25 of the most provocative questions facing science

NY Times (Science Times) ^ | Nov. 11, 2003 | Anon.

[Pharmboy]

(1) Does Science Matter?

(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?

(3) Will Humans Ever Visit Mars?

(4) How Does the Brain Work?

(5) What Is Gravity, Really?

(6) Will We Ever Find Atlantis?

(8) What Should We Eat?

(9) When Will the Next Ice Age Begin?

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?

(11) Could We Live Forever?

(12) Are Men Necessary? ...

... Are Women Necessary?

(13) What Is the Next Plague?

(14) Can Robots Become Conscious?

(15) Why Do We Sleep?

(16) Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?

(17) Can Science Prove the Existence of God?

(18) Is Evolution Truly Random?

(19) How Did Life Begin?

(20) Can Drugs Make Us Happier? Smarter?

(21) Should We Improve Our Genome?

(22) How Much Nature Is Enough?

(23) What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?

(24) Where Are Those Aliens?

(25) Do Paranormal Phenomena Exist?

[Pharmboy]

26) Is liberalism genetic?

[Pharmboy]

Ping. And they attempt to answer the questions...

[Pharmboy]

12) Are Men Necessary? ...
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Well, are they?

A recently separated friend sniffed at the idea of a whole 600 words on the subject.

"Since the answer is `no,' " she said, "I don't quite see what you can do for the other 599." In fact, if men are on earth solely to preserve the species, there is already enough DNA in sperm banks to last for ages. Advances in cryogenics and turkey basting have rendered human males largely superfluous.

Other women interviewed defended their own irreplaceability — an artificial womb is still years off — but argued that men, though an anachronism, do have some impractical value.

"Geez, I'd miss sex," one said.

Another asked, "If there weren't gay men," who would help women check out the jeans-clad courtship displays of breeding males?

But the blunt fact is that human females rarely get to choose to eliminate males. The world is patriarchical because male aggression makes for a winning reproductive strategy, said Dr. Barbara B. Smuts, a feminist sociobiologist.

Male chimps, seeking many partners, dominate females who otherwise, Dr. Smuts argues, would accept sex only with the most qualified male.

In that regard, humans imitate chimps, not our other closest relatives, bonobos, whose females band together to fight off unwanted males.

Among lower animals and insects, as described by the evolutionary biologist Dr. Olivia Judson, the notion of "choosing" males is not so prevalent.

Insomniac male brown bats rape their way through hibernating roosts. Male honeybees explode upon climax, leaving their genitals behind in the queen as a chastity belt.

Male green spoon worms live inside a female's reproductive tract to fertilize passing eggs; they reach it by getting close enough to the females, who are 200,000 times their size, to be inhaled.

Male Australian redback spiders not only somersault into their mates' fangs to be eaten while copulating, they also fight for the privilege, pulling rivals from the females' jaws and hogtying them with silk.

The engine behind all this is the Y chromosome, which determines maleness. Scholars have recently mocked it as a genetic cul de sac.

Over the eons, more than 900 of its 1,000 genes have shifted to other chromosomes, and it could theoretically become extinct in 10 million years. "Man's defining structure is a haven for degenerates," Steve Jones, a geneticist at the University College London, writes in his recent book "Y: The Descent of Men."

But advancing chromosomal recombination is the point of sex, and advancing sex is the point of pheromones, courtship displays, the taking of female captives in war and romantic love. Consequently, said Dr. David C. Page, a specialist in Y chromosomes at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., without males there would not only be no war, but also "no poetry, literature, music, advertising or fashion." "A Thousand Clones" makes lousy drama.

That raises a question: sex, yes, but why separate sexes? Hermaphroditic California sea hares mate happily in chains — male end to female end to male end to female end — beneath the waves. Why can't we all?

The answer: no one knows. Above the fish-and-slug level, in reptiles, birds and mammals, hermaphroditism is almost unheard of, except for rare genetic accidents. Sexual dimorphism must convey some huge mysterious advantage. We are stuck with each other.

Party on.

[Pharmboy]

(17) Can Science Prove the Existence of God?
By GEORGE JOHNSON

I have no need for that hypothesis," Pierre-Simon Laplace famously responded when asked where God fit into his new astronomical theory. Using calculus and Newton's laws of gravity, he explained the forces that kept the planets from gradually drifting out of orbit, imparting some stability to the solar system. Newton had thought the Great Engineer must step in now and then to readjust the machine.

The theory didn't explain where the solar system came from. But Laplace also had an answer. The planets, he proposed, had congealed from a swirling cloud of gas and dust surrounding the sun.

O.K., so where did the sun and the mother cloud come from? And what set the whole thing revolving?

By now, scientists think they have even those answers, and they do not involve the intervention of any Great Engineer. The whole point of science for the last few hundred years has been to explain everything in terms of a physical process, something that can be described by equations.

