one of the current problems in neuroscience: how consciousness works. The New Scientist article correctly identifies this as an area where the ID movement are very likely to strike. But before we discuss that, a short description of consciousness must suffice. To describe a neural function that is, to say the least, responsible for our being alive is very hard to do. Is it appropriate to describe consciousness as a 'live' phenomenon? What about those unfortunate individuals who exist in a vegetative state due to horrific injuries, aren't they technically "alive"? Or are they? Who can adequately describe consciousness, in all its fancies and frivolities, dreams and nightmares, naturals and supernaturals, illusions and vividity, in a way that would comprehensively define it? The answer is: there isn't one. Consciousness is simply too big and too difficult to describe and there is no general definition that could come close to fully explaining it.

However, there are ways in which we can come close to understanding it or how it works. The ability to categorise stimuli and react to them, to discriminate between things, the way different cognitive structures integrate to provide information, the reportability of mental states, the mechanics of focus and attention, the deliberate control of behaviour, the difference between sleep and wakefulness, all of these are generally separate issues that can be understood in themselves. They are what we call the 'easy' problems of consciousness, denoting that these issues are relatively easy to understand when sufficient research has been carried out and these processes unfold. When we have 'easy' problems, it automatically follows that we have a 'hard' problem and it is this very hard problem that lies unsolved in the mystery of consciousness. The hard problem can be properly described as how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Or put another way, how can the functioning of neurons (objective processes) give rise to the subjective experiences that make us who we are, our loves, our joys, our sadnesses, our life experiences, our memories, our emotions, everything about us that makes us unique?

This is an issue that neuroscience cannot yet fully explain, although research is always ongoing. Some neuroscientists are sceptical and say that the hard problem will never be solved. Others think, as per the article, that new physical principles need to be postulated in order to guide research and solve it. Still others suggest that sufficient research into the easy problems will cause the hard problem to disappear automatically. Time (and research) will tell.

There will be those who, throwing their hands up in frustration (or thunder from their pulpits à la Jeffrey Schwartz), decide it's all a waste of time and go to the opposite extreme in their extreme thirst for an explanation. As per Daniel Dennett (1991), 'accepting dualism is giving up.' And this is precisely what these people appear to have done in joining the ID movement. But before you start thinking about the influence of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, Steven Novella has shown how the current agents for non-material neuroscience have links to Buddhism, loose associations with Deepak Chopra, as well as the intellectual abuse of quantum mechanics. This makes things a little more difficult because there are some neuroscientists who are interested in Buddhist meditational methodologies (and who employ them in their own lives) as a tool to better understand the experiential quality of consciousness, and some papers are sometimes published that discuss the possibility of what those Buddhist principles may be able to contribute to research in the area. Novella also goes into an excellent discussion of what constitutes the correct understanding of materialism, or naturalism, that is required to understand scientific or neuroscientific issues, and how IDeology diverts and is generally incompatible with the basic precepts of science, such as how a hypothesis should be falsifiable in principle. One example of this is how ID'ers suggest that "unexplained" issues in science can be explained once one accepts the notion of an intelligent top-down designer ('Godiddit!'), but how could this assumption be falsifiable? How is it possible to even prove that an intelligent designer exists? Thus, how could ID ever be scientific in spite of their claims to be so?

All in all, it appears that the IDeologues have learnt nothing from their abject failures in attacking evolution. As outlined in their mission statement they seek nothing less than the destruction of materialism, so it is expected that they will simply up sticks and move somewhere else to kick up a fuss. If they follow similar strategies to when they attacked evolution, we can expect more of the same: attacking all the "weak points" and filling the gaps with God. The disturbing thing is that they do this academically and while wearing the same white lab coats that genuine scientists wear, so the public will be fooled into thinking that any controversy they stir up will be a genuine one and that "conflicting opinions" may have some substance to them. They will publish their "scientific" academic papers (mostly in their own journals) and leave them to confuse the innocent wide-eyed newbies. This is all very disappointing, and underlines all the negatives of being influenced by an ideology that conflicts with the facts. Who would ever attempt to square a circle? Yet this is what the IDiots are trying to do.

