DS9 Document EFTA01168947

TH ersH Alt. t—.—/ rt is WIC, min 10C Thursday September 12011, thetimos cu uk I No 70353 TIMF7,.5 E, Free inside Eureka( ,tk Richard Dawkins exclusive The maga/itle lot Raithits Planning revolt fuels fears over economy Countryside lobby opposes easier development Som f lemma. Rama Watson Monsters must dery opposition to plans that would tstee restrictions on buckling in 11w countryside, nor of the country's foremost busmen lenders has warned. The Governmtml most 'hold Its coune" a the row 'noodles over 'Reform will cut banks' earnings by a quarter' *wt. owns 10.13 proposed changes that woukl create a "mesumption in favour of sustainable ploy David Prost, the depart- ing chief of the British Chambers of Commerce, told Thu Tignat Reforms making It harder for coun- cils to block development have provoked another dispute between the coalition and rural campaigners Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, accused lobby growlof "send-hydro. car ailithiat of the chariot but Can. *emotive and Liberal Democrat MN fear a backlash In their constituencies. IN THE NEWS Bruit screening risk Women are 'AM heinitkopt hr the dark' about the risk awe land w all Ni IS lirroi I lInCet seowung Naar, Polo 3 Mr Frost, 141040 organisation repre- sents I00,000 humus*" employing more than 5 m 'Ilion people, warned the coalition that it would damage growth R It budded in the race of resistance "The Government Is absolutely right to move on planning but my worry is that It. is going OWL It has to hold Its course. nine is a sand-off and you have Wrinull fatty lined up against the proposedchange, herald Business groups argue that Ilw reforms are vital to streamline building and revitalise growth. The Home Builders Federation yesterday accused a coalition of groups opposed to tow reforms, Including the Notional Trust of wareniongering Out the Greenest IlannIng Ever Coalition which also includes the RSPB and the WWF, says that new laws would damage the countryside. Jack Neill-I loll. or the Campaign to helot Ruud England. said Mse proposals are nyenyhelmlinly geared to delivering the needs of business and shoMtenn growth rather than long- term needs of communities and the environment " An olio Ivo of leading town planners Conlinum on pre 11, rot 1 61.111•1 HA l . op• ; we George Clooney.* political thriller TM On al Merit harkflabbing on the campaign hall. opened Me Venire film festival at night. News, P09414 Clooney cruises in for `overdose of handsome' Child rioter convicted Sartori accused A boy, II. became the youngest person In he convicted in connection willi Iasi Mill Id's riots in Landon. News, Pepe Nkuln Sarkumy accepted illegal campaign donlit inns (0)rultnink-e• nclunt WiMUM, I lijudp•dwms woad. PIM Z9 T-Mobile deal halted A'Earts SS billion takeover of T•Mnbile INA is on the brink of collapse after nuirlaton blocked It Buttons. peg' Transfers bonanza Premier league dub/loom (415 million on new planers by Mu dow of the transfer deadline. Spat, pages 72411 How UK waged `oil war' in Libya ImccmaTtm Webb When the holm tithe overthrow of Colonel Muammar Grititinfl is finally written, two shabby disused rooms on the top floor of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will dewed, a special mention. Ned to redundant photocopiers and surrounded by maps of the Maghreb, half n doyen turnip* Office and Minis- try of Defence o Wink worked far four months alonsolde Alan Duncan, the oil trader turned minister, and MI6 on a second critical front. When David Cameron meets the victorious Mustafa Abdul Jain the chairman of the National Try manta*, Council (NTC), in PAM today he may quietly credit a covert tram that he commbaloned. the Ilbyan Oil Cell. Its mission was tottery /wont history and make the sanctions on Colonel Caddell operate effectively. against the backdrop of an increasingly hitter Whitehall turf war to control the unit 11w six-strong team, led fled by an admiral and then a senior diplomat. was created In early April idler the first flush of bombing failed to oust (*MIMI Glidden Mr ()uncap confronted the National Security Council with intelligence from the nil world that hastily arranged Banc lute were hurting the rebels while leaving the Libyan dklator's war machine untouched. With the dietMor ready to pay SIN) to $200 more than the going rate for a tonne of petrol, the behaviour of a few oil traders was beam. Some dodged sanction. by Misting to the Tunisian pod of LIT :WAITS and trucking sop piles across the border. while /OW Continued on page?,colS fo glrl! real power Ilse TIMUI2 sl EFTA01168947 1111 1 1\11lure I vme 24 • September Nil. 5dence• Life• The Planet EFTA01168948 Science master with a lesson for us all As one of BfitainY pre•eminent academia and authors, Richard Dawkins could command the attention of the world's opinion formes. Yet three years ago he gave up his day job to con• centrate on writing a hook for children The Male of Reality, extracts of which appear in this haw of Eureka, is ikatmed to become a &Mk, to do for science what Ernst GombrichY A Little History of Shit World has done for its Wiwi. But It Is his motivation that Is important In directing his energy at children, Professor Dawkins Is addressing the greatest educational challenge this country faces. Britain Is running short of scientists and engineers; unless we start growing more, and quickly, we will have to import scientists and outsource the induatry that should he powering mfr future growth. In WOO Britain was ranked fourth by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development m science attainment by pupils aged IS. By 2909 it was INK The trend b dearly one we need In reverse, and Imaginatively. Educators and politicians should heed the findings of science The more we learn about how our brains work the more likely we will be able to Inspire children to hecome.scientists. If that means going out of the margins, starting school later in the day or offering Rita tin on the lunchtime jelly, then that should he considered Their are already signs of rekindling interest. This year the numbers of A level maths and sci- ence students have soared, beamed perhaps by Thion Cox et al Prof Dawkins may not have quite 1130 slum pop star appeal, hut the silence meille he weaves is as nwe,Ingarnig II might he the impettn we need to set Britain back on track to the top bench of scientific excellence • Every (MI WONDERFUL. WORLD Let there he light INTIIEORY Thermo- dynamics it l SCIENCE. MATTERS The problem with patents in genetics In I SCIENCE. LIFE. THE PLANET • EVERYTHING News from out there 10 1 YOUR SCIENCE, LIVE, PLANV.T Your views & your 'Achim You decide: Can companies own genes? 'I'his month 'I'he school run Careers advice P20 What schoolchUthco think of %dente — our very colourful experiment Keeping it real P22 The science master on whatb really Due -Ns...et KY RICO IAan DAWN IN 'Those who ran, teach L.P34 Meet five Inspirational science teat-ben sY KAYA KU KG Os OM% A: IIll:PIRST MAYO r I NI KY RoNTII \ext home Oda [ p4 0 tl l GREENWAMI No such thing as a free trip I &moss in learning What science can taadi education NY MARK I MN DMON a IIANNAII DEVLIN IS I WHOARE YOU? QUF.NTIN COOPER Aliens or Just us? "We are the Martians!" ri Matt el .11 Sin al Id science be taught as a single-sex subject? 99 osellY vs ANTHONY %IILDON O. SKI HEN MILLER I've learnt my lesson — at least In French di l THE REVIEW National Museum of Scotland by I lermione Cockburn p47 Family affair Alice 'Ilioniani has a history lemon at the Cavendish laboratory l'hc Big Picture Shinning rf 'filament INS MI THE FUN Quiz & putties Mt I TI IF. MONTH What's on when & where Every day The science biog thetdmes.cauk/ eureka-dolly EUREKA IS... 14414 I Aw.114.w.l. Aft Wiecinf Man (Leh Ili We. Illatinod lbws chaff sui-cdoss ihPra 1000114 .14•Apen rf IMF l WWI COM Swamis. 11W4sty wee nIsSw 1.1e AIn Rt. m Iv is Neosho (Sm.% 14101.” ,an NA liven. MSS MAW. Amu Issmau 0 Ilnoti iNwsparm nil VIII PISS laeael Tim Nnq rpm Kahn t Instals Met Koh lake UK Y.Ouorm3000 Net Prkurh theiped LH Mil a le soli ispiralibleir lK Scplanbet lull I north I Dill TIMES I I EFTA01168949 • PI larOGRAPIIY: DAVID STEWART In his new book Richard Dawkins teaches young and old alike the fundamentals of science. So take your seat in the classroom... • ...why are there so many animals? Adam's task of turning all the animals was a tough one les been estimated that about 2 million species have so far been corn scientific names. and eirti these are just a small fraction of the number of yxtw t yet to he named. I low do we e-•en decide whether two animals belong in the saint species or in two different species? Where animals reproduce sexually. we can come up with a sort of defuut ion. Animals belong to different species If they don't breed togetlxt There arc txsnkrlin• cases. suds as horses and donkeys, which ran brred together but produce offspring (called mules or hinnies) that arc infertile We therefore place a horse and a donkey in different species. More obviously, horses and dap belong to different species because they don't even try to interbreed. and couldn't produce offspring if they did. even infertile ones Rut spaniels and poodles belong to the same species because• they happily interbreed. and the puppies that they produce am fertile. Can you sit the shape of a tree developing in your mind? It is a family tree a tree with many branches, each branch basing sub-branches. and each sub-branch having sub-sub-branches The tim of the twigs are species The other groupings -- class. order. family. gem; - arc the branches and suh-twanchet The whole tree n all of life on froth The following isn't exactly how the tree of animals branched. but it gives you an idea Imagine an ancestral species splitting into two species. If each of thaw Own splits into two, that makes four If each of them splits into two, that makes eight. and so on through 16, 32. 