Robert Deyes

In their book The Privileged Planet, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher of science Jay Richards point out that rather than adopting the original definition of ‘science’ as a search for knowledge (literal translation from Latin), some opinion makers in science have taken it to mean “applied naturalism” defined as, “the conviction that the material world is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain, indeed must explain, its existence” (1).

Outspoken neo-atheist Peter Atkins has actively pushed such a view through his espousal of  the ‘scientism’ movement, unwaveringly maintaining that science is “the only reliable way we have of discovering anything about the workings of nature and fabric of the world” (2).  Countering such a position is philosopher Eddie Colanter who described scientism as “the worldview [that] asserts that the only type of truth or knowledge that exists or that is important is that which can be known or verified through the scientific method” (3). Read More ›

Physicist Emerson Pugh once quipped, “if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t” [1]. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music neuroscientist Daniel Levitin notes how the number of ways that brain neurons can connect is so vast that we will never fully comprehend all the thought processes that we are capable of.

In recent years, mapping techniques have revealed a lot about the functional regions of the brain. Wernicke’s area is responsible for language processing, the motor cortex for physical movement and frontal lobes for generating personalities. Both encephalography and MRI have given us key spatial-temporal data about brain function in these regions. But we also find that activities such as listening to music contravene such a simplistic compartmentalization.

In fact the perception of pitch, tempo, the emotions invoked by a piece of music and the lyrics of a song all use different parts of the brain albeit simultaneously. Levitin repeatedly emphasizes the multi-faceted aspects of the music ‘experience’ noting how a, “precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake” leads to our appreciation of music [p.188]. The brain is thus a massively parallel device, capable of carrying out several different tasks at once.

While it is through a lifetime of exposure that our brains become used to the note scales and music styles of our culture, it is during childhood that we are most receptive to learning music rules and note sequences. The finding that children’s tastes in music are heavily influenced by the music heard during prenatal development, has forced a shift in the way we think about childhood memory.

We now know for example that the cerebellum has the capacity to recall with precision accuracy the rhythm of a music piece long after it has been heard while the brain stem and dorsal cochlear nucleus are able to distinguish between consonant (harmonious) and dissonant sounds. In fact our brains are able to group sounds without any conscious effort from ourselves. Read More ›

“Of all whale species, by far the noisiest, chattiest, most exuberant, and most imaginative is the humpback. It is the noisemaker and the Caruso of the deep, now grating like an old hinge, now as melodious as an operatic tenor” (1). These were the words of the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in his epic volume Whales, originally written in French under the more descriptive title La Planete Des Baleines. The male humpback in particular had been a source of fascination for Cousteau’s exploration team precisely because of its exquisite song-making capabilities. Star Trek aficionados will no doubt remember the long-range distress calls of these ocean-faring giants in the movie blockbuster The Voyage Home.

Humpbacks can be heard for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers creating discernible noise sequences or ‘themes’ that can last as long as 20-30 hours (1,2). The available repertoire of vocalizations requires that “bursts of air” be channeled up from the lungs and through the trachea (3). The frequency range of these vocalizations is formidable- 8-4000 Hz (compared to 80-1300 Hz for a singing human; (4)). While certain sounds might serve to maintain contact between distant herds (2) others are clearly used to attract mates in the shallow breeding grounds of the tropics (5).

The sperm whale’s characteristic clicking has likewise been intensely studied and marine biologists have in the last decade described this creature’s ‘pneumatic sound generator’ in great detail (6). Usual clicks serve for echo location while so-called ‘coda’ clicks are used for maintaining the “complex social structure in female groups” (6). Remarkably the amount of air used to make each click is so small that even at depths of 2000 m, where the air volume is significantly reduced, sperm whales can phonate successfully (6). The mechanism of sound generation is exquisitely selective for the two modes of communication: “the marked differences between coda clicks and usual clicks are caused by differential sound propagation in the nasal complex” (6).

