Posts Tagged ‘science’
the photosynthesis challenge
c’est bien simple…
So I wrote last time about my non-career in science, with a promise to myself that I might try to get my head around photosynthesis. So, years ago I read Oliver Morton’s fiendishly difficult book, Eating the Sun, and all I clearly remembered about it was that there were two types, simply named type 1 and type 2, and that the processes are very very very complex, and took decades to unravel. And a feeling that it was all over my head. Or that one had to be there, in those labs, or chatting at science conferences with the experts, as Morton no doubt was, to have a chance of getting my dull head around it all. And yet, never say never…
So I’m rereading Morton’s book (published in 2007 – has more been nailed down about the processes since?), having nothing better to do – and that isn’t meant as an insult – and I’m currently about a quarter of the way through. What I note is that Morton intermixes the undeniably complex science with interesting character sketches of the major researchers and theorists, and descriptions of the mostly mid-twentieth century background of war and conflict (at least in this early part of the book). My aim here though is self-education, so I’ll be focussing entirely on the science as far as I can grapple with it. So there will be no names, just a lot of ‘this breakthrough led to a new avenue of research’, etc.
So, photosynthesis is about using sunlight as sustenance. Of course, water is also required, and CO2. The devil’s in the detail, and there’s an awful lot of it..
So, where to begin. Chlorophyll, I suppose. That’s the green pigment in the chloroplasts of plants and algae. They absorb light, mostly from the sun. But what does this mean? And how did we come to know this?
Chloophyll is green because the green area of the light spectrum is reflected, while blue and red light is trapped, mostly. So, though plants ‘eat’ sunlight, they don’t eat the green part of that light, which is fascinatingly counter-intuitive.
As to these chloroplasts, these key sub-cellular elements in plants and algae, they’re a product of endosymbiosis, the colonisation of eukaryotic cells by earlier microbes – bacteria or their ancestors. Mitochondria, the engines of ATP through oxidative phosphorylation (wateva), are another such product.
Which brings me to photophosphorylation in plants, as useful and interesting a starting point as any. This process, originally called photosynthetic phosphorylation, might be expected to be carried out by mitochondria in plants, as it is in mammals, but plant biologists noted that ‘the leaf cells with the greatest number of chloroplasts – the cells that do the bulk of the photosynthesis – contain remarkably few mitochondria’ (Morton, p76).
Phosphorylating, as I understand it, involves adding a phosphate to ADP (adenosine diphosphate) to create adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the principal ‘energy molecule’. Another such molecule is NADPH (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Phosphate), of which more later, perhaps. They are both important in plants, and are key to what became known as the Calvin-Benson cycle, a set of chemical reactions (independent of light) within chloroplasts as a part of photosynthesis. These reactions convert CO2 from the atmosphere into sugars for energy.
There are apparently two main stages to photosynthesis, the light-dependent stage and the light-independent stage (aka the Calvin-Benson cycle, or even the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle). The light-dependent stage occurs inside the thylakoid membranes of the chloroplasts. Here’s Wikipedia:
Thylakoids are membrane-bound compartments inside chloroplasts and cyanobacteria. They are the site of the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis. Thylakoids consist of a thylakoid membrane surrounding a thylakoid lumen. Chloroplast thylakoids frequently form stacks of disks referred to as grana (singular: granum). Grana are connected by intergranal or stromal thylakoids, which join granum stacks together as a single functional compartment.
In thylakoid membranes, chlorophyll pigments are found in packets called quantasomes. Each quantasome contains 230 to 250 chlorophyll molecules.
So that’s something about thylakoid structure. Now to function. Or maybe not – it’s all so complex. The thylakoid proteome (set of individual proteins) consists of at least 335 protein types, of which 89 are in the lumen or central cavity. At this stage it’s calculated that about 42% of these proteins are involved in photosynthesis.
Jumping away from all this, it’s important to note that for us mammals, the essential value of photosynthesis is that it creates, or releases, oxygen. Think of the great oxygenation event, mainly involving oceanic cyanobacteria, ‘about 2.4 billion years ago, shortly after the end of the Archaean’, according to Morton (p175). So how does that oxygenising aspect of photosynthesis work?
But I was going to write about the light-dependent part of photosynthesis, requiring sunlight and water. It’s called photosystem 1, and Wikipedia calls it ‘a vital membrane protein complex that uses light energy to transfer electrons from plastocyanin to ferredoxin, producing NADPH and helping generate ATP.’ So, digging slightly deeper, plastocyanin is ‘a small copper-containing protein that acts as a mobile electron carrier in the photosynthetic electron transport chain of plants, green algae and cyanobacteria’, and ferredoxins are ‘small iron-sulphur proteins that act as electron carriers in a wide variety of biological redox reactions’.
