Yet, the overwhelming majority of surviving organisms propagate by sexual reproduction. Even the plant kingdom is dominated by angiosperms that require chance pollination (80% of plant life) and there are mechanisms to prevent self-pollination.

To explain this paradox, scientists have formulated theories that seek to justify sexual reproduction within the context of evolution. For example, that it allows faster adaptation to environmental challenges via group selection rather than the longer process of individual change. Or that it helps to reduce the effects of damaging genetic mutations within a population by bringing two beneficial mutations together. But all such theories have been either disproved or put under severe strain by new research. Besides, scientists at the US Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) have discovered that at least one group of microscopic animals has evolved for tens of millions of years without sexual reproduction or genetic exchange.

And there are unique issues about humans that defy any evolutionary explanation. Unlike other animals that only copulate when the female is receptive (in 'heat'), women remain receptive throughout even though they only ovulate once a month. Further, human females remain receptive even after menopause (cessation of ovulation and loss of fertility). Thus humans alone are able to engage in sexual activity for reasons unrelated to reproduction (pure pleasure).

Some of the scientific proposals on the emergence of sex are truly outlandish. A 2001 study of simulated digital organisms at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggested that comet or asteroid impacts from outer space (accompanied by heavy doses of radiation) could have stressed asexual organisms enough to force a deluge of genetic mutations that led to sexual reproduction. Even the proponents have called this idea "highly speculative." Here again we see a willingness among some scientists to readily infer inanimate intervention from outer space while any reference to cosmic intelligent design for a purpose remains taboo.

Charles Darwin called the origin of angiosperms an "abominable mystery". Over one hundred years after Darwin, sexual reproduction remains an enduring mystery for science. As biologist Jessica Mark Welchof of the MBL remarked: "Sex and genetic recombination are obviously tremendously important for life, but we don't understand why they are so important. When we do eventually understand, it could have practical consequences we can't yet imagine."

Indeed. Here is a crucial life process that is obviously important in so many ways, none of which we can properly grasp. Yet we have vociferous advocates of human cloning trumpeting that cloning is not "outrageous or immoral" and that the only objection is that "the procedure is insufficiently safe." Safety is hardly the overrriding consideration for humans. The paramount objection is that our general ignorance severely limits our ability to intervene productively in this area.

Thursday, 17 February 2005

Search for 'God particle' intensifies

Scientists have a major problem they having been trying to solve for almost 40 years. Physics tells us that atoms and their constituents are made up of fundamental particles of matter (quarks, gluons, photons, electrons etc.). To explain how these sub-atomic particles fit together and interact with each other, physicists came up with a theory called the Standard Model. This groups 16 particles -- 12 matter particles and 4 force carrier particles -- in jigsaw puzzle type frames.

For this model to work, sub-atomic particles must not have mass. But it soon became clear that even the smallest particle did have some mass. To solve this mystery British physicist Peter Higgs and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh suggested the existence of yet another particle in the late 1960s. This particle, called the Higgs bosun, is thought to create an all-pervasive, invisible field through which all other particles pass to acquire mass. The snag is the proposed particle has remained stubbornly undetected, leading to it being dubbed the God particle.

To prove the existence of the Higgs bosun, scientists have been attempting to recreate the fantastically hot conditions that would have existed immediately after Big Bang - the initial explosion of a primordial particle from which the Universe is thought to have emerged. Since the 1960s a succession of massive atom-smashing machines (linear colliders) have been operated in gigantic underground tunnels in Europe and America. But after spending billions of dollars on experiments without success some scientists concluded that the elusive particle might not even exist.

If the Higgs proposal turns out to be incorrect or incomplete, science will be left totally unable to explain mass. So physicists are forced to continue searching for the God particle. The largest linear collider to date (as high as a 12-storey building) is under construction in the depths of the Alp Mountains in Switzerland. Due to come on stream in 2007 it is expected to produce nearly one billion particle collisions every second, generating energy levels beyond the 115 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV) previously achieved. Such is the feeling of urgency in scientific circles that already an international group has proposed building an even larger linear collider at a yet to be determined site at an anticipated cost of almost six billion US dollars.

No one knows what will happen when these mega-collisons are initiated but there is an intense air of excitement among physicists. As Professor Jim Virdee of Imperial College London puts it: "We are at a stage where the theorists do not know which direction to go ... We don't always like theorists to tell us what we should find. Nature is much smarter than us. It might come up with a real surprise and that would be much more interesting - much more satisfying." Let's all hope the surprise does not turn out to be unpleasant.

It is strange that scientists are prepared to go to such extreme lengths to detect a particle from which they can only infer the existence of an invisible field, yet they are reluctant to endorse already available evidence for the existence of an equally invisible agent (or agents) of intelligent design.