I do not think much of their declaration of war. What war? Based on previous history, IDiots hardly ever come up with any real evidence of their claims; they simply re-interpret older and 'classic' experiments to suit their ways of thinking. When the 'weaknesses' of neuroscience are an open secret, the ID'ers will have the tough job of explaining away the 'hard problem' as well as having to explain how Cartesian dualist principles are valid after all. I'm not envious, but I'm not expecting too much from them either. Simply saying 'Godiddit!' to everything isn't a scientifically valid answer nor does it provide satisfactory explanations. It also turns out that David Chalmers, the philosopher who coined the term 'hard problem', has shown significant unease at how it has been hijacked by the ID'ers and has made some interesting points on his blog.

What worries me are the reactions of the public. As mentioned before, they are likely to be fooled into thinking that non-material neuroscience is just as equal and valid a paradigm as 'material' neuroscience is. We are likely to hear more 'spiritual' explanations for how various neural functions work from individuals such as the odious Deepak Chopra, and quite possibly the repellent 'Godiddit!' chorus from the Bible-quoting (or Dhammapada-quoting) peanut gallery. And of course, the usual criticisms about evil crackpot scientists with their chemicals and their test tubes, and how damn myopic and narrow-minded they are to ignore the "spiritual realm" in their doomed endeavour to search for the meaning of everything. This isn't a fantasy - this is history - which has the peculiar quality of repeating itself. That the whole evolution debacle even made it to several legal courts and education boards brought the indignation of many a scientist and a judge, but the one good thing about this "war" on neuroscience is that it is unlikely to have a large effect on public education as the subject is generally only taught at university level. Still, the idea of graduates' heads being filled with 'alternative' theories (when there are already plenty of 'orthodox' theories to digest) is something that causes me to shudder.

At the end of the day, what matters is that - war or no war - this shift is important to acknowledge and represents a challenge for this scientific establishment to face it head-on. Plenty of people would disagree about there being anything to face, and they would be right, but the final paragraph of the article was very telling: "What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the 'God of the gaps'."

And this is the reason why this blog exists. It represents my very small and humble contribution to public education.

Why Are Some People Black?

As a follow-up of sorts to the last post on evolution, an excellent article by Steve Jones from the same book discusses the reasons for why evolution results in different skin complexions. It was written around 1996 or so.

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Everyone knows - do they not? - that many people have black skin. What is more, black people are concentrated in certain places - most notably, in Africa - and, until the upheavals of the past few centuries, they were rare in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Why should this be so? It seems a simple question. Surely, it we cannot give a simple answer, there is something wrong with our understanding of ourselves. In fact, there is no straightforward explanation of this striking fact about humankind. Its absence says a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution and of what science can and cannot say about the past. Any anatomy book gives one explanation of why people look different. Doctors love pompous words, particularly if they refer to other doctors who lived long ago. Black people have black skin, their textbooks say, because they have a distinctive Malphigian layer. This is a section of the skin named after the seventeenth-century Italian anatomist Malphigii. It contains lots of cells called melanocytes. Within them is a dark pigment called melanin. The more there is, the blacker the skin. Malphigii found that African skin had more melanin than did that of Europeans. The question was, it seemed, solved.

This is an example of what I sometimes think of as 'the Piccadilly explanation.' One of the main roads in London is called Piccadilly - an oddly un-English word. I have an amusing book that explains how London's streets got their names. What it says about Piccadilly sums up the weakness of explanations that depend, like the anatomists', only on describing a problem in more detail. The street is named, it says, after the tailors who once lived there and made high collars called piccadills. Well, fair enough; but surely that leaves the interesting question unanswered. Why call a collar a piccadill in the first place? It is not an obvious word for an everyday piece of clothing. My book is, alas, silent.

Malphigii's explanation may be good enough for doctors, but will not satisfy any thinking person. It answers the question how but not the more interesting question why there is more melanin in African skin.

Because the parents, grandparents, and - presumably - distant ancestors of black people are black, and those of white people are white, the solution must lie in the past. And that is a difficulty for the scientific method. It is impossible to check directly just what was going on when the first blacks appeared on earth. Instead, we must rely on indirect evidence. There is one theory that is, if nothing else, simple and consistent. It has been arrived at again and again. It depends solely on belief; and if there is belief, the question of proof does not arise. Because of this, the theory lies outside science.