Now, NADPH is, of course, ‘the reduced form of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate’ which acts as ‘a key electron donor and energy carrier’ in various processes, including photosynthesis. So, my guess is that these movements of electrons create chemical changes, and a moment’s research tells me that’s what redox reactions are all about. In oxidation, electrons are lost, which takes the oxidation number up (the substance is oxidised), and in reduction they’re gained, which takes it down, and the substance is reduced.
In oxidation, electrons are lost, which takes the oxidation number up (the substance is oxidised), and in reduction they’re gained, which takes it down, and the substance is reduced.
Ok so that’s enough for now, there’s so much more to explore – rubisco, the z scheme… I cannot help but feel that it’s not light yet, but it’s getting there, to non-paraphrase Dylan….
References
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun, 2007
reflections on my relations with science & philosophy: photosynthesis next time!
I’m not a scientist of any kind, obviously, and yet…
When I left high school at fifteen, after a contretemps with the sadistic Principal, I was holding my own – just – in the ‘arts’ subjects, but failing in the science subjects. Frankly, I only responded well to the entertaining teachers; authoritarian teachers made me switch off. That, and a kind of natural clumsiness vis-a-vis lab work, and a lack of any scientific background, convinced me early on that science stuff wasn’t for me. And yet…
When, years later, I sat a mature age entry test for tertiary education, it was, I seem to recall, only to do an Arts degree. Not science, not law, not anything that might lead to a lucrative career. Not that I was too worried about this at the time, I knew I was never going to be classed as rich.
Anyway, I received acceptances at Adelaide’s only two universities at the time, Flinders and Adelaide, in that order. On receiving the first acceptance, which I thought would be the only one, I visited the Flinders campus for the first time, and was thrilled by the beauty of the place, and the great views it offered of the city below. Then I received the Adelaide acceptance, and was unsure…. I was living in the heart of the city at the time, a brief walk from the Adelaide campus, which I was already quite familiar with. It was a no-brainer, surely. Yet I felt slightly guilty. Was I choosing the Adelaide campus because it seemed more prestigious? I kind of hated that idea, and yet… In any case, the convenience of Adelaide made it the obvious choice.
But by this time, in my thirtieth year, I had long been ‘switched on’ to science. My conversion, if you can call it that, had come from the novel reading I’d been doing for many years, especially a novel by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. Hans Castorp, the main character, was, like me, in his mid twenties, and he was holed up in an alpine sanitarium due to being consumptive. He spent his time there listening to intellectuals and reading, and it seems one of his books was something like What is this thing called science? (Chalmers, 1976), or What is Life? (Schrodinger, 1944), although Mann’s book was published in 1926.
Anyway, something about the book clicked in me, and I decided to learn more about the scientific world. First off, I read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, then copious copies of science mags, such as Scientific American and New Scientist, which I semi-absorbed and puzzled over in my usual solitary fashion.
So, on being accepted at uni, I found that one of the subjects I was permitted to enrol in was a kind of ‘biology for arts students’ thing. So, of course, I tried it, but I switched back to an arts/science hybrid of sorts, called anthropology, because a couple of weeks into the science thing I botched up a piece of laboratory work so badly that I felt humiliated. It was as if I’d been told from on high to stop nursing ideas above my station.
The subject that most interested me, otherwise, was philosophy, but my essays on the subject failed to impress my lecturers and tutors. One sentence in one of those essays elicited the comment Wunderbar! – obviously sarcastic since there was no other comment and the essay received a bare pass. Yet the field – especially that of ‘philosophy of mind’, which Adelaide’s philosophy department seemed particularly devoted to – was of great interest to me, if more from a scientific than a philosophical perspective. Is the mind something more than the brain? It is an epiphenomenon of the brain? I very much doubted it, and felt that the mind-body problem was essentially chimerical. It was around this time that I came across a comment by an earlier 20th century philosopher – maybe Moritz Schlick or Max Black – that problems of this type are first taken up by philosophy but then resolved by science.
So there. I don’t think Adelaide University’s philosophy department, or the ‘philosophy of mind’ topic, are doing so well these days. Nya nya ne nya nya.
Philosophy of mind, methinks, has been dealt a death blow by the massive advances made in neurophysiology in the 21st century. As Robert Sapolsky, whose two big books Behave and Determined have thoroughly convinced me on the poverty of the free will argument, has pointed out, more has been discovered and understood, in the first decade and a half of the 21st century, about how our brains work, than in all of the previous centuries combined.