Tuesday, 15 February 2005

Church of England plc: Capitalism triumphs

When I spotted the headline Privatise the Church of England in a conservative UK national newspaper earlier this year (The Telegraph, 17 January), my first thought was that someone was being facetious. Then I started reading and realised the writer was deadly serious. Comparisons are made with flourishing local churches in the USA where ministers of religion have to compete for business and receive financial rewards proportional to the size of their congregations. I was astonished. Here was an argument in a bastion of the establishment that "the Church of England [C of E] would benefit from denationalisation just as surely as British Telecom did." Revolutionary but hardly realistic, I concluded, given the difficulties that would arise over divvying up the church's financial and land portfolio among numerous parishes.

But now we learn that the church's General Synod (national assembly of clergy and laity) is debating proposals that will allow bishops to sack lazy or incompetent clergy and introduce performance reviews at all levels (including bishops). No mention is made of bonus payments and share options but I'm sure these are in the pipeline. Also, it is not clear who will be the ultimate arbiter. Up till now it has been the assumption that priests are 'called' by, and answerable to, God. How will the judgement of the almighty on such weighty matters be discerned and who will be the channel for communications?

Other proposals include transferring legal ownership of clergy housing to the local diocese and allowing parishes that are hard pressed for cash to lease parts of churches for shops and businesses -- sex shops and banks excepted (lets not forget Jesus chased money changers out of the temple). However at least one Vicar has been quoted as saying he "wouldn't mind an ethical bank or a credit union." Well, at least the local diocese will now be able to raise money against its housing assets for much needed restorative work.

Come to think of it, the C of E introduced concepts of business management over a decade ago. I recall attending martins (traditional Sunday morning service) at a local parish church in the course of which the incredulous congregation was treated to a lengthy presentation of a new style Annual Plan -- charts, graphs, performance indicators, financial projections etc. -- at the expense of expected ritual. The vicar, a decent sort, was visibly embarrassed but had to follow directives.

The C of E is not alone in capitulating to the lure of Mammon. Authoritative umbrella group Churches Together in Britain And Ireland is urging Christians to drop their traditional suspicion of free market economics and embrace wealth creation. In a soon to be released report titled Prosperity With a Purpose - Christians and the Ethics of Affluence, the group concludes that "Under the right conditions, economic growth can serve God's purposes." It may not go as far as adopting the philosophy caricatured in the movie Wall Street that "Greed is good", but it endorses the capitalist principle of unlimited money making -- provided it is accompanied by charity.

Millionaire televangelists will raise a silent cheer. Maybe they will be invited to teach their methods of raising finance to traditional clergy. Maybe the C of E and other mainstream denominations will introduce tithing (mandatory church dues based on personal income -- usually 10%) in return for preferential services. One can only imagine the effect all this is going to have on the already battered faith of many church members. For some, this might be the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

Weekend, 12-13 February 2005

Verdict: Lent and Self-Denial

This week marked the start of the annual 40-day period of penitence in the Christian calendar known as Lent. Ash Wednesday is preceded by Shrovetide; a four-day bacchanalia over which varying degrees of hedonistic revelry takes place in communities around the world (e.g. the Trinidad Carnival, New Orleans Mardi Gras, Spanish Carnival, British Pancake Festival). The idea is to have one last fling before a prolonged period of abstinence. Lent concludes with a two-week Passiontide (Passion Week and Holy Week) over which Christian liturgy observes the closing stages of Jesus' life on Earth. The following Sunday is Easter; the feast marking the resurrection of Christ that is central to Christian belief.

The Church prescribes fasting over Lent (especially within the Catholic faith) and encourages members to adopt other penitential disciplines. But there is no requirement in the Bible for either Jews or Christians to observe a 40-day period of fasting and abstinence prior to the Passover or Easter respectively. However there are frequent references in scripture to a 40 day period that range from rainfall for 40 days and nights (Gen 7:4, 12) to Jesus appearing on and off for 40 days after his death (Acts 1:3). The only other faith with an obligatory period of abstinence is Islam -- fasting over the 30-day Ramadan is the fourth pillar of this third Abrahamic faith. Significantly, both Lent and Ramadan are moveable periods governed by solar and lunar movements.

In reality, the many Christian celebrations between All Souls Day (2 November) and Candlemas (2 February) were invented by the Church to absorb the varied annual pagan feasts celebrated around the same time. These included feasts marking harvest, rebirth of the Sun at the winter solstice, the Kalends (Roman New Year festival), renewal of nature in spring, ploughing and sowing festival of Saturnalia and other earlier pagan fertility rites.

So, is there any point to such enforced periods of self-denial? Ten leading lights offered interesting and varying viewpoints in the Independent this week. I also found this practical guide put out by St. Thomas' Church useful; although its exhortation to "Fast from one luxury (e.g. alcohol, take-aways) and give the money saved to the [church] building project fund" may well attract the attention of Trading Standards officers in other circumstances!