It is that each group was separately created by divine action. The Judeo-Christian version has it that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden. Later, there was a gigantic flood; only one couple, the Noahs, survived. They had children: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Each gave rise to a distinct branch of the human race, Shem to the Semites, for example. The children of Ham had dark skins. From them sprang the peoples of Africa. That, to many people, is enough to answer the question posed in this essay.

The Noah story is just a bald statement about history. Some creation myths are closer to science. They try to explain why people look different. One African version is that God formed men from clay, breathing life into his creation after it had been baked. Only the Africans were fully cooked - they were black. Europeans were not quite finished and were an unsatisfactory muddy pink. The trouble with such ideas is that they cannot be disproved. I get lots of letters from people who believe passionately that life, in all its diversity, appeared on earth just a few thousand years ago as a direct result of God's intervention. There is no testimony that can persuade the otherwise. Prove that there were dinosaurs millions of years before humans, and they come up with rock 'footprints' showing, they say, that men and dinosaurs lived together as friends. So convinced are they of the truth that they insist that their views appear in school textbooks.

If all evidence, whatever it is, can only be interpreted as supporting one theory, then there is no point in arguing. In fact, if belief in the theory is strong enough, there is no point in looking for evidence in the first place. Certainty is what blocked science for centuries. Scientists are, if nothing else, uncertain. Their ideas must constantly be tested against new knowledge. If they fail the test, they are rejected.

No biologist now believes that humans were created through some miraculous act. All are convinced that they evolved from earlier forms of life. Although the proof of the fact of evolution is overwhelming, there is plenty of room for controversy about how it happened. Nowhere is this clearer than in the debate about skin colour.

Modern evolutionary biology began with the nineteenth-century English biologist Charles Darwin. He formed his ideas after studying geology. In his day, many people assumed that grand features such as mountain ranges or deep valleys could arise only through sudden catastrophes such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, which were unlikely to be seen by scientists as they were so rare. Darwin realised that, given enough time, even a small stream can, by gradually wearing away the rocks, carve a deep canyon. The present, he said, is the key to the past. By looking at what is going on in a landscape today. It is possible to infer the events of millions of years ago. In the same way, the study of living creatures can show what happened in evolution.

In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin suggested a mechanism whereby new forms of life could evolve. Descent with modification, as he called it, is a simple piece of machinery, with two main parts. One produces inherited diversity. This process is now known as mutation. In each generation, there is a small but noticeable chance of a mistake in copying genes as sperm or eggs are made. Sometimes we can see the results of mutations in skin colour; one person in several thousand is an albino, lacking all skin pigment. Albinos are found all over the world, including Africa. They descend from sperm or eggs that have suffered damage in the pigment genes. The second piece of the machine is a filter. It separates mutations which are good at coping with what the environment throws at them from those which are not. Most mutations - albinism, for example - are harmful. The people who carry mutant genes are less likely to survive and to have children than do those who do not. Such mutations quickly disappear. Sometimes, though, one turns up which is better at handling life's hardships than what went before. Perhaps the environment is changing, or perhaps the altered gene does its job better. Those who inherit it are more likely to survive; they have more children, and the gene becomes more common. By this simple mechanism, the population has evolved through natural selection. Evolution, thought Darwin, was a series of successful mistakes.

If Darwin's machine worked for long enough, then new forms of life - new species - would appear. Given enough time, all life's diversity could emerge from simple ancestors. There was no need to conjure up ancient and unique events (such as a single incident of creation) which could neither be studied nor duplicated. Instead, the living world was itself evidence for the workings of evolution. What does Darwin's machine tell us about skin colour? As so often in biology, what we have is a series of intriguing clues, rather than a complete explanation.

There are several kinds of evidence about how things evolve. The best is from fossils; the preserved remnants of ancient times. These contain within themselves a statement of their age. The chemical composition of bones (or of the rocks into which they are transformed) shifts with time. The molecules decay at a known rate, and certain radioactive substances change from one form into another. This gives a clue as to when the original owner of the bones died. It may be possible to trace the history of a family of extinct creatures in the changes that occur as new fossils succeed old.