So, all of this is preliminary, I must say, to my attempt, in the next piece or two, to get my head around photosynthesis – the horrendously complex processes by which plants manage to ‘eat the sun’, in Oliver Morton’s clever phrase, used for the title of his brilliant but complex book on the topic. I’m looking forward to it….I think…
Reference
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun, 2007
could I ever manage to get my head around epigenetics?
Nessa Carey’s book, The epigenetics revolution, was published in 2011, and discusses, and introduces, to many of us, gene methylation, histones, a number of different types of RNA, the names of specific genes, karyotypes, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), phosphorylation, the Waddington epigenetic landscape and much else besides. Wikipedia’s account of epigenetics is no doubt more up-to-date, and is just about book-length (how long does a book have to be?), with over 200 references to scientific papers and such. Although the term was coined in the 1940s, the study of epigenetics is very much a 21st century thing, Our current knowledge of the area, like our knowledge of neurophysiology, has been one of the great developments in modern science. To read about it is exasperating, because there’s just too much to learn, to explore, to get your head around, and yet it’s vital to an understanding of who and what we are. When I think of SETI, for example, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, I wonder – how could such ineffable super-complexity have developed more than once in the universe, even given its incalculably massive extent?
I wish I was young and gifted with the opportunity to work in such a field, one which explains us, or tries to. How we manage to replenish all the cells in our bodies throughout our lives – not perfectly, for then we could live forever – but for a period extended enough for us to learn our own history, to fall in love, to learn from our many mistakes, to experience, delight in and suffer through all the stages of life, to observe all its amazing variety – the birds and the bees as they say, and the flowers and the trees, all of which have their genetic blueprints.
To think we had virtually no idea of this only a century ago, and we are 300,000 years old as a species, and DNA-driven creatures have existed for millions, maybe billions of years on this planet. We only worked out the structure of this molecule in the 1950s, and now we know for example that a spruce tree contains about six times more DNA than a human, and that it’s likely that our world was preceded by an RNA world, which still enlivens the viruses that plague us with influenza, hepatitis, polio, COVID-19 and so much else.
And all this epigenetic stuff – which is mainly about DNA methylation and histone modification – has been going on beneath our awareness, and certainly without our permission, since our life began as an embryo. That’s how our cells differentiate into some 200 different types. It has much to do with whether we’re tall or short, sickly or healthy, extroverted or introverted – even before we’ve ever met another soul. All of these goings-on in our growing bodies, as well as the inter-connections, disconnections and reconnections in our growing brains, in the time spent connected to a placenta and the subsequent years being buffeted by parents, relatives, strangers and frenemies, are what shape us for a lifetime.
So where am I going with all this? Those who know me might guess, and be much annoyed, or much heartened.
To return to Carey’s book, which explores, inter alia, how laboratory creatures like rats and mice show specific patterns of behaviour for a lifetime after early deprivation, stress and other conditions, I was struck by this passage:
The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand others to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It’s hard to imagine this, so let’s visualise each connection as a disk that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun (which is 93 million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
That’s a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. It’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, pp 235-6
This is, I believe, the only passage in Carey’s 300-page book that refers to determinism, and of course it struck me enough to write one word in the margin.
‘Really?’
I don’t often write in the margins of my books these days. Decades ago I had a girlfriend who expressed shock and great disapproval at finding margin notes in some of my books. She apparently found this behaviour to be sacrilegious in some way. Texts were sacred even if they were reproduced in their thousands. So, though I respectfully disagreed, I’ve reduced my sacrilegious behaviour, maybe to honour her memory. But this time I couldn’t resist.
– ‘mechanistic but not entirely deterministic’? What is the difference between these two terms? Aren’t these mechanisms determined by other mechanistic processes? Isn’t this what the book is all about? Isn’t this how we know about epigenetic processes, because they produce certain changes under certain specific conditions? Aren’t the determining factors precisely what we’re looking for, and what knowledge is all about. And yet there is, I find, a kind of fear or distrust of the word, even amongst those researchers who rely on mapping out the causal chain, often a complex and elusive one, to make good their discoveries. Whether we’re looking at the causes of cancer, or how one or two bees become queens while thousands more become workers, to mention just two topics explored in Carey’s book, we’re always trying to uncover and explain the determining conditions. It’s the sine qua non of all science.
Maybe I’m mis-representing Carey here. Maybe she meant, when she described the ‘huge flexibility’ of our neuronal system, the impossibility of trying to pin things down, cause-and-effect-wise, with absolute certainty. But then, that’s not what she wrote. She wrote ‘not entirely deterministic’, and that was a red flag to me. So what was the part that escaped determinism? It doesn’t actually make sense.
The idea, it seems to me, and the argument that most people try to use against determinism, is that complexity trumps it (sorry to use the word ‘trump’ here). If complexity was infinite, that might be so, but complexity isn’t infinite, it’s just complex.