All in all a tradition that reminds us of our mortality, teaches us some self-discipline, creates space for meditation and encourages acts of charity towards those less fortunate than ourselves cannot be a bad thing. If only that was all there is to religious doctrine…

Thursday, 10 February 2005

On a WHIM and a prayer

Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (HSCA) have given a glimmer of hope to the decades-old search for "missing" cosmic components. About half of the 'ordinary matter' that astrophysicists calculate was generated by Big Bang at the birth of the Universe has completely vanished.

Considering that ordinary matter (Earth, rest of the Solar System and galaxies) accounts for only 5% of what cosmologists believe actually exists for the Universe to hold together (the balance 95% being invisible 'dark matter' and the mysterious 'dark energy'), finding the missing ordinary matter has become imperative. As Fabrizio Nicastro of the center puts it, "If we cannot find half of the ordinary matter in our local universe, it does not bode well for understanding dark matter or dark energy."

Cosmologists have speculated that the lost ordinary matter could be located in a gigantic "cosmic web" of diffuse gas clouds with extremely high temperatures but low densities that make them difficult to detect. These peculiar properties led scientists to assign the label Warm-Hot Intergalactic Matter (WHIM) to such clouds.

Until now there has been little evidence of WHIM. But the team of researchers from HSCA reported this month that the NASA-run Chandra X-ray Observatory had observed two distant clouds of WHIM near the galaxy Markarian 421 that is situated around 400 million light-years away (one light-year is about 6 trillion miles). They also detected much less than the X-ray light estimated to be present, leading to conclusions that the WHIM clouds most likely contained hidden ordinary matter.

Nicastro and his colleagues believe it may now be possible to compute the first reliable estimates of missing ordinary matter hidden in WHIM clouds -- assuming of course that the size and distribution of the observed duo near Markarian 421 are representative of WHIMs throughout the Universe.

One can only wish them the best of luck. The enormity of the task to detect just 5% of estimated cosmic content is a sober reminder that we still know next to nothing about our universe.

Tuesday, 08 February 2005

Introducing the machine detectives

The UK government is planning to use machines to detect fraudsters in areas such as tax, benefits and immigration. The "voice risk analyser" measures stress levels in a person's voice as a basis for detecting deception. Traditional lie detectors measure actual physical outputs like sweat and pulse.

The technology is reportedly already being used by at least five insurers, including Halifax, Axa and Highway Insurance to weed out fraudulent claims. Other businesses that assess customer applications by phone such as banks, recruitment companies and even dating agencies are said to be planning to introduce the system.

The technology is banned in several countries because it has been shown to be fallible -- stress can arise in a person's voice patterns for reasons unconnected to deception and many people are nervous by nature. Tests conducted on the system at American universities and by the US Air Force research laboratory concluded that reliable detection of deception was not proven.

Liberty activists in the UK are sure to engage the government over the widespread use of such sensitive, controversial technology in the public domain.

Weekend, 05-06 February 2005

Climate Change - Beware the fate of the Dinosaurs

The row between opposing scientific camps on global warming reached a new level over the past two weeks with rival conferences in London examining whether or not human activity is causing potentially catastrophic climate change. The UK has become the 'eye of the storm' since last year when Prime Minister Tony Blair declared climate change to be our biggest environmental challenge, and the government's chief scientific adviser Sir David King said it was a far greater global threat than international terrorism. These grim views gained support from a recent report by a global task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics that warned we might reach 'a point of no return' in little less than 10 years.

This past week the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (HCCPR) hosted a conference for 200 scientists on 'Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change'. The conference considered fresh claims from one of the largest climate prediction projects ever run that temperatures around the world could rise by as much as 11C this century with consequent disastrous rises in sea levels and atmospheric CO2. This forecast by a global distributed group coordinated by Oxford University is more than twice that previously suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- a consortium of several thousand independent scientists. Papers were also presented from a World Wildlife Fund study that warns of dangerous levels of climate change by 2026 if no action is taken to stop global warming.

But earlier on 27 January, the Scientific Alliance (SA), a group of scientists sceptical about global warming, held a 'pre-emptive' conference to address questions they feared the HCCPR conference would ignore such as "the alarmist nature of future predictions." A spokesperson for SA said: "It's important for people to know there are eminent scientists who don't share this [alarmist] viewpoint." The sceptics say IPCC and similar studies are based on models, not observations. They claim, "the greenhouse warming from increased gas emissions is, as far as we can tell, insignificant … It's unlikely to be appreciable even a century from now, and we can easily adapt to it." IPCC and other supporting scientists concede a lack of enough knowledge about some key aspects of climate change, but they are agreed the cumulative data is improving daily and is already enough to infer danger to natural systems from human activities.