Other whale species are known to ‘talk to each other’: blue whales, fin whales, rights and bowheads all display the use of what has tentatively been called a rudimentary language (7). Equally captivating is the auditory apparatus that picks up these sounds (8). Unlike terrestrial mammals, whales sport freely-vibrating ossicles in the middle ear for more sensitive distance hearing:

“The bones of the middle ear, although fused to each other, are not directly connected to the rest of the skull; they are suspended from it by means of ligaments. All around them is a complex network of cavities and sinuses filled with a foamy mucus that further insulates the ear from the skull and provides yet another means by which whales filter out all but the essential sounds.”(9)

What are we to make of the evolutionary origins of these key designs? In the summer of 2009 a seminal publication in the journal Mammalian Biology provided fodder for one popular idea (10). Using the aquatic escape behavior of Bornean mouse deer as primary evidence for their claims, researchers from Indonesia and the Australian National University in Canberra proposed that whales might have descended from ancient members of the ruminant family tragulidae which today includes cattle, sheep, goats and deer (11). Local villagers have observed tragulids submerging themselves in rivers and streams for over five minutes at a time as a way of eschewing would-be predators (10). Read More ›

Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that ‘there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell” (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the ‘Chance Hypothesis’, has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer’s summary of the current state of this so-called ‘minimal complexity’ research is profoundly insightful:

“The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium – a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires “only” 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA…to assemble those proteins…Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes” (p.201). Read More ›

When it comes to academic triumphs and laudatory honors it can be said that mycologist Paul Stamets has his fair share. Stamets has authored six books on mushrooms, holds over twenty patents, is a winner of the Collective Heritage Institute’s Bioneers Award and owns a wholesale business selling alternative medicines. Today he also runs a facility that boasts twenty four laminar flow benches across four laboratories processing between 10-20 thousand kilos of mycelia each week. He has close to a thousand mycelium cultures growing at any given time and is renowned across the world for his view of fungi as the ‘grand molecular dissemblers of nature’.

Stamets describes himself in his youth as a hippy with a stuttering habit who could not look people in the eye. He also fondly recalls once telling his charismatic Christian mother that the forest is where he goes to church on Sundays. He spent many years as a microscopist at the Evergreen State College in Washington studying mushroom mycelia with the aid of an electron microscope. There he developed an intense passion for all things fungal even to the extent that he now occasionally appears in public sporting a hat made from Amadou– a fungus that, he boldly maintains, was essential for the portability of fire during man’s much-heralded migration out of Africa. Read More ›

“This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being” (2).

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“When I looked under the microscope for the first time I saw the absolute need for humility in the face of Nature. I do not know if there is a God but what I do know is that man is no substitute”. These were the words of Professor Challenger in Tony Mulholland’s and Adrian Hodges’s screen adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, as he prepared for an adventure that would take him into the deepest parts of the Brazilian Amazon in search of prehistoric life (Ref 1). Conan Doyle’s The Lost World proved to be a resounding bestseller in its first year.  Re-released on the centennial anniversary of The Origin Of Species, this action packed adventure clearly caught the public’s imagination. Although much has been made of this year’s Darwin bicentennial, it is a lesser-known fact that this year many are also celebrating the 150th anniversary of Conan Doyle’s birth through public readings of his iconic book (Ref 2). Read More ›

The distinction between historical and experimental science is one that extends back over the centuries and at its core seems easy to grasp. Whereas historical science has as its focus events that have defined the history both of our planet and larger cosmos, experimental science has its eye on the current operation of nature.

The 19th century philosopher William Whewell coined the term ‘palaetiological sciences’ to describe those fields of science, such as geology and paleontology, that have a historical perspective (1). Whewell’s broad application of the term shone through in his two great works, his History of the Inductive Sciences and his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1). Immanuel Kant used a similar distinction contrasting those sciences that describe “relationships and changes over time” with those that deal with the “empirical study and classification of objects…at present” (2). Read More ›

The NOVA documentary The Incredible Journey Of The Butterflies, which aired on public television earlier this year, details a phenomenon that in recent years has captivated biologists worldwide- the North American Monarch butterfly’s 2500 mile long migration to the Mexican Sierra Madre mountains. Both the sheer scale of the journey and the paucity of models in the scientific literature that adequately explain its evolutionary origins are plainly evident (1).

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould took a rather nebulous stab at explicating the origins of another migratory feat- that of the green turtle’s trans-Atlantic breeding trek from Brazil to the ‘pinpoint of land’ we now call Ascension Island (2). Having soundly carved up biologist Archie Carr’s migratory drift hypothesis (which would have us believe that the migratory distance used to be much shorter and extended gradually as continents moved apart), Gould treated us to his own momentary reliance on obscurity. In Gould’s words “the mechanism of turtle migration is so mysterious, that I see no barrier to supposing that turtles can be imprinted to remember the place of their birth without prior genetic information transmitted from previous generations” (2). It seems that for Gould at least, the bigger the evolutionary mystery, the more scope one would have for assuming what one wished to assume. Read More ›