64,128. 46, 512 You can see that it doesn't take long to get up into the millions of mimes. For species. the equivalent of words 6 DNA — the genetic inkmution every thing thing carries inside it that determines how it is made. When individuals reproduce sexually, they mix their DNA. And when members of one local population migrate into another local population and introduce their genes into it by mating with individuals, we call this gene flow'. Tice DNA of two separated populations of a species becomes less and los alike over time 'lieu DNA becomes less and less able to viva together to make babies Dome DNA has drifted so far from donkey DNA that the two tin no longer unskrstand each other. Or rather. they can mix well enough — the two -DNA ihalects can and mtand exit other well enough - to stake a Ming creature. a mule. but not well enough to make one that run reproduccAnimal species almost never exchange DNA again emir they have (lilted far enough apart to have stopped breeding together. • • • 22 I niE TIMES I Fens I Sestme.t2011 Sepinriter Nil I beets I Tilt 111611.'S I n EFTA01168950 At some point, probably less than a million years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from uskilhat a modern person wouldn't have been able to breed with them if they had met I tear Richard Dawkins captain -Who was the lint person really- in an exclutise audio extract on the I one. Wad edition on 'flitinadas %comber I Komi a full inters trw with Richard Dawkins in llits on Saturday September ...who was the first person really? This may surprise you. but there never was a first person because every person had to have parents and those parents had to be people. too. It's the saint with rabbits There never was a lust rabbit. never a find crocodile. never a lint dragonfly. Every creature ever born belonged to the same species as its parents So that must mean that every creature eva.born belonµed to the same species as its grandparents And its great-grandparent. And so on for ever. For ever? Well, no. it's not as simple as that This Is going to need a hit of explaining. In your imaination. find a picture of silent-If Now take a picture of your father and place it on top Then find a picture of his father, your grandfather, and place that on top. Then place on top of that a picture of your great-grandfather Carry on paling up the pictures. going back through more and more great itreat-greats flow many greats do we nett' for our thought aent? Oh. a mere ISS million or so well do nicely. It isn't easy to imagine a pile of ISS million pictures. If each picture were punted as a picture postcard. then a suck of 11%5 million tipped on its side would need a bookshelf three miles long The near end of the bookshelf has the picture of you The far end has a picture of yourdistant ancestor. What did he look like? We don't know exactly what he looked hie. but fossils give us a pretty good ilea. Your I85-million-greats-grandfather was a fish So was your 185-mdlion-greats-grandmother. which is just as well or they couldn't luxe mated with each other and you woukln1 be here Les now walk along our three-mile bookshelf, pulling pictures off it one lw one to have a look at them. Every picture shows a creature belonging to the same species as the picture on either side of it Yet if you walk steadily from one end of the bookshelf to the ottk-r, youth ace a human at one end and a rah at the other. and lots of interesting relatives an between, which include some that look like apes, other that look lake shrews, and so on. Each one is like its neighbour. in the line yet. if you pick any two pictures far apart in the hoe they are very different So it was all very gradual — so gradual that you wouldn't notice any change as you walked back ten thousand year, which would bog you to somewhere around sour 400-greats-granctfather Now, kis push a hit further back in time, If you walked the first million years