So, that’s enough for now. Again, I wish I was fifty years younger, and a more disciplined person than I was in my youth, because I’d love to be working in the field of organic chemistry, or molecular biology, or neurophysiology, rather than peering at it over a vast stretch of ignorance, as I am today. But never mind…
References
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, 2011
Carlo Rovelli, humanist extraordinaire, and Lucretius, ditto
Lucretius, apparently
I was, for a time, a member of the South Australian humanists, basically a meet-up group, but also a branch of the national organisation, the title of which I can’t remember, mea culpa. I might also claim to be a prominent member, as I gave three talks to the group, the first on free will (on which I’ve since changed my position), the second on the decline of religion in Australia, and the third on the birth and growth of international organisations. I write this purely to big-note myself, as nobody else will.
I believe that humanist group is no longer with us, but of course humanism lives on in many hearts and minds. I’ve been very much reminded of this as I read a collection of essays by the philosophical physicist Carlo Rovelli, with the grand and charming title, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness. And I must say, to my shame, that I only got the book via a ‘Dirty Santa’ game last Christmas. I filched the book from someone, as part of the rules of the game, largely to show off about how bookish I am (I also filched another book, to become the sole owner of the only book gifts available).
Strangely I knew the name, probably through my various researches for my writing, but I chanced to search my little library and found a slender Rovelli volume, Seven brief lessons on physics, which I can’t for the life of me remember buying, and have surely never opened – mea maxima culpa. So now I have two Rovelli essay collections to read, and they truly are gems, resurrecting my humanist interests as well as, if it’s not the same thing, making me want to be a better person, at last!
The most recent essay I’ve read, ‘De rerum natura’, rather excited me in anticipation, and I must tell a story about it, which I suspect I’ve written before, but never mind.
In my early twenties I was at a party at a friend’s house, a fairly raucous affair, with painfully loud music and painfully attractive women, and I found myself overwhelmed and wilting. My friend noticed and made some effort to revive me, but I told him I was in a dull mood and should go home. He suggested instead that I spend some time in his spare room, away from the noise, where there was a sofa bed and ‘lots of books’. He knew me well. So, shutting the door to the beats of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello et al, I perused a plethora of texts before more or less randomly selecting Lucretius. De Rerum Natura is generally translated as On the nature of things, or On the nature of the universe, though there may be other variants. It was written in the first century BCE, and, believe me, it’s an extraordinary work, which cuts through the centuries between then and now like a knife through air. After the first few pages I found myself laughing with incredulity. Though from the beginning he addresses the great goddess Venus, it didn’t strike me as a religious text, it was too full of the life of the nature around him, animate and inanimate, and the atoms this natural world was all made from. Yes, this was an early atomic theory, first posited by Democritus and Epicurus, though long before subatomic particles, quantum states, electromagnetism and field theory,
I was certainly bedazzled by this 2,000 year old claim about atoms, but other speculations seemed fascinatingly ‘modern’:
… if things were made out of nothing, any species could spring from any source and nothing would require seed. Men could arise from the sea and scaly fish from the earth, and birds could be hatched out of the sky… The same fruits would not grow constantly on the same trees, but they would keep changing: any tree might bear any fruit. If each species were not composed of its own generative bodies, why should each be born always of the same kind of mother? Actually, since each is formed out of specific seeds, it is born and emerges into the sunlit world only from a place where there exists the right material, the right kind of atoms. This is why everything cannot be born of everything, but a specific power of generation inheres in specific objects.
This is the very sniffter of an intuition about the origin of individual species, which went through me, as a young man, like a very mild and titillating electric shock. The passage, and others like it, appear in the first few pages of De Rerum Natura, and it may well be that I didn’t get much further on that night, given the circumstances, but they made a deep impression. Our thoughts, or those of the best of us, have been plumbing the depths of what’s what in terms of what we are, and everything living – and non-living – around us, for 2 thousand, or 20 thousand, or even 200 thousand years. Our sharing of these thoughts no doubt began with the development of language, and then writing, which boosted us to become the dominant species we now are.
So I note that I’ve got a copy of On the nature of the Universe on my bookshelves, but I likely haven’t read past Book One of six books. Time to make amends. Life begins at 69! Which reminds me – vive les bonobos!
References
Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2022
Carlo Rovelli, Seven brief lessons on physics, 2014
Lucretius, On the nature of the universe, trans by R E Latham, 1994
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
what’s that thing called science?
