Number 94 : November 1998 |
Patterns of Life: Boris Pavlovitch Belousov was investigating the Krebs cycle, a metabolic pathway by which living cells break down organic foodstuffs into energy. Mixing citric acid, potassium bromate, sulphuric acid, and a catalyst of ceric ions in a largely inorganic approximation of the process, he produced a solution which oscillated between being colourless and yellow-hued. His manuscript was rejected in 1951 as impossible. Some ten years later, Anatoly Zhabotinsky replaced the ions with an iron reagent and changed the oscillation to between red and blue. The reaction gained acceptance, becoming known as the BZ reaction. Using the chemical ruthenium bipyridil as catalyst it can be excited into action through the influence of light. It is an example of self-organisation in a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. So are you: or rather you are a myriad of such systems, some extremely complex.
When I read about this, in Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield's superb 'The Arrow of Time', W H Allen, 1990, a book which has been mentioned by Theo in the past, and which is a remarkably comprehensive tour of science using the arrow of time to stitch it all together, I speculated, in typical OTT fashion, looking for oscillations in human behaviour. How would we look to a life-form so alien that to it humanity was no more than a slime-mould. It would see something which, largely, was mobile during the day and dormant at night. It would detect oscillations in many of the population as they set off from where they rested at the same time each day to the same place and returned at the same time in the evening. What would it make of the sudden, but regularly sudden, switch of behaviour at the weekend? It would also have to find a reason, not for the annual August migration to the Costas, but for those who do not take part in it. Would it devise a strange attractor in its mathematical models, searching for patterns of randomness in what it saw as deterministic chaos? We would have an advantage over it. We know what we're doing, don't we? Of course there is the little matter of the 'readiness potential' (New Scientist, 1.4.89), by which the electrical potential of the scalp is reported to change before we make a decision. Do our brains simply note what is about to happen and then come up with some reason for it which we swallow like ice cream at a children's party? After all, our dreams only seem fantastic when we wake up and are able to make comparisons. It puts a new slant on the expression, 'You'll believe anything', doesn't it? Perhaps you will !
Abortion: I'll try to respond to Stef Gula (C93/25) without using the words 'scrape' and 'barrel'. How many abortions have been carried out on twelve year old gang rape victims ? When is it valid to use extreme cases to set general laws ? How much of the girl's difficulty is due to: 1) the brutality; 2) the rape; 3) society’s reaction; and 4) carrying the child to term ?
Do I detect support for my 'licence to populate'? 'Being married' is 'obvious' because it shows the necessary commitment.
My 'provocation' was precisely because I think it a serious matter and was directed at those who work in abortion clinics, whom I might most kindly describe as examples of retrograde evolution. A new dominant male animal will often kill its defeated predecessor’s offspring, but then it is driven by the need for its own offspring to be born and survive in a world governed by fitness. What these persons’ excuse is escapes me. To ease suffering ? Fine: let's napalm Africa; or form an orderly queue at Beachy Head perhaps ? It can't be done any other way because suffering is relative. Theo has just about said it all in response to Sheila Blanchard (C93/30-32) and I am most grateful. I have the greatest respect for Sheila and wholeheartedly endorse the idea that agreement on meaning is vital: witness the nonsense in much debate about Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless, I feel that in the case of 'murder' and 'killing' one might say that anyone who uses the word 'murder’ is implying disapproval of the particular form of 'killing' in question and that this enhances communication, which is the purpose of 'meaning' in this context. I take Martin Lake's point (C93/42), but then it isn't 'fair’ that women should be the ones to have to bear children. It's just bad luck, but all persons are ultimately responsible for their own well-being.
Anthony Owens