There’s a video interview with Richard Dawkins at Big Think in which he talks about the irrationality of sex – much as I do in 13 Things. The basic problem is that it involves sharing genes and reproducing half as fast as asexual species. Each of these halves the rate at which you pass on your genes, which is why John Maynard Smith called it the "fourfold cost of sex".

I can’t help wondering whether horizontal gene transfer seen in rotifers may have provided some of the answer since the book went to press, but Richard doesn't seem to mention that (hence my title!). There are still unanswered questions, of course. The importance of sexual vs social selection is one, and the role of parasites is another. Then there’s the issue of whether the shuffling of genes in sexual reproduction does give survival advantage in a changing environment. The literature is mixed on this, as I explain in 13 Things, but this recent piece of research, published in Nature, suggests it does help. Still an open question, I think – but maybe it’s closing. If only Maynard Smith were alive to see it.

As a postscript, I feel bound to mention that I live about a mile from where Maynard Smith lived. He once told me his neighbour was a creationist, and wouldn't talk to him because of his scientific take on existence. If God does exist, there's definitely a divine sense of humour. In the UK, such hard-line creationists are pretty rare. The idea that the greatest living exponent of evolution would be living right bang next door to one is too delicious...

I had an interesting email from a juggler recently. He was interested in the subject of free will – specifically the Libet experiment where the activation of the brain’s action (more usually readiness) potentials, which prepare us for movement seem to pre-empt any conscious desire to move. He had this to say:

I would love to see what my action potentials look like when i am juggling, especially when the balls are moving very fast. an interesting thing that I have experienced is the feeling that there is "someone else" inside me doing the juggling. It  happens only rarely, and only after I have been juggling for at east 30-45 minutes and have entered "the zone." My conscious thoughts can wander while the juggling just happens.

I too would like to see what his action potentials look like, but neuroscience is nowhere near sophisticated enough to deal with all the information.

It strikes me that this must be like a great guitarist who doesn’t need to think about what notes to play during a solo. That must feel, in a sense, like “someone else” is playing.

This divide between a conscious self and the brain/sensor/motor mechanism in certain tasks – driving a car is another, I guess – is fascinating. But at any point, the conscious mind can choose to stop what’s going on in the “background”, which makes me think that perhaps it’s not related to the Libet action potentials.

I think the waters on free will are really muddy. A recent experiment claimed to have disproved Libet’s result, for example, but others say the new result can’t even be related to the Libet experiment, because the new setup “changes the paradigm”.

What it seems you’re not allowed to say is “who needs free will anyway?” I don’t exist as anything other than some emergence from the cells that make up my body and brain, and my brain’s “thoughts” are a mess of chemical and electrical signals that do various things, including create that nebulous thing we call a consciousness. Why do I need to think that something in me has “free will”?

It seems obvious to me that, even if it does somehow exist, it can only be an incredibly weak and rather inconsequential factor in the path we follow. Genetic studies that show predisposition to addictions, or marital unfaithfulness, to choose two examples, make that painfully clear. We are carbon-based machines controlled by chemistry. Get used to it. Or ignore it. But don’t worry about it.

I recently finished reading Catching Fire - How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. The book, which is about how cooking is responsible for making human beings so successful, is published in the UK by the same people as published 13 Things, and I was invited to have dinner with Richard and some others. We had raw, seared and cooked courses in honour of the book.

It’s a great read and over all too soon. I got the feeling Richard was just warming to his theme when I reached the notes (which are fun by themselves, actually). But it has left me with the justification for some politically incorrect ideas. When humans first learned to cook, men had to travel great distances to hunt meat and had every right to expect to come home to a cooked dinner, apparently. While men needed a woman to stay home to forage and cook, women needed men to protect them, their children and their food stash from raiders – cooking releases lots more energy from food, but it also sends an “I’m here!” smoke signal into the sky.

There’s plenty of fodder for the unreconstructed male here – no wonder Richard is unpopular with the feminist movement.

What’s important to recognise, though, is that we aren’t bound by the culture of the first humans. Just as Richard Dawkins points out that understanding the selfish gene gives you the ability to rebel against the urges it prompts, revealing how things were in the first human society isn’t the same as endorsing it for today.

It’s true in lots of areas. I’m particularly interested in the biological issues of monogamy at the moment – my phase of life has me surrounded by suddenly wandering males. Can this be excused by biology: is the male midlife crisis as inevitable as the ticking biological clock that sees many women desperate to have a child?

I don’t know the answer, but this New Scientist article is interesting. Two monogamous biologists, married to each other for more than 30 years, make the point that, just because ducks are promiscuous, that doesn’t say anything about what a pair of humans, with all their social aspects of their relationship to consider, ought/ought not to be doing.

A review of the pair’s latest book is here, and it prompts an interesting question that I’ll leave you with. How, exactly, do you give a blackbird a vasectomy? 
 

Had fun talking to Danny Wallace on 6 Music today (he’s filling in for George Lamb this week - listen here, 42 minutes in). Sadly, didn’t get time to talk about bees, which is my favourite story of the week. Apparently, the “waggledance” that bees do is largely useless.