Vera Rubin – check out galaxy rotation rates and dark matter, inter alia
There are people I know who profess no interest in science. Not because they lack intelligence – after all, professing is what professors do, en it? And not because they’re religious – remember Stephen Jay Gould’s silly NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria)? It snared him an audience with the Catholic Papa, and perhaps that’s what it was all about, but the fact remains that The Church is a totalizingly magisterial organisation and always will be.
So, no, it seems to be more about C P Snow’s old notion of ‘the two cultures’. Some quite smart people are happy to be scientifically illiterate and find the whole thing a bore, or worse. A fellow teacher of mine – I used to teach EAP (English for Academic Purposes) to NESB students vying for a place at an English language university – once quoted one of Newton’s laws at me – F=ma perhaps – to prove that it was virtually all kindergarten stuff. I mean, how E=mc² is that? She did know something about Thomas Kuhn’s highly questionable concept of paradigm shifts, which she used as proof that it was all just high-falutin fashion.
So, in defence of science, let me break it down. Science is curiosity. Science is wonder. Like wondering why the sky is blue – when the sun is visible. Why the moon changes shape in the sky. Why some days are hot and some are cold. Why we grow old. Why some people are good to look at, others not so much. Why we get sick. Why we get hungry. Why we get tired. Just about everything is a cause for wonder, and science tries to satisfy that curiosity, though it seems so often to open up more questions. Do all creatures see the same sky that we do? Can all creatures even see? What exactly is seeing? How do eyes work? How long is it possible to live? Why don’t cats and dogs live as long as we do, barring accidents? And so on and so on ad infinitum. Science just never ends. I wonder why?
Here’s my little ‘come to science’ story, probably a just-so story. I was an avid reader from childhood – mostly fiction, but also encyclopaedia entries (mostly history, and biographies from Albert Einstein to Adolf Hitler) and a bit of that soft and very malleable science called psychology, because my mother worked in a mental hospital. And so it went, through to my early to mid twenties when I happened upon a novel by Thomas Mann, called The Magic Mountain. Its central character, Hans Castorp, was about my age, and had been sent to an alpine sanitarium, in an attempt to cure his consumption. He encounters some lively characters, and engages in deep discussion and contemplation, on politics, the nature of time, the origin of life, and even non-life – why is there something rather than nothing? And it was these last, more or less scientific questions that seemed to flick a switch in me. It inspired me to buy my first fully scientific book – The selfish gene, by Richard Dawkins – and a copy of Scientific American every month for the next two or three years, before switching to New Scientist, and then to the various science podcasts and videos available these days.
I may be exaggerating this ‘come to science’ moment – we like to turn our memories into neat narratives – but I do feel that my greater interest in scientific problems and solutions since that time has helped me to ‘rise above myself and grasp the world’, a term attributed to Archimedes which has resonated with me since I first encountered it, not so long ago. And there’s so much about our world that we haven’t yet grasped, and are just discovering. We identified our first exoplanet in the 1990s, and now we know of around 6,000 (in saying ‘we’ I’m reminded again of my teaching colleague, who responded contemptuously to my use of the pronoun – ‘ “We”? – what part did you play in all that?’), and we learned with some certainty in 2010 that Neanderthals and Humans got it on together from time to time. And the Vera Rubin observatory/telescope, which has just come online, will doubtless bring a harvest of new discoveries and conundrums.
And of course the world of science is also a world of scientists, in a multitude of fields, each one more fascinating than the next. These fields are, I must admit, a welcome escape from the horrors, tragedies and stupidities of much that we call global politics, and the workers in those fields seem so much happier in their bubbly spheres of interest. I would have liked to have been one. Better even than being a bonobo, maybe… but I love the way they swing….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
The FIRST images from the RUBIN observatory! (Dr Becky video)
more gobbledegook on free will?: C D Broad
The Cambridge philosopher C D Broad (1887-1971) was, from what I’ve read, a genial self-effacing fellow, who according to his bio, got into philosophy because he didn’t think he could make it as a scientist. His contribution to the Berofsky volume is, so far, the most incomprehensible piece I’ve read. So, in the French tradition of explication de texte, I’ll have a go at pulling apart the penultimate paragraph of his essay. The whole essay is entitled ‘Determinism, indeterminism and libertarianism’ (published in 1952). The final two paragraphs of the essay come under the sub-title ‘Libertarianism’:
We are now in a position to define what I will call ‘Libertarianism’. This doctrine will be summed up in two propositions. (1) Some (and it may be all) voluntary actions have a causal ancestor which contains as a cause-factor the putting-forth of an effort which is not completely determined in direction and intensity by occurrent causation. (2) In such cases the direction and the intensity of the effort are completely determined by non-occurrent causation, in which the self or agent, taken as a substance or continuant, is the non-occurrent total cause. Thus, Libertarianism, as defined by me, entails Indeterminism, as defined by me; but the converse does not hold.