along the shelf. the picture of your 50.000-greats-gnmdfather would be different enough to count as a different species, the one we call flomo erectus. We. today. are lbw sapiens So, the question of who was the first person, and when they laved, doesn't have a precise answer. It's kind of hors. lake the answer to the question when did you stop being a baby and become a toddkr/ M some point, probably less than a million years ago but mote than a hundred thousand ye-an ago. our mentors were sunkientb different from us that a modern person wouldn't have been able to breed with them if they had met RICHARD DAWKINS ...what is the inside of an atom like? An atom of lead is the smallest obiat that still desenrs to be called lead. But can you really not cut an atom any further' And would an atom of lead actually look take a tiny tattle chip of lead? No, it wouldn't look like anythmg. because an atom n too small to be seen, even with a powerful microscope And, yes, you can cut an atom into even mutter pieces — but what you then yet is no longer the same elenkni What n more, this is very difficult to do, and it releases an alarming quantity of energy That is why, for some people, the phrase -splitting the atom' has such an ominous ring to it It was fiat done by the great New leaLind scientist Ernest Rutherford in 1919. Although we can't see an atom, and although we can't split it without turning it into something else, that doesn't mean we can't work out what it is like inside. Tlk Rutherford model, later refined by Rutherfords pupil. 11w erktrated Owlish physicist Niels Bohr, treats the atom as a tiny. miniatunted solar system There is a nucleus in the middle of the atom, which contains the bulk of its material And there arc tiny particles called electrons whining around the nucleus in "oda(' One surprising thing about the Rutherfonlitiohr model is that the dittance between each nucleus and the next is very large compared with the sire of the nuclei, even in hard, solid matter, such as a diamond. A diamond it nude up of carbon atoms. Suppose wc represent the nucleus of each carbon atom in the crystal by a football, with electrons in orbit around it On this wale the neaghbounitg footballs in the diamond would be more than 15km away The !Mon between 11w footballs would contain the electrons in orbit around the nuclei Rut each electron, on our football scale, is much smaller than a put, and these miniature gnats are themselves several kilometres away from the footballs they are flying around. So you can we that - amazingly - even the legendarily hard diamond is almost all empty space The same is ink of rocks, no nutter how hard and solid 11 n true of iron and lead And it is troy of you and me Solid matter is made of alt0(113 'packed- together, but -packed' means something rather odd here because the atoms are mostly empty space Why do rocks and walk feel hard, and wits' can't we merge our spact' with theirs? We lave to reality that what we feel and see as solid matter is more than Just maid and electrons - 11w footballs and the gnats_ Scientists talk about 'forces and 'booth" and 'fields", which ad an their different ways both to keep the 'footballs' apart and to keep the component' of each "foothalT together And al is thaw forces and fields than make things feel solid. When you get down to really small thing's, such as atoms and nuclei, the distinction between 'matter" and *empty TACO' starts to lose its meaning. It nrct really right to say that nucleus n "matter" like a soccer and that there a 'empty space until the next nucleus. We define solid matter as 'what sou can't walk through' You can't walk through a wall because 01 thew mysterious forces that link the nuclei to their neighbors in a lixed position. That's what soot meant SrptrniltrIVII I Eurriri I mu risiv; I rs EFTA01168951 .what would ET and other aliens look like? If there are living creatures on other planets, what might they look like? There's a widespread feeling that its a bit lazy for science fiction authors to make them look like humans, with just a few things changed — bigger heads tar extra era, or maybe wings But perhaps it is not jut lazy. not just a lack of imagination. Perhaps there really is good reason to suppose that aliens, if there are any (and I think there probably are). might not look too unfamiliar to us Ektional aliens are proverbially described as bug-eyed monsters, so I'll take eyes as my example. Eyes arc pretty good thins> to have, and that es going to he true on most planets light trawls, for practical purposes, in straight lines. Wherever light is available, such as in the