As Caroline Williams says in New Scientist this week, the bee's waggle dance has become an established scientific fact: “even schoolchildren are taught that honeybees dance to tell hive-mates about good food sources.”

But it might not be true. Researchers have stopped questioning whether that's really what's going on, and focussed in on trying to interpret the dance. But it turns out that, if they are communicating, no one's listening.  Among bees that attend to a dance, 93 per cent ignore the instructions and head to a food source they already know about. Others are apparently unable to follow the instructions. Others watch the dance more than 50 times and make several sorties out of the hive but never find the food.

So, what’s gone wrong? At what point did it become “fact” that the waggledance sends bees off to find food? As well as fascinating science, there’s a fascinating story here about the way science works. Anyone know something about how a suggestion became received wisdom then made it into the textbooks? And what other scientific truths are nothing of the sort?
 

What with all the worry about the swine fever virus, I thought I’d see the positive side. As I discuss in this piece for the Times website, viruses are a worthy adversary for the human race. There’s no shame in struggling to control their power over us. After all,

1. Viruses might cure cancer
2. They can deliver gene therapy
3. They could help us fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria
4. They drive evolution
5. They haven't always been parasites
6. They resist scientific classification
7. They have unknown potential
8. They make up most of our DNA
9. They gave us complex life
10. The biggest ones come from Bradford

And if you've ever been to Bradford, you'll understand why that is somehow cool!

I reviewed  Bruce Hood’s SuperSense in New Scientist this week . It’s a great book, really fascinating. The central theme, really, is why we’re all naturally superstitious – and that includes people who think they’re entirely rational.

One upshot of this is that we think of minds and bodies as separate entities, which is where we get our notion of the soul, and our difficulties with death.

Children just assume that death is not the end. Adults, certainly those raised in a rational, secular environment, have to conclude that it is. But this doesn’t always sit well with the way our minds work.

I’ve been wrestling with a related issue this week. Friends of friends had a stillborn baby, which was incredibly sad. They took the baby home from the hospital for a few days, which I thought really strange.

 But thinking about it and talking about it with family, it does occur to me that we dismiss the notion of such ritual at our peril. Some things are inherent to our psyche and the way our brains work (which is what SuperSense is all about).

While the modern, rationalist view might be that “these things happen”, and that we have to move on, perhaps it is more important to linger with these things for a while. A rational, clinical approach is not always the way to good mental health: thanks to the evolutionary history of our brains, a little bit of irrationality can be a good thing.
 

Two interesting pieces in this week’s New Scientist. The first – a short one – says “the parts of the brain that process religious belief are those that evolved most recently and give us sophisticated cognition.” Thus explaining why humans are the only religious species. Erm…

You can read it for yourself here – it’ll only take you a minute – but I’m not convinced it gets us anywhere. When you’re asking people what are essentially complex questions, which bits of the brain do you expect to light up? Duh: the bits that deal with complex issues…

I only highlight it because I think the neuroscience of religion is a really fashionable topic at the moment, and fashion can be a dangerous thing for scientific progress. (Interestingly, the swingometer seems to suggest that quantum computing is going out of fashion – but I’ll save that for another day…)

Onto a much more interesting and far-reaching topic: life. It’s a big subject, and here’s a big article. Really interesting stuff, though. Having said as much in 13 Things, I was particularly pleased to see Craig Venter back away so eagerly from any suggestion he’s making life from scratch.

As part of my research for the book, I also went to see Steen Rasmussen at Los Alamos( he's moved back to Denmark since). Though his project was impressive, I didn't think it would create anything we'd call life, either. Having reported on his ambitions four years ago, the New Scientist article pulls back on his claims a little too.

At the time, Rasmussen hoped success might be only a few years away. Today he's more cautious. "No life yet," he reports. "But we're getting closer... we're inching our way."

I hope funding doesn't start to fall away for this fashionable topic just because it's turning out to be more difficult than anyone thought, however. It's simply far too important to give up on.

You didn't get the Christine Keeler reference? Here you go:

Great to see the selfish gene being exposed to a bit of scrutiny in this New Scientist article. Biological organisms are, according to the selfish gene hypothesis, supposed to be concerned only with the individual’s survival. That way, the genes within that individual are, effectively, immortal.

Alternatives, such as group selection, where behaviours and traits offer benefits to the group rather than the individual, are anathema to most biologists. Richard Dawkins once called the idea “sheer, wanton, head-in-a-bag perversity.” But that’s exactly the kind of attitude that ought to ring alarm bells: history tells us that when scientists close their eyes to a possibility, however remote, they can end up missing something profound. In 13 Things, I suggest that the mysteries surrounding sex and death might be resolved with the rehabilitation of group selection as a valid research area.

It’s interesting to read in the article that “the proponents of group selection agree that only a few potential examples have been identified so far, such as the small size of some annual plants that grow together and reduced virulence in some parasites (to keep their hosts alive).”

A lot of that may be to do with the fact that only the brave, the foolish or the tenured can research group selection. The risks to your career are just too high.