The human fossil record is not good - much worse, for example, than that of horses. In spite of some enormous gaps, enough survives to make it clear that creatures looking not too different from ourselves first appeared around a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Long before that, there were apelike animals which looked noticeably human but would not be accepted as belonging to our own species if they were alive today. No one has traced an uninterrupted connection between these extinct animals and ourselves. Nevertheless, the evidence for ancient creatures that changed into modern humans is overwhelming. As there are no fossilised human skins, fossils say nothing directly about skin colour. They do show that the first modern humans appeared in Africa. Modern Africans are black. Perhaps, then, black skin evolved before white. Those parts of the world in which people have light skins - northern Europe, for example - were not populated until about a hundred thousand years ago, so that white skin evolved quite quickly. Darwin suggested another way of inferring what happened in the past: to compare creatures living today. If two species share a similar anatomy, they probably split from a common ancestor more recently than did another which has a different body plan. Sometimes it is possible to guess at the structure of an extinct creature by looking at its living descendants. This approach can be used not just for bones but for molecules such as DNA. Many biologists believe that DNA evolves at a regular rate; that in each generation, a small but predictable proportion of its subunits changes from one form into another. If this is true (and often it is), then counting the changes between two species reveals how closely they are related. What is more, if they share an ancestor that has been dated using fossils, it allows DNA to be used as a 'molecular clock,' timing the speed of evolution. The rate at which the clock ticks can then be used to work out when other species split by comparing their DNA, even if no fossils are available.

Chimpanzees and gorillas seem, from their body plan, to be our relatives. Their genes suggest the same thing. In fact, each shares 98 percent of its DNA with ourselves, showing just how recently we separated. The clock suggests that the split was about six million years ago. Both chimp and gorilla have black skins. This, too, suggests that the first humans were black and that white skin evolved later. However, it does not explain why white skin evolved. The only hint from fossils and chimps is that the change took place when humans moved away from the tropics. We are, without doubt, basically tropical animals. It is much harder for men and women to deal with cold than with heat. Perhaps climate has something to do with skin colour. To check this idea, we must, like Darwin, look at living creatures. Why should black skin be favoured in hot and sunny places and white where it is cool and cloudy? It is easy to come up with theories, some of which sound pretty convincing. However, it is much harder to test them.

The most obvious idea is wrong. It is that black skin protects against heat. Anyone who sits on a black iron bench on a hot sunny day soon discovers that black objects heat up more than white ones do when exposed to the sun. This is because they absorb more solar energy. The sun rules the lives of many creatures. Lizards shuttle back and forth between sun and shade. In the California desert, if they stray more than six feet from shelter on a hot day, they die of heat stroke before they can get back. African savannahs are dead places at noon, when most animals are hiding in the shade because they cannot cope with the sun. In many creatures, populations from hot places are lighter - not darker - in colour to reduce the absorption of solar energy. People, too, find it hard to tolerate full sunshine - blacks more so than whites. Black skin does not protect those who bear it from the sun's heat. Instead, it makes the problem worse. However, with a bit of ingenuity, it is possible to bend the theory slightly to make it fit. Perhaps it pays to have black skin in the chill of the African dawn, when people begin to warm up after a night's sleep. In the blaze of noon, one can always find shelter under a tree.

The sun's rays are powerful things. They damage the skin. Melanin helps to combat this. One of the first signs of injury is an unhealthy tan. The skin is laying down an emergency layer of melanin pigment. Those with fair skin are at much greater risk from skin cancer than are those with dark. The disease reaches its peak in Queensland, in Australia, where fair-skinned people expose themselves to a powerful sun by lying on the beach. Surely, this is why black skin is common in sunny places - but, once again, a little thought shows that it probably is not. Malignant melanoma, the most dangerous skin cancer, may be a vicious disease, but it is an affliction of middle age. It kills its victims after they have passed on their skin-colour genes to their children. Natural selection is much more effective if it kills early in life. If children fail the survival test, then their genes perish with their carriers. The death of an old person is irrelevant, as their genes (for skin colour or anything else) have already been handed on to the next generation.