Public bystanders are both bemused and worried over the conflicting signals from the scientific community on such a serious matter. If it is anything like the controversy over dinosaurs, we may not see scientific consensus until the catastrophe (if predictions are correct) is upon us. 65 million years after dinosaurs are thought to have perished, scientists are still locked in disputes over how those enigmatic creatures managed to attain such huge sizes in the face of competition and, crucially, exactly what happened to make them extinct after dominating the earth for 140 million years.

The popular view on dinosaur extinction has been that an enormous asteroid from outer space smashed into Mexico's Yucatan peninsular, a cataclysm equal to a gigantic nuclear explosion that would have would literally roasted most living things and left survivors facing freezing conditions and darkness for decades or even millennia with dust and debris blocking the Sun's light. But alternative views have emerged that climatic and sea level changes from volcanic activity etc. that also released massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere could have impacted disastrously on the environment to wipe out several living organisms. This view has some support from new data that suggests the asteroid crater in Mexico actually predates the extinction of dinosaurs by about 300,000 years. Will it be a case of deja vu?

Thursday, 03 February 2005

No more 'bird brain' jokes - birds are smarter

An international group of researchers that spent more than 10 years studying behavioural patterns of birds has reported that our feathered friends are just as smart (if not smarter) than the average mammal. Twenty-nine neuroscientists found that birds can perform amazing tasks that are beyond the reach of cats and dogs.

The findings will come as no surprise to acquaintances of an African grey parrot called N'kisi that has a vocabulary of 950 words and shows signs of a sense of humour. Scientists were stunned last year by N'kisi's remarkable ability to communicate and interact with humans. He has even been known to invent new words and phrases when confronted with novel ideas or situations and is said to be telepathic.

Professor Donald Broom of Cambridge University's School of Veterinary Medicine is quoted as saying, "The more we look at the cognitive abilities of animals, the more advanced they appear, and the biggest leap of all has been with parrots."

This new information on birds will give ammunition to animal rights campaigners. It also means the term 'bird brain' is a misnomer for people perceived to have low IQ. N'kisi is sure to have something to say to anyone who persists in insulting his species.

Tuesday, 01 February 2005

Cosmology - One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward?

Nowadays, no sooner does one set of scientists trumpet a 'discovery' of some aspect of our Universe than another group postulates a new theory that contradicts their claims. Until now, it has been the gospel in astrophysics that, billions of years after Big Bang (theory of initial explosion that founded the universe), the Solar System emerged from a slowly condensing cloud of dust and gas. But now a radical new theory has emerged that says our Sun and planetary system were born from yet another violent explosion of an immense star accompanied by an enormous release of energy and intense radiation. This scenario is diametrically opposite to the previous accepted view.

The new explosion theory has some support from new data uncovered by researchers from Arizona State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences while studying a primitive meteorite from China. The meteorite is believed to have formed shortly after the birth of the Solar System. If further evidence emerges for this controversial new view, it will have profound implications for current assumptions about, e.g., the size and shape of the Solar System, the physical make-up of Earth and the chemistry that led to life.

This controversy is just the latest in astrophysics as scientists struggle to come up with credible theories on the origin, nature and continued existence of the Universe. The detection in the last few decades of 'missing' Dark Matter (which may not be dark but invisible) and Dark Energy, both of which needed to exist for Big Bang to hold true, were hailed as scientific breakthroughs. Then last year, a joint French-British team of astronomers published research that suggests Dark Energy is non-existent -- there is, they concluded, simply more Dark Matter than has hitherto being calculated. Team member Subir Sarkar of Oxford University said: "The dark energy could be a huge cosmic mirage. It may not exist at all."

In July 2004 celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking lost a long-standing bet with a colleague when he conceded that his famous 1975 'black hole' theory was incorrect (black holes are formed when stars burn all their fuel and collapse, creating a huge gravitational pull in space). Last January, researchers in Australia proposed that as many as one-tenth of stars in our galaxy may be generating conditions necessary to support complex life on orbiting planets. By August British and American colleagues were saying the opposite; that our solar system may be unique after all despite the discovery of at least 120 other systems with planets.

The average layperson could be forgiven for dismissing cosmology as an assembly of fanciful ideas liable to tumble down like a pack of cards with every slight breeze of new information. Big Bang is currently being challenged by the Electric / Plasma Theory. One is reminded of the candid admission by respected scientist H.C. Arp that "Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on very few facts."

It is precisely because there are such huge gaps in our knowledge of the Universe that we worry when ambitious experiments are undertaken that seek to alter the structure of our Solar System without prior democratic debate. We support and applaud progress in science. But we demand that the public is properly consulted and informed on matters that could affect us all irreversibly.