vicinity of a star, it is technically easy to use light rays to find your way around. to navigate, to locate objects. Any planet that has hfe n pretty much bound to be in the vicinity of a star, because a star is the obvious source of the energy that all life needx. So the chances are good that light will be available wherever life is present and where light is present it is very likely that eyes will evolve Let's exercise our imaginations a bit more On the plaint of our hypothetical Attn. the radiant energy from their star will probably range from radio waves at the lung end to X-rays at the short. Why should the alerts limit themsehrs to the narrow hand of frequencies that we call 'light. ? Maybe they have radio eon) Or X-ray eyes? A good image relics on high resolution The higher the resolution, the closer two points can be to each other while still being distinguished from each other. Not surprisingly, king wavelengths don't make for good resolution. tight wavelengths are measured in minute fractions of a millimetre and give excellent resolution. but radio wavelengths are measured in metres So radio waves would be busy for forming images, although they are very good for communication purposes because they can be modulated. Modulated means changed, extremely rapidly; in a contmikd way As far as is known. no living creature on our planet has evolved a natural system for transmitting, modulating or receiving radio waves7 that had to wait for human technology. But perhaps there are ahem on other planets that have evolved radio communication? What about wave% shorter than light waves — X-rays, for example? X-rays are difficult to focus, which is why our X-ray machines form shadows rather than true images, but it Is not impossible that some life forms on other planets have X-ray vision Or, if the aliens have evolved °warn that can handle radio waves for communication, they might also evolve true radar to find their way around Duckbilksd platypuses have electric senors in their bilk which pick up the electnc4 disturbances in water caused by the muscular activity of their prey. It n easy to imagine an alien life form that has evolved electrical sensitivity along 11w sane lines as fish and the platypus. but to a more advanced level ...how is a rainbow made in the sky? First we need to understand about something called the spectrum. It was discovered about ;so years ago by Isaac Newton. who may well have been the greatest scientist ever Ile discovered that white light is really a mixture of all the different colours. To a scientist, that's what white means I low did Newton find this out? /Le set up an experiment first he blacked out his room so that no lkeht could get bl and then he opened a narrow chink in the curtain, so that a pencil-thin beam of white sunlight came streaming in. lie then let the beam of light pass through a prism. Which is a sort of triangular chunk of Ores What a prism does is splay the narrow white beam oul but the splayed-out beam that emerees from the prism is no longer white. It is multicoloured, like a rainbow, and Newton gave a name to the rainbow that he made that day. the spectrum. line's how it works. When a beam of light travels through air and hits Om, it gets bent The bending is called 'refraction", Refraction doesn't have to be caused by glass- water does the trick, too. So, light is bent when it hits glass or water. Rut now here's the point. The angle of the bend n slightly different depending on what colour the light is Red light bends at a shallower angle than blue light So, if white light really is a mixture of cokmred lights as Newton guessed, what's going to happen when you bend white light through a prism' The blue light n going to bend farther than the red light, so they will be separated from each other when they emerge from the other side of the prism. And the yellow and green lights will come out in between. The result n Newton's spectrum: all the colours of the rainbow. arranged in the correct rainbow order — red. orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Prisms are all wry well but when you see a rainbow in the sky, there isn't a great big prism hanging up there doing the refracting No, but there are millions of raindrops. If you want to see a rainbow you have to have the sun behind you when you look at a rainstorm Each raindrop es more like a little ball than a prism. and light behaves differently when it hits a hall from how it behaves when it hits a prism The difference is that the far side of a raindrop acts as a tiny mirror The light front the sun turns a somersault inside cony raindrop and is reflected