The skin is an organ in its own right, doing many surprising things. One is to synthesise vitamin D. Without this, children suffer from rickets: soft, flexible bones. We get most vitamins (essential chemicals needed in minute amounts) from food. Vitamin D is unusual. It can be made in the skin by the action of sunlight on a natural body chemical. To do this, the sun must get into the body. Black people in sunshine hence make much less vitamin D than do those with fair skins. Vitamin D is particularly important for children, which is why babies (African or European) are lighter in colour than are adults. Presumably, then, genes for relatively light skin were favoured during the spread from Africa into the cloud and rain of the north. That might explain why Europeans are white - but does it reveal why Africans are black? Too much vitamin D is dangerous (as some people who take vitamin pills discover to their cost). However, even the fairest skin cannot make enough to cause harm. The role of black skin is not to protect against excess vitamin D.

It may, though, be important in preserving other vitamins. The blood travels around the body every few minutes. On the way, it passes near the surface of the skin through fine blood vessels. There, it is exposed to the damaging effects of the sun. The rays destroy vitamins - so much so, that a keen blond sunbather is in danger of vitamin deficiency. Even worse, the penetrating sunlight damages antibodies, the defensive proteins made by the immune system. In Africa, where infections are common and, sometimes, food is short, vitamin balance and the immune system are already under strain. The burden imposed by penetrating sunlight may be enough to tip the balance between health and disease. Dark skin pigmentation may be essential for survival. No one has yet shown directly whether this is true.

There are plenty of other theories as to why some people are black. For an African escaping from the sun under a tree, black skin is a perfect camouflage. Sexual preference might even have something to do with the evolution of skin colour. If, for one reasons or another, people choose their partners on the basis of colour, then the most attractive genes will be passed on more effectively. A slight (and perhaps quite accidental) preference for dark skin in Africa and light in Europe would be enough to do the job, This kind of thing certainly goes on with peacocks - in which females prefer males with brightly patterned tails - but there is no evidence that it happens in humans. Accident might be important in another way, too. Probably only a few people escaped from Africa a hundred thousand years and more ago. If, by chance, some of them carried genes for relatively light skins, then part of the difference in appearance between Africans and their northern descendants results from a simple fluke. There is a village of North American Indians today where albinos are common. By chance, one of the small number of people who founded the community long ago carried the albino mutation and it is still abundant there.

All this apparent confusion shows how difficult it is for science to reconstruct history. Science is supposed to be about testing, and perhaps disproving, hypotheses. As we have seen, there is no shortage of ideas about why people differ in skin colour. Perhaps none of the theories is correct, or perhaps one, two, or all of them are. Because whatever gave rise to the differences in skin colour in different parts of the world happened long ago, no one can check directly. But science does not always need direct experimental tests. A series of indirect clues may be almost as good. The hints that humans evolved from simpler predecessors and are related to other creatures alive today are so persuasive that it is impossible to ignore them. So far, we have too few facts and too many opinions to be certain of all the details of our own evolutionary past. However, the history of the study of evolution makes me confident that, some day, the series of hints outlined in this essay will suddenly turn into a convincing proof of just why some people are black and some white.

Three Facets of Evolution

I'd like to put up this excellent short piece by the late Stephen Jay Gould, the renowned palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. It was originally published in How Things Are: A Science Toolkit for the Mind by John & Katinka Brockman (1996), and it outlines evolution theory and the bare basics of how to deal with some of the current controversies.

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Three Facets of Evolution

§ - What Evolution Is Not.

Of all the fundamental concepts in the life sciences, evolution is both the most important and the most widely misunderstood. Since we often grasp a subject best by recognising what it isn't, and what it cannot do, we should begin with some disclaimers, acknowledging for science what G. K. Chesterton considered so important for the humanities: 'Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.'

First, neither evolution, nor any science, can access the subject of ultimate origins and ethical meanings. (Science, as an enterprise, tries to discover and explain the phenomena and regularities of the empirical world, under the assumption that natural laws are uniform in space and time. This restriction places an endless world of fascination within the 'picture'; most subjects thus relegated to the 'frame' are unanswerable in any case.) Thus, evolution is not the study of life's ultimate origin in the universe or of life's intrinsic significance among nature's objects; these questions are philosophical (or theological) and do not fall within the purview of science. (I also suspect that they have no universally satisfactory answers, but this is another subject for another time.) This point is important because zealous fundamentalists, masquerading as 'scientific creationists,' claim that creation must be equated with evolution, and be given equal time in schools, because both are equally 'religious' in dealing with ultimate unknowns. In fact, evolution does not treat such subjects at all, and thus remains fully scientific.