As a result, challenges to the selfish gene are by no means convincing yet. But at least they’re coming out of the cold:

It is still too early to know whether group, species and ecosystem-level selection are major evolutionary forces or merely minor curiosities - baroque ornaments on the central edifice of individual or gene-level selection. But the dominance of the "selfish gene" in evolutionary thought is facing its strongest challenge in many years.

I went on the George Lamb show on BBC Radio 6 Music today, which was great fun (you can listen at the site - I was on about 2 hrs 15 minutes in). They are running a typically bizarre experiment, following the moldification (if that’s a word) of two tubs of cooked rice (you can see a YouTube video on the BBC site). One has “negative” words written on its container – hate, disgust, evil, that kind of thing. The other has “positive” words: love, peace, gratitude, and so on. The idea is to leave it 3 weeks or so, and see which one gets more mouldy. Obviously, the hope is that the negative words will create more mould, thus proving that we should fill the world with positive vibes.

I’m sure I don’t need to say there are SO many issues with this, scientifically speaking. But here’s one to start with. What’s wrong with mould?

Why should mould thrive on negative vibes, when it can so clearly be a force for good? In fact, many of us have a mould to thank for our good health: penicillium – known  across the world as penicillin – is a vital part of global healthcare.

A quick Googling will tell you how Penicillin saved countless lives in World War II. Plus:

It has lowered the death rate of staphylococcal infections by 86%, is the most effective drug for the treatment of hemolytic streptococcus, is the most powerful therapeutic agent against gonorrhea and syphilis, is a very affective antibiotic for wounds and burns, is helpful in the treatment of gangrene, and is the best treatment existing for bacterial endocarditis, empyema, lung abscess, brochietasis, acute osteomyelitis, chronic osteomyelitis, and anthrax; and yet, penicillin is nontoxic.

Anyway, back to the rice. In 13 Things, in the chapter on homeopathy, I mention some of the strange things people believe about positive and negative vibes, or intentions. The thing is, there are one or two quite eminent scientists among them.

Rustum Roy, for example, has a long list of emeritus professorships, and an even longer list of publications in respected journals. He has received a research award from the Emperor of Japan; he’s even had a mineral – Rustumite – named after him. Roy advocates using silver as an antibiotic, something that has repeatedly separated fools and their money – including those selling the silver, who have been fined by the FDA for promoting and profiting from a treatment that can result in actual bodily harm.  He also thinks – and advocates in this paper – that the conscious will of a healer such as a Chinese Qigong Grand Master can change the structure of water.

Then there’s William Tiller, a former Department Chair of Materials at Stanford University, has published claims that weak magnetic fields can alter biological materials and the pH of water, and that human intention can also change pH, affect electrical circuits, and alter the properties of space.

I don’t buy any of it. I promised I’d try the rice experiment – and I will – but unless I do it a few hundred times, double blinded, randomised, in fully sterilised containers, I don’t think I’ll read too much into it.

(Yes, I know it's meant to be a bit of harmless fun. And if it weren't for the likes of Roy and Tiller, it might be...) 

There’s a great piece of writing in the Times Higher this week. It’s by Tim Birkhead of Sheffield University, and it’s all about how Darwin dealt with sex. Stuffed with anecdotes, sniggers and first-hand (and first-rate) information (Birkhead has been trawling through the Darwin Correspondence), it’s exactly what science writing is all about.

Birkhead argues that Victorian mores meant that Darwin self-censored once his writings were being read, or chose not to see what was right in front of him. Take the case of Darwin’s cousin’s geese: they showed clear evidence of infidelity, sperm competition and multiple paternity.

If Darwin had put two and two together, the study of sperm competition - now a major area of research - might have been launched in 1870 rather than 1970. “Why did Darwin ignore the evidence and why did it take a century for others to make the connection?

What Darwin didn’t censor, his daughter Etty often did. Later, she displayed her sensibilities in a strange campaign against nature:

In later life she single-handedly began a campaign to have the stinkhorn fungus - whose Latin name, Phallus impudicus, simultaneously both identifies and describes it - removed from the English countryside because of its influence on the maids.

The result, Birkhead says, is that the biology of sex has been set back a hundred years:

The upshot of all this was that Darwin steered clear of female promiscuity and plumped for female monogamy, an idea that then remained firmly fixed, in biologists' minds at least, for a full century.

I first came across this fixed mentality a couple of years ago in La Jolla at the Beyond Belief conference. Joan Roughgarden had a stand-up debate with Richard Dawkins where she said biology was plagued by “locker-room bravado". Basically, the boys in charge of biology have always liked the alpha male idea, and ignored the evidence of female promiscuity (and homosexuality, of course) for as long as they could.

It seems they can’t any longer. And, as Roughgarden explains in her book Evolution’s Rainbow (there's a free chapter on female choice through that link) that has profound consequences.

13 Things’ chapter on sex touches on some of this stuff as a route to explaining the problems with sexual reproduction. It’s a fascinating area of biology – but start with Tim Birkhead’s piece. Go on – it’s freely available, after all. Which I only found out after I'd bought it. Damn.