This sort of language-torturing borders on criminality, it seems to me. But it might be fixed. My simplification:
Here’s my summary of Libertarianism. First, our deliberate acts often (and perhaps always) proceed from a causal chain which, followed back in the past, involve efforts which have little to do with these current actions [if that’s what Broad means by ‘occurrent causation’]. Second, this means that these current acts can be traced causally to those past actions/decisions which…. oh, forget it.
What Broad is engaging in here, presumably without fully realising it, is just word-play. He fails to define ‘occurrent causation’ and ‘non-occurrent causation’, which are key to understanding the paragraph. On the face of it you’d think they mean ’causes that exist’ and ’causes that don’t exist’, but that just sounds dumb, so better to stick with the obscurantism. More important, Broad fails completely, like most of the contributors to this volume, to deal with real situations and the lives of real people. It’s all abstraction, which is often the biggest failing of philosophy. I recall many years ago reading comments, I think by Max Black – another philosopher heavily influenced by Wittgenstein – to the effect that most philosophical problems eventually get taken over and clarified by science (‘theory of mind’ comes immediately to mind – I mean, brain). Meaning, I reckon, that they move from abstract constructions and general formulae to formalised research and the hard data thereby produced.
In any case, Broad relies a lot on the concept of entailment, as mentioned in the last sentence of the above quote, which is essentially a concept in logic. The determinism that Sapolsky is focussing on is about more slippery phenomena, like the combined effects of genes, hormones, neural connections, early childhood experiences, thousands of years of culture, physical development, recent trauma, and much else besides, in our daily decision-making. Strict entailment isn’t what this is about at all, but that hardly rules out or mitigates against a determinism which is multifactorial and inescapable. It turns out, apparently, on the basis of other, more patient (and no doubt smarter) analysts than myself, that Broad is likely, on the basis of this essay, as much a determinist as Sapolsky:
The position Broad reaches is a version of what is sometimes called free will pessimism: free will is incompatible with determinism, but there is no viable form of indeterminism which leaves room for free will, either; therefore, free will does not exist—indeed could not exist.
from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: Charlie Dunbar Broad
And just a note on libertarianism – it has always seemed to me an ideology of the more-than-haves rather than the have-nots – and I note with some bemusement, and amusement, that it doesn’t rate a mention in Sapolsky’s book. It also seems to run in families – if your Dad’s a libertarian, you’ll rarely feel free to be anything else! In any case, libertarianism is usually defined in terms of individual freedom, which is funny coming from the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet.
To be continued, perhaps.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-Wittgenstein
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
on religion, secularism, tolerance and women
Over the years, I’ve read, listened to and encountered non-religious people defending religions and the religious in the name of tolerance, decency, human rights and more. A non-religious philosophy tutor once told the discussion group that I was a member of that western morality was based on Christianity. This claim appeared to be made as a criticism of the ‘new atheist’ movement that was prevalent at the time (some 15 or so years ago). I found it to be highly dubious on its face, so I engaged in a ‘deep dive’ into the key texts of Christianity – the so-called gospels, the purported reportage of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus, the son of the Judeao-Christian or Abrahamic god. Did these most basic Christian texts provide a coherent moral system for the western world, or even the barest framework of such a system?
Needless to say, I found no such thing, nor did I find any evidence that the gospel authors had ever even met the central figure in Christianity, Jesus. Whether such a person ever existed is a question with no clear answer. Jesus was a relatively common name at the time, a period which provides no written records of the existence of individuals outside of monarchs, governors and the like. Much research has explored the production and dating of the gospels, which were not contemporaneous with the life of their subject, who was said to have been crucified sometime between 30 and 40 AD (it doesn’t help that our current dating system is based on his conjectured birth). My writings on the subject (about a dozen blog posts, referenced below) were, as with most of my writings, a kind of self-education project. Amongst my gleanings were that the different gospels were inconsistent, both internally and compared to each other, and included interpolations from as late as the third or fourth century AD.
Let me focus briefly on one gospel example, the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ in John 8 (3-11), since it’s all about a topic of interest, the treatment of women. It’s now generally accepted as a later interpolation, but it’s still useful in terms of its lack of context – a problem with most gospel anecdotes. In modern jurisprudence, and modern (WEIRD) morality, context is absolutely essential. This is explored in much detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The weirdest people in the world, in which motive, intention, effect and a host of other factors are included in our judgment and appraisal of others.