Second, evolution has been saddled with a suite of concepts and meanings that represent long-standing Western social prejudices and psychological hopes, rather than any account of nature's factuality. Such 'baggage' may be unavoidable for any field so closely allied with such deep human concerns (see Part 3 of this statement), but this strong social overlay has prevented us from truly completing Darwin's revolution. Most pernicious and constraining among these prejudices is the concept of progress, the idea that evolution possesses a driving force of manifests an overarching trend towards increasing complexity, better biomechanical design, bigger brains, or some other parochial definition of progress centered upon a long-standing human desire to place ourselves atop nature's pile - and thereby assert a natural right to rule and exploit our planet.

Evolution, in Darwin's formation, is adaptation to changing local environments, not universal 'progress.' A lineage of elephants that evolves a heavier coating of hair to become a woolly mammoth as the ice sheets advance does not become a superior elephant in any general sense, but just an elephant better adapted to local conditions of increasing cold. For every species that does become more complex as an adaptation to its own environment, look for parasites (often several species) living within its body - for parasites are usually greatly simplified in anatomy compared with their freeliving ancestors, yet these parasites are as well adapted to the internal environment of their host as the host has evolved to match the needs of its external environment.


§ What Evolution Is.

In its minimalist, 'bare bones' formulation, evolution is a simple idea with a remarkable range of implications. The basic claim includes two linked statements that provide rationales for the two central disciplines of natural history: taxonomy (or the order of relationships among organisms), and palaeontology (or the history of life). Evolution means (1) that all organisms are related by ties of genealogy or descent from common ancestry along the branching patterns of life's tree, and (2) that lineages alter their form and diversity through time by a natural process of change - 'descent with modification' in Darwin's chosen phrase. This simple, yet profound, insight immediately answers the great biological question of the ages: What is the basis for the 'natural system' of relationships among organisms (cats closer to dogs than to lizards; all vertebrates closer to each other than any to an insect - a fact well appreciated, and regarded as both wonderful and mysterious, long before evolution provided the reason). Previous explanations were unsatisfactory because they were either untestable (God's creative hand making each species by fiat, with taxonomic relationships representing the order of divine thought), or arcane and complex (species as natural places, like chemical elements in the periodic table, for the arrangement of organic matter). Evolution's explanation for the natural system is so stunningly simple: Relationship is genealogy; humans are like apes because we share such a recent common ancestor. The taxonomic order is a record of history.

But the basic fact of genealogy and change - descent with modification - is not enough to characterise evolution as a science. For science has two missions: (1) to record and discover the factual state of the empirical world, and (2) to devise and test explanations for why the world works as it does. Genealogy and change only represent the solution to this first goal - a description of the fact of evolution. We also need to know the mechanism by which evolutionary change occurs - the second goal of explaining the causes of descent with modification. Darwin proposed the most famous and best-documented mechanism for change in the principle that he named 'natural selection.'

The fact of evolution is as well documented as anything we know in science - as secure as our conviction that Earth revolves about the sun, and not vice versa. The mechanism of evolution remains a subject of exciting controversy - and science is most lively and fruitful when engaged in fundamental debates about the causes of well-documented facts. Darwin's natural selection has been affirmed, in studies both copious and elegant, as a powerful mechanism, particularly in evolving the adaptations of organisms to their local environments - what Darwin called 'that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.' But the broad-scale history of life includes other phenomena that may require different kinds of causes as well (potentially random effects, for example, in another fundamental determinant of life's pattern - which groups live, and which die, in episodes of catastrophic extinction).


§ Why Should We Care?

The deepest, in-the-gut, answer to the question lies in the human psyche, and for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom. We are fascinated by physical ties of ancestry; we feel that we will understand ourselves better, know who we are in some fundamental sense, when we trace the sources of our descent. We haunt graveyards and parish records; we pore over family Bibles and search out elderly relatives, all to fill in the blanks on our family tree. Evolution is this same phenomenon on a much more inclusive scale - roots writ large. Evolution is the family tree of our races, species, and lineages - not just of our little, local surname. Evolution answers, insofar as science can address such questions at all, the troubling and fascinating issues of 'Who are we?' 'To which other creatures are we related, and how?' 'What is the history of our interdependency with the natural world?' 'Why are we here at all?'