backwards and downwards. where it hits your eyes. Nobody sees the full spectrum from any one raindrop There are millions of other raindrops, and they are all behaving in the same kind of way. While you are looting at Ni red beam. there is another raindrop called B. which is lower than A. You don't see B's red beam because it hits you in the stomach But B's blue beam is in exactly the right place to tut you in the eye And there are other raindrops lower than A but higher than B, whose red and blue beams miss your eye but whose yellow or green beams hit your eye So lots of raindrops together add up to a complete spectrum 66 Let's exercise our imaginations a bit more. Why should the aliens limit themselves to the narrow band of frequencies that we call light"? Maybe they haw radio eyes? Or X-ray eyes? C Richard Hawkins and Have McKean. EvIracted (ram Tlw Magic of Reality. to be published by Hesitant Press on Sept IS or 120. It is mailable far 118, with free Sp, front The limes liook‘hop. (IS-IS 2712134 or thelime..cauklbookshop 1 larry Rxter.CAraline. lie Magic of Reality — the illustrator Dave McKean is well %timed in the art of science axontunicat ion Picture this RICHARD DAWKINS MAO: of Kraft,' I low du you set about illUstralinsi unexplainable, or al least complex. theories in science? I think everything is explainable. Mad areas of science, and definitely the subjects covered m the book. are explainable by a clear-sighted writer, which Richard certainly is, and imagery can help to make things solid and clear in a different way. In the same way that it is sometimes useful to use sound to talk about a painting, or coiours to talk about music. imagery can throw a different perspective on a subject. Is art the key to science communication, or will words always be more powerful? I think some people can think more clearly about a subject if they can sec it laid out on the table in some form. Sometimes images can create an atmosphere or feeling they can evoke emotiom show colours and textures and, of course, they. can clearly show data in the form of charts, diagrams and relative distances. I certainly think imam are a powerful tool us storytelling. that's the power of graphic novels They RICHARD DAWKINS tin The won of allajor General Albert Snenteeerne Plisse US Army S fount. chk4 ci Inlelllomte Convinced he could wait through *ail, Ow I easearif Thal both were made ed dear <Irani' Mom°. he ran at 0.14• In hit OM* In Arington. Ye pas In 1963 Ile cookie, an LOW A spleeny Irv", rhinoceros. In the Magic Dawkins inglisins thin it talk was nude tram mil a woukt hove a allatlenal Oela abeel a OM as strong as are owe) to So aealhah the me 0404.10 told slIrtth about co Oho *godly irio like a whirr give you half the story, and the engaged reader evokes the other half — the sound and motion — in the mind What lengths do you need to go to to research and understand science briefs? I'm not a scientist, so I have to understand the subject from scratch It was fun to go luck to school and learn (or re-learn) about the periodic table and light refraction I appreciate the knowledge much snore as an adult than I did as a child What's the ksy to successful and beautiful science illustrations? They must Fis' accurate land in this book's case, that's accurate according to Richard. and several friends and colleagues who offered critiques) and beautiful (I still value beauty in art). Our soal for this book was to try to show how 'awesome" — in the proper sense of the word — the real world is, and the mechanisms and proossis that govern it The dories embedded in the history and development of our Universe arc even more astounding than fortion, not least because they are true. 26 I TM MIK*: I tints I Scerrinber Ntl settrthnlou I Varna I narrows EFTA01168952 Evolution? Yes, children can Adam and Eve it WORDS: RICHARD DAWKINS lease tell me something I can tell Daddy, which he doesn't already know." The heartfelt plea of this child from Northern Ireland is the more poignant because his father happened to be a devout Christian — as is com- mon in that unfortunate province. What nonsense might the boy have been fed, from the cradle on? And what true knowledge could we offer in response? Perhaps this little boy, when he asked the perennial question: "Where did I come from?" was told: "God made you:' Or "You came out of your mother, and she came from her mother and so on back to your great-great-great-great-grandmother who came from Eve. And Eve, along with her husband Adam, was made by God." No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it is surprising how many parents think