So here is the story, from the ‘New Revised Standard Version’ of the Bible:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them,4 they said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
So this is where we need to add, if we can, the context lacking in the story. For example, what does ‘caught in the act of adultery’ mean here? And indeed, what does ‘woman’ mean? It’s well established that, in this region, at this time, females were sold into marriage on a regular basis. Furthermore, these females were often – in fact customarily – children as young as ten, or younger, and once married, they were referred to as ‘women’.
But we hardly need to go into detail to recognise that adultery is here quite undefined, that stoning to death for this or any other crime is disproportionate to say the least, and that it’s highly unlikely that a man would be threatened with the same punishment as the ‘woman’ is in this case.
This of course isn’t an isolated anecdote – all of the parables, speeches and actions of Jesus, as described, lack the contextual elements we would need to arrive at the kinds of judgments expected of us in the WEIRD world.
Then again, it might be argued that the proscriptions enumerated in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 2-17) are a better starting point for western or WEIRD morality. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that lying, stealing and killing fellow humans would be offensive to an omnipotent god who wants to see his prize creations behaving nicely, it does seem odd that he should be so concerned about his own position in their lives that he must have their love more or less constantly (second commandment). It suggests a degree of insecurity not quite in keeping with omnipotence. The tenth commandment, too, strikes a flat note to a WEIRD individual keen to promote a bonobo humanity, as it speaks against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife along with other property items. It’s a bald reminder, as if one needed it after reading Genesis, etc, that this god is definitively male.
The whole point here is that, if western or WEIRD morality emerged from Christianity or the Bible, which to some extent is true, it needs to also be pointed out that the Bible and its ‘gospels’ are human documents. The Pentateuch was written five or six hundred years before the putative birth of Jesus, and was arguably the first successful creation of an omnipotent, controlling god, designed to unite a tribe or people as ‘special’ and chosen, while seeking to explain the origin of the world in which they lived (though of course its creation myths were derived from earlier versions). The god’s concern, through the commandments – or rather the concern of the Jewish leaders and authors who wrote them, was to unite and separate the Jewish people in the context of a multi-ethnic region with a bewildering array of gods, with ambiguous powers and rankings. Given the context, these commandments are bog-standard – don’t lie to, steal from or kill each other, don’t covet each others’ property (including women), treat your one and only god (creator of all things) with respect, treat marriage as sacred, honour your parents and kin, and follow the proper rituals. Basically, a recipe for the survival and thriving of the group, in what was, then and for a long time before and afterwards, a god-obsessed human world.
The interesting innovation of Christianity, of course, was that it dispensed with the chosen people concept, making it more universalisable, if that’s a word. The concept of Christ dying for our sins, or so that the rest of humanity might be ‘saved’, does seem rather obscure, but it has doubtless provided grounds for thousands of theological theses over the centuries.
I began this piece reflecting on those non-believers who look askance at other non-believers criticising religion and the religious. I understand full well that, had I been born many centuries ago, I too would have believed in the gods of my region. Galileo, the foremost mathematician and astronomer of his day, was a lifelong Catholic. Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death, and the foremost scientist of his generation, was also a thorough if idiosyncratic Christian. Whatever one thinks of free will, we can’t escape the zeitgeist we’re born into. The thing is, today’s zeitgeist is more complex than anything that’s gone before, and will probably become more so, and the tensions between religious beliefs and secular, scientific explorations of every imaginable research field, including religion, its origins, modalities and effects, and why it is losing its grip on WEIRD humanity, will continue long into the foreseeable. I have no idea how it will all end, but I suspect that the feminine side of humanity will be an essential element in bringing about a best-case resolution, if such a resolution ever comes.
References
http://stewartsstruggles.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Bible: Child Marriage in Ancient Israelite times – Paedophilia?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020%3A2-17&version=NIV
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s daughter: a drama of science, faith and love, 1999
catching up on SARS-CoV-2
Canto: So, having largely ignored COVID-19 in the last few months, since having my fourth vaccine, which came before or after having tested positive (a RAT test) for the virus, with minimal symptoms – and I suppose it may have been a false positive – I hear that it’s still causing serious problems two years on. And I’m still encountering people who make light of the virus, and are ‘on the fence’ about ‘the whole vaccine thing’, so I think we should explore the situation anew – variants, comorbidities, actions to be taken, long covid etc etc.
Jacinta: Okay, another interminable conversation perhaps. Where do we start? According to a graph (see below) on the situation in South Australia, case numbers have spiked a few times in the last year, but the graphic gives no indication of severity of symptoms. The reporting on new cases seems to be more sporadic at the moment, which explains the gap between the lines, which are getting disturbingly longer. We’ve noticed of course, that mask-wearing and other precaution-taking has slackened off during the year, and government-enforced mandates were lifted months ago….
