Deep-Frozen Science There Are Other Points on Which Con- Sciousness Lacks Clarity
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS has twice as much consciousness as another? There can also be too much gee-whiz science for my taste. For instance, talking about the nervous system of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans with its 302 neu- rons, Koch describes the creature’s “state of consciousness” as the current posi- tion of the system on a 302-dimensional graph, with 2302 possible states (for each combination of the 302 neurons either firing or not). The neural network is a material thing, Koch argues, but the shape of the graph describes the conscious experience of the worm at that moment, “its phenomenal experience”. By this argument, the 32,768-byte computer file holding this review has a Humans have been probing the mysteries of the Antarctic for almost 200 years. consciousness defined by its position on a 32,768-dimensional graph with POLAR RESEARCH 25632,768 (or, put more quaintly, 1 followed by 87,000 zeros) possible states. Person- ally, I don’t think any of them have much chance of being conscious. Deep-frozen science There are other points on which Con- sciousness lacks clarity. Koch tackles Francis Halzen is exhilarated by a trek through stories most of the big questions: are mice and of research and exploration in Antarctica. fruitflies conscious (yes); can comput- ers be conscious (yes); are they already (yes); is there free will (not really); can dazzling array of narratives throngs Doran, a biologist at we ever understand consciousness (yes); Antarctica, collected from scien- the University of Illi- can the mind affect our behaviour (no); tists in one of Earth’s most extreme nois at Chicago. But and even is there a god (yes, but absent Aenvironments. Science writer and consultant it isn’t only research- D. TEWKSBURY since the Big Bang). Gabrielle Walker gathered these stories in the ers who feature here. “What does Unfortunately, it course of five trips criss-crossing the conti- The book is peppered it mean to is often hard to nent, mostly as a guest of the US National with characters who say that decipher which of Science Foundation’s Antarctic programme. “keep the scientists these he thinks are This is not just a highly accessible ency- alive”. On one trip we one system Antarctica: An has twice proven facts, which clopedia of Antarctic science. It interlaces meet camp manager personal beliefs and researchers’ stories with natural history, tales Intimate Portrait Rae Spain, who came as much of the World’s which momentary of the ‘heroic age’ of exploration and pas- Most Mysterious to Antarctica as a car- consciousness opinions. sages that viscerally describe the cold, isola- penter and returned as another?” Continent In fairness, the tion and beauty of the environment. Neatly GABRIELLE WALKER because she could not equations are much organized geographically, the book covers Bloomsbury: 2012. get the continent out more complicated than is described here. the East Antarctic coast, with McMurdo Sta- 416 pp. £20 of her head. “It haunts Still, in the end, the theory seems to me tion (the largest community in Antarctica) you,” she told Walker. to be an example of a conflation of igno- and the penguins; the high plateau, with the Mars has literally come to Earth just rances: saying that because we don’t really Concordia and South Pole research stations; beyond the Dry Valleys, Walker tells us. understand A or B, they must be causally and the isolated West Antarctic coast. Researchers on Skidoos systematically scan related. Whether they invoke quantum Walker talks about the Dry Valleys near the ice sheet for meteorites — a relatively easy mechanics, microtubules or integrated McMurdo, which run from the edge of the ice task, given that everything stands out in this information content, these explanations sheet that covers most of the continent down icy landscape. We accompany John Schutt, a of consciousness are, for all their math- to the Ross Sea. Precious little precipitation mountaineer who has returned for the hunt ematical precision, no more than pure has fallen here for millions of years: with an every year since 1980. More meteorites have speculation. Perhaps one of them is actu- average temperature of −55 °C, this is Mars been found since the 1970s in Antarctica ally right. But perhaps, like ancient Greek on Earth. But it is teeming with life — cyano- than over centuries in the rest of the world. philosophers searching for the cause of bacteria, found in ponds the world over. In 1982, for the first time, an Antarctic thunder, we are still thousands of years Here, they live inside the dry rock, surfacing meteorite was identified as coming from the from an answer. for only a few weeks a year to find water from Moon. Two years later, researchers found a I argued with Koch all the way through the little snow that fell over winter. Then they rock from Mars that turned out to contain this book. And I loved every minute of it. ■ go back to sleep. structures that may be nanoscale fossils: the Walker learned that NATURE.COM most intriguing indications yet that life may Robert Stickgold is an associate fascinating story on To read about have existed on other planets in the Solar Sys- professor of psychiatry at Harvard a diving expedition Antarctic research tem, although debate is still raging. Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. in Lake Hoare in the 100 years ago: The West Antarctic coast, as Walker e-mail: [email protected] Dry Valleys with Peter go.nature.com/9fbuuj shows, is out of reach of the permanent 272 | NATURE | VOL 483 | 15 MARCH 2012 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT scientific stations, and difficult to approach by vessel. This is where gigantic glaciers empty into the Pacific Ocean, and studies Books in brief have revealed rapid changes in the ice flow. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Free Will Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Sam Harris FREE PRESS 96 pp. $9.99 (2012) California, has traced these changes to sub- Neuroscientist Sam Harris, the author of the bestselling The Moral glacial lakes linked by canals, which form a Landscape (2010), here skewers the concept of free will — that dynamic hydrologic system on which the ice mainstay of law, policy and politics — in fewer than 100 pages. slides to the sea. Walker journeys across the Using evidence drawn from psychology and neuroscience, Harris inhospitable glaciers, where she stands on ice asserts that the course of human life is all down to luck, and that flows the size of Niagara Falls with George willpower is a “biological phenomenon”. We are not in charge Denton of the University of Maine in Orono, of our own minds, he says: thought and intention simply arise. a veteran in ‘reading’ glacial landscapes. This is a tract that is sure to boldly go straight to the heart of the Some of the historical vignettes will be determinism debate. familiar, such as the race to the South Pole between Norwegian explorer Roald Amund- sen and his trained team, and Robert Scott, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics British hero of scientists, who presumably Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim UNIVERSITY Of CALIfORNIA PRESS found Amundsen’s efficient approach ungen- 304 pp. $19.95 (2012) tlemanly. Other stories are less well known, Obesity has gone global — as has misinformation about nutrition such as that of Australian geologist Douglas and food. Nutrition scientists Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim Mawson, who travelled to the south magnetic unscramble the confusion with a serving of science. They reveal pole as part of Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod how calories — those potent but ill-understood measures of heat expedition and later led a disastrous research energy — are really counted, why we need them, how we use them, trip to Adelie Land, on which two men died. how many we actually need and why it all sometimes goes so wrong. Tales of those expeditions, and the scien- From ‘secret’ calories to food politics, malnourishment and calorie tific ones that followed, remind us that people restriction for health, this is a feast for the mind. have been travelling to Antarctica for almost two centuries, ever since seal hunter Captain John Davis first set foot there in 1821. The Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief Antarctic Treaty, signed by 49 countries, has Justin L. Barrett FREE PRESS 320 pp. $26.00 (2012) since 1961 guaranteed that the continent Psychologist Justin Barrett says that belief is rooted not in is reserved for science. High technology indoctrination, but in a default setting of the infant brain. A range has now arrived: the collaborations behind of findings in developmental psychology, he argues, support the the South Pole Telescope and the IceCube theory: very young children, for instance, are aware that nature is Neutrino Observatory have constructed not designed by humans; and people tend to look for unseen agents the kinds of instrument that are more rou- behind natural phenomena. Barrett says that the evidence points to tinely built at laboratories such as Fermilab a universal “natural religion” — but he also argues that parents must near Batavia, Illinois, or CERN near Geneva, not impose belief systems on their children, and should leave the Switzerland. IceCube collects a few hundred question of whether to die a believer up to their offspring. neutrinos per day, some with energies that exceed those at earthbound accelerators by more than two orders of magnitude. Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the Yet Antarctica is still the “world’s most World Can Finally Overcome It mysterious continent”, as it remains the Daniel Halperin and Craig Timberg PENGUIN 432 pp.