that it is somehow fun to pass on this falsehood (and others in the same vein) to their children. Or they expect their child's school to do so. Perhaps they think it harmless, like Father Christmas. Or maybe they think the truth is less poetic, less "fun" or harder to understand than the myth. But I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic — even more fun — than this myth, or any of the hundreds of creation myths from around the world. And — perhaps surprisingly — evolution could be taught in such a way as to make it easier to understand than a myth. This is because myths leave the child's questions unanswered, or they raise more questions than they appear to answer. Evolu- tion is a truly satisfying and complete explanation of existence, and I suspect that this is something a child can appreciate from an early age. Nevertheless, many adults find evolution hard It is a stnkmg (act that nobody understood it until (larks Darwin and Alfred %mei Wallace in the 19th century. two centuries later than Isaac Newton's (on the face of it more difficult) catmints-Asian of the laws of motion. force. acceleration and universal gravity Could there be aspects of science that children find easier than adults because adults are weighed down by misleading familianty? Maybe weight itself is literally misleading? I was fortunate this year to attend a conference of scientists with astronauts — American. Russian and European - and I talked to some of them about what it is lac to be %nightie..., but not massless. I quoted Douglas Adams to them- - The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a µs-caromed planet wing around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to he normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. but we lust done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of out misapprehensions" I 'untested to the astronauts that, if children were ever to be horn and brought up in a space station where they now experience weight. they will find Newton easy to understand They will intuitively grasp the idea — so foreign to us troglodytes at the bottom of the gravity well — that the default condition for a moving body is to continue forever in the same direction 'Hwy will effortlessly comprehend the difference between weight and mass, and will understand that, although a cannon hall and a ping pang ball can have equal weight. they very much do not haw equal mass. Try to throw a cannon ball amass the space station and you are likely to shoot off in the opposite direction. Jump towards what you think of as the °ceiling", and you will he shocked to find that the "ceiling turns into the *floor" as you "fall"hemily" 'down" on it. Welghtksa children might even be primed to understand the Ennis-Minn equivalence between gravity and acceleration. Computer games typically are programmed with a virtual physics which mimics, on the screen, the familiar physics of the outside world Simulated objects don't pass through each other, simulated balls bounce off walls and off each other, they follow hailinically calculated parabolic trajectories, and so on What if a computer game were pnwrammed with an alternative physts, perhaps even a virtual rendering of counter- intuitive quantum physics? Or of something resembling Einsteinun physics at close to a maximum permitted velocity? Might children brought up on such ganws have a head start when they come to study physics at 9600 or university? Newton and Galileo had to wrest themselves free of false intuitions horn of their upbringimt in the grasity well. Is there a similar barrier to understanding evolution? Is there a parallel respect in which naive children might actually find evolution easier to understand than adults? According to the great Gemum-American zoologist Ernst Mayr. the chid historical bather to understanding evolution has been the philosophy of casaitialiun• for which he blames Plato and Aristotle. Steeped in geometry. the Greeks thought of triangles in the real world as imperfect approximations to an abstract ideal of trianglinesa In the same way that individual rabbits, rhinos and cormorants -- variable. flesh-and bone individuals -- were flawed approximations to the ideal rabbit, the perfect rhino, the essence of cormorant Mayr argued that such essentialist thinking delayed, by centuries, humanity's understanding of evolution The idea that one species coukl turn into another Ilse idea that, given a sufficient number of generations. species of fah could gradually change so far that their descendants could be aardvarks or philosophers — is, according to Mayr, detmly antithetical to all our intuitions, and this is becassewe are dyed-in-the- wool essentubsts. Hut maybe children are not. Children.; fainiaks are replete with anti-essentialist propaganda Mice turn into white horses and pumpkins into gleaming coaches at the touch of a fairy's wand It takes only a kiss for a frog to morph into a handsome prince. Such radical changes undermine Mayes essentialist bogeyman Indeed, they go too far in the other direction. Magical transformations arc not just antiassientialist, they are anti-evolution. too And antiacience. Complex things. such as hones. coaches and princes, cannot spring spontaneously into exigence from nothing nor can they be spawned in a puff of smoke (rum other complex things. such as mire pumpkins and frogs To he sure, a tadpole can turn into a frog and a caterpillar into a butterfly, but those are revealing special cases. A caterpillar's DNA is dual purpose full instructions (or how to build a caterpillar (tam an egg. and then a second tier of instructions fur how to build a butterfly from &constructed caterpillar flesh You can't make a caterpillar or a butterfly or a frog or a pnner by magic, from nothing The DNA has to be already in place, and the only way we know for that to happen -- at least until human technology catches up — is tlw slow, gradual, generation-by- mutation filtering process of natural selection. But at least fairytales give the lie to — or perhaps positively undermine — issenualrun I fununs can't turn into werewolves by moonlight. No species can turn into a radically different spat But any species can turn into a slightly different species And given enough minions of wan. slight difference adds to slight difference and then accumulates slight difference again until eventually the descendant of a fish turns out to be a fishmonger "I'll believe in evolution the day a monkey gives birth to a human' So speaks the ignorant creationist, flat-footedly misunderstanding the gradualness of en:autism No animal ever ban was a member of a different species from its parenta 'Die trick is to unikrstand how that truth Is fully compatible with another truth every one of us is descended from an animal which. were we to meet it today, we would classify (and very pmbably eat) as a fish. Before that, every one of us was descended from an ancestor that we would need a microscope to we, and that we would probably classify as a bacterium. All that is literally true at the same time as at is true that every intermediate link in the chain would have been classified as the same species as its parents and its children It Sift realty all that paradoxical Every child is familiar with gradual change, too slow to notice. The hour hand of %um watch seems motionless gut look away (or an hour and it has moved. You were once a baby. then you became a toddler then you became a chikf Yet there non was a day when you woke up and said, 'Yesterday I was a toddler. today I seem to have become a child." In the same way, there never was a first I Ionic sapiens baby born to I lona mynas parents When anthropologists heatedly argue whether a particular jawbone belongs to I km° or Australopithecus. they may turn out to be engaging in essentialist foolery. There never was a moment when Australopithecus parents gam, fondly down at the firstborn flow baby livery baby ever born belonged to the same species as Its pamds Yet. if you sample an ancestor's descendants at a sufficiently long interval (like sampling the position of the hour hand on a watch). you'll find descendants that belong not just in different sixties but different orders, classes and phyla It is a certain (act that there once was an animal that is the common ancestor uf you and a snail I have sometimes worried about the educational effects of fairytales Could they be pernicious, leading children down pathways of gullibility towards anhanenblic superstition and religion? Maybe. But could they also be beneficial, in leading children away from static essentialism? and towards a state of mind that is receptive to the dynamics of evolution? I don't know. And as so often when I don't know the answer to a question, I'd like to find out The Magic of Reality — An Evening with Richard Dawkins Royal Albert Mk October 19, 8-JOpm lames I larding Editor of The limes hosts an evening with Richard Dawkins Times• members can book premium seats (normally DA) for 1.50 each Ticket prices include a voucher for one free copy of The Magic of keulily to be exchanged on the night and a glass of Moe champagne. innamytimesphntaisk a: nw nmm I Stela 4 *twin .7aM Scpleathrr Rot I Foul I ME TIMES I EFTA01168953