The quest, however, is far from done. God, for those who want to use that term, can be invoked to account for phenomena that have not yet yielded to the scientific method. What is for some the ultimate question — Does God exist? — has become a matter of how much further the domain of the unknown will continue to contract, and if it will ultimately evaporate.

The momentum has been in that direction. The whirlpool of cosmic stuff that spawned the solar system spins because it is one small part of the great rotating galaxy, the Milky Way. When a random fluctuation causes enough gas and dust to bunch together, gravity takes over and celestial bodies begin to form. If you want to know where the galaxies came from, there are answers as well. Ultimately, it all comes down to the Big Bang.

That is where the chain of reasoning bottoms out. What caused the primordial explosion? At this point all but a few scientists go with Wittgenstein ("of what we cannot speak we must pass over in silence") or with Kierkegaard, blindly taking the leap of faith into the abyss of the unknown, choosing what to believe.

Why there is something instead of nothing is not an issue that science is well equipped to address. As cosmologists understand it, the primordial eruption did not take place at a certain instant in a certain place. The Big Bang created absolutely everything, including space-time itself. How can anyone ask what set the whole thing going if there was no space or time for a creator to be in, much less any matter or energy for Him or Her or It to work with?

This rather formidable obstacle doesn't prevent a few people, some of them scientists, from trying to prove, or disprove, the existence of a deity. Almost any book or conference on science and religion inevitably includes what has become a metaphysical set piece:

The various parameters of the universe — the charge of the electron, the strength of gravity, and so forth — appear to be finely tuned to support the existence of stars and atoms and molecules and life. If the conditions at the instant of the Big Bang had been slightly different, the argument goes, then the universe (at least from an earthling's point of view) would have been a colossal waste of space-time. So we are the lucky benefactors of blind chance, or life was planned all along — either by a Great Intender or by some physical or mathematical or logical law or process. Ignore the great Wittgensteinian whisper and you feel the queasy discomfort of a human mind pushed to the edge of what it is possible to know.

One theory is that the Big Bang actually spawned a plenitude of universes each randomly endowed with different physical conditions. People, of course, find themselves in one that is capable of supporting life.

"Universe" used to mean everything that exists. To even think about this new scheme of things, the definition must be weakened to "everything that we can get information about." We are required to believe in — take on faith — that there is something outside the universe. Might as well just call it God.

Whether the multiverse theory is more comforting than believing that human existence results from a senseless crapshoot or a holy decree is a matter of taste, not science. For many theorists it is also a betrayal of the great effort to explain the laws of physics. Some still hope to find "a theory of the initial conditions of the universe," a supreme mathematical law, hidden perhaps in superstring theory, showing that the parameters of creation could have been set only in a certain way.

But then they would have to find a law to explain where the law came from . . . and ultimately an explanation of why the universe is mathematical and of where mathematics came from and what numbers are.

Like a petulant 8-year-old, we keep asking why, why, why, why. In the end, the answer is either "just because" or "for God made it so." Take your pick.

[js1138]

#25: no.

[Truth666]

How Does the Brain Work?
What about a much more simple one : Computers store information as bits.

How do people store information ?

[palmer]

Will trollbots on FR ever pass the Turing Test?

[glorgau]

Another question that was left out was

Does time exist?

It just may not.

[leadhead]

Another question that was left out was Does time exist? It just may not

Great! Now I won't be late all the time.

[leadhead]

The greatest math problem is: Where have I put all the money I "saved" buying a car, a TV, etc.on sale?

[Truth666]

(18) Is Evolution Truly Random? What about a much more simple and basic one : Post a better proof for evolution than this one

[The_Media_never_lie]

How Does the Brain Work?

The brain is an intellectual, he doesn't need to work.

[aardvark1]

This can't be the top 25 because #1 is missing. I ask myself this every day and anecdotal evidence tells me the vast majority of the world asks the same thing...

Where are my keys?

[Mad Dawgg]

"Does time exist?

It's astounding;
Time is fleeting;
Madness takes its toll.

[general_re]

In that regard, humans imitate chimps, not our other closest relatives, bonobos, whose females band together to fight off unwanted males.

Oh, I dunno - I'll wager every man has, at least once, had the fun of trying to separate the woman he's interested in getting to know from her chosen pack of screaming b*tch harpy girlfriends - the ones who have decided to "band together to fight off unwanted males".

[Skwidd]

Will We Ever Find Atlantis?

What?

[AmericaUnited]

Among lower animals and insects, as described by the evolutionary biologist Dr. Olivia Judson, the notion of "choosing" males is not so prevalent.

Well that makes sense, choosing lower life forms and insects as your role models. /sarcasm

[dsc]

"(16) Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?"

Or is it just that some people are really, really dumb?

[Agnes Heep]

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?
The big foreplay, no doubt.

[rintense]

Male honeybees explode upon climax, leaving their genitals behind in the queen as a chastity belt.

OUCH!