Canto: And few people seem to be concerned about crowded settings any more… The ABC has a state-by state report, referenced below, which gives weekly stats. It shows that in every single state and territory the case numbers for the last week were higher than those of the week before. Their site presents a rather alarming graphic of case numbers over the last four months, which speaks for itself:
Jacinta: And yet, as you say, covid fatigue, or rather covid restrictions fatigue, has set in, and governments are no doubt reluctant to get tough again, unless things get even worse. What I’m hearing, from people much younger than me, is that it’s no big deal for the young and healthy, only elderly people or those with comorbidities need to worry – and of course it’s all a bit overblown. I hesitate to ask if they’ve been fully vaxed – they’ve obviously never heard of Typhoid Mary.
Canto: And that was 100 years ago – the germ theory of disease wasn’t fully accepted then, but now information is easily available.
Jacinta: And so is misinformation. Anyway, the ‘fourth wave’ is now underway, according to the media. According to Dr Nancy Baxter in an ABC interview, our vaccine immunity has declined over time and most covid restrictions are gone, so numbers are increasing again, and hospitalisations are rising.
Canto: My sympathies go to all the medicos, nurses and other such workers out there. What about death rates – and what about variants, where are we with those?
Jacinta: So just over a month ago the federal government’s Chief Medical Officer made this public statement:
We are seeing an increase in COVID-19 case numbers in Australia, reflecting community transmission of the Omicron variant XBB. We are also closely monitoring the overseas transmission of a second Omicron variant – BQ.1. While evidence is still emerging, the experience to date with these two variants overseas is that they do not appear to pose a greater risk of severe illness and death – and that the COVID-19 vaccines provide good protection against these outcomes. All indications are that this is the start of a new COVID-19 wave in Australia. This was to be expected and will be part of living with COVID-19 into the future. The overseas experience is that these new variants have driven increases in case numbers – and hospitalisations at a rate proportionate to these increases – because of their ability to evade the immunity provided by prior infection and vaccination.
So, not more deadly, but each new variant that comes to our attention does so because it has varied sufficiently to evade the immunity provided by previous infections and the vaccines created to target those earlier forms of the virus. So this could be an ongoing problem, as the CMO says.
Canto: So doesn’t this remind you of the antibiotics dilemma? Rapid reproduction means rapid variation, and we can’t keep up, with antibiotics or vaccines. We’re all doomed!
Jacinta: Well, the panic seems to be over – though panic is the wrong word, to be sure – but case numbers continue to be high, though they appear to go in waves, as every new more successful variant comes along. And death rates, which of course lag case rates and are complicated by comorbidity and age factors, are still higher than we’d like them to be. It’s a weird situation we’re in now, with so many people being in denial or just switched off, perhaps because they’ve made it okay thus far. But of course we’re not doomed – we just need to keep informed about our local area, keep up the vaccines as required, and take precautions as necessary. Remember it’s a largely airborne virus, and it loves crowds of people in enclosed spaces.
Canto: Well we might be keeping up with the vaccines, but are the vaccines keeping up with the variants?
Jacinta: Well this week the CDC in the USA came out with an advisory about updated (bivalent) boosters for adults and children – though the adult one came out on September 2, so not so recent…
Canto: What’s a bivalent booster?
Jacinta: That’s a vaccine that confers immunity to two antigens, such as two versions of a virus, as is presumably the case here. So they’re able to tweak vaccines to cover new variants, methinks. Seems to be a bit of a race between antigens and prophylactics. As to keeping up, an article from the Nature website (referenced below) provides reassurance:
Booster shots against current SARS-CoV-2 variants can help the human immune system to fight variants that don’t exist yet. That’s the implication of two new studies analysing how a booster shot or breakthrough infection affects antibody-producing cells: some of these cells evolve over time to exclusively create new antibodies that target new strains, whereas others produce antibodies against both new and old strains.
Canto: So the message clearly seems to be to keep up the boosters, which I strongly suspect young healthy people aren’t doing, so they’re playing dice with their own health as well as threatening the health of others inadvertently, as more of less healthy carriers of the virus.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s really a difficult message to get through to the young, especially if they’re not in contact with serious sufferers or the mortality of loved ones.
Canto: Okay, so it’s an ongoing drama at present. I’m hoping that we can look at the long covid issue sometime soon, another complex problem, due to symptom variety, skepticism, and the whole issue of treatment.
Jacinta: Yes – whether the pandemic is over or not is a live issue. Sometimes I get the impression that it’s over just because people want it to be over. They want to return to ‘normality’ whatever the consequences. The virus may teach us otherwise. We need to keep an eye on it.
References
https://www.health.gov.au/news/new-covid-19-variant-leads-to-increase-in-cases
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/bivalent-vaccine