Beyond this, I think that the importance of evolution in human thought is best captured in a famous statement by Sigmund Freud, who observed, with wry and telling irony, that all great scientific revolutions have but one feature in common: the casting of human arrogance off one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our ruling capacity in the universe. Freud mentions three such revolutions: the Copernican, for moving our home from center stage in a small universe to a tiny peripheral hunk of rock amid inconceivable vastness; the Darwinian, for 'relegating us to descent from an animal world'; and (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history) his own, for discovering the unconscious and illustrating the nonrationality of the human mind. What can be more humbling, and therefore more liberating, than a transition from viewing ourselves as 'just a little lower than the angels,' the created rulers of nature, made in God's image to shape and subdue the earth - to the knowledge that we are not only natural products of a universal process of descent with modification (and thus kin to all other creatures), but also a small, late-blooming, and ultimately transient twig on the copiously arborescent tree of life, and not the foreordained summit of a ladder of progress. Shake complacent certainty, and kindle the fire of intellect.

Let's Celebrate The Real Big Questions

Although it isn't directly relevant to neuroscience or neuropsychology, this excellent essay from Lawrence Krauss in the September (2008) edition of New Scientist discusses premises that I often encounter in my discussions with people:

LAST year I agreed to write a short essay for an advertisement featuring the question: "Does the universe have a purpose?" It was to appear in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Economist and New Scientist. I was asked to express my views in my own words, so I wasn't worried that they would be distorted to support an ulterior agenda. I considered the ad a useful outlet for communicating how I believe science can inform this question.

I was naive. The ad, which was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation - an organisation that aims to find links between science and religion - was the first instalment in a Big Ideas series, and has been followed up by essays on: "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Next week the otherwise well-grounded Skeptics Society is to run a related conference, also sponsored by Templeton, called Origins. According to their promotional material, "the Big Questions... involve Origins", such as the origins of the universe, the laws of nature, time's arrow, life and consciousness. "Science is making significant headway into providing natural explanations for these ultimate questions, which leaves us with the biggest question of all: does science make belief in God obsolete?"

Unfortunately, despite the money being channelled into such meetings and ads, this is neither a very big question nor a very big idea. The issue may be of importance to some theologians and philosophers, but it is essentially irrelevant to scientists. In the academic departments where these origins are being investigated, the question is almost never raised.

Scientists may, if asked, express views on issues relating to purpose and religion, especially to counter ill-conceived notions that might mislead the public, but in our work we focus on scientific questions that can be addressed by the tools we have to explore the universe. Whether any form of modern religion is made obsolete by our progress is a tangential and almost trivial point. If new knowledge about the universe cannot be worked into these philosophies, they will become obsolete. Otherwise, they persist.

While the participants have changed, the so-called debate over the relation between science and religion has hardly progressed in 400 years. Today's arguments about intelligent design, for example, are little different from those of Thomas Aquinas and William Paley, though the realm in which the debate is taking place has been shifted from human scales to scales that are many, many times smaller or larger. Focusing on such stale and fruitless questions prevents the public from appreciating the truly interesting intellectual frontiers in science.

I recently moved to Arizona to lead a new programme on Origins at Arizona State University. Its purpose is to explore and celebrate emerging knowledge on origins: from that of the universe to humanity, consciousness to culture. We will be sponsoring, among other things, a big public event in Phoenix in April 2009, where speakers including Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, Brian Greene and Steven Pinker will focus on the real questions driving intellectual progress across science. Is there a multiverse? Are the laws of nature unique? What caused the big bang? How did life arise on Earth? How abundant and diverse is life in the universe? How did humans evolve consciousness? Can machines think? Can we genetically re-engineer humans?

These are the questions that reflect the remarkable upheavals and challenges that our understanding of nature has faced over the past century. Our efforts to answer them will form the basis of knowledge and action in the next.

Hadron Switch-on

Now that the Large Hadron Collider has been switched on, we can expect a flurry of astounding news and reports that will contribute to the advancement of knowledge and science. For a start, it promises to recreate the conditions at the birth of the universe that will allow scientists a better view of how the universe came into being. Billed as "the largest experiment in the world" where protons will collide at 99.99% the speed of light, there isn't much remaining to say to people who continue to cling to beliefs about sky fairies and diablos as fundamental and important forces in the universes.

Except this: