Ockham's Razor

"In a country with baby bonuses, paid parental leave schemes and a high immigration intake, to argue that rapid growth can't be avoided is like claiming that speeding is inevitable while your foot is on the accelerator." (Melvin Bolton)

We so often hear about Melbourne's 'livability' according to the specious and self-fulfilling criteria of the 'Economist group' that it is nice to hear about "Another major liveability index for cities is produced by the American consulting firm, Mercer. "The Mercer Quality of Living Survey for cities is continually being updated and it ranks more than 220 cities on scores under dozens of different criteria of liveability. In this list Vienna has come top for three years in a row and Sydney has come in at number ten, also for the past three years. Melbourne doesn't make it to the top ten and the other nine have populations smaller than Sydney's." (Melvin Bolton)

Transcript from "Finding the Right Size"
Ockham's Razor, Sunday, 14 December 2014.

Robyn Williams interviews science writer, Melvin Bolton, who talks about the work of Professor John Burden Sanderson Haldane

Robyn Williams: J.B.S. Haldane has always been a hero of mine, mainly because he was bonkers, but also because he was seriously clever. I ran a poem of his in the Science Show a couple of weeks back: ‘I wish I had the voice of Homer, to sing of rectal carcinoma…’ or something like that. Yes, Haldane wrote a poem about his tumour. He also used to blow himself up during the war to test explosive atmospheres in ships and submarines because he wanted to make them safe for soldiers and sailors. Haldane was a sort of aristo, Eton and Oxford, but also, weirdly, the communist party and he wrote magnificent pieces on sciences. He was a great science communicator, writing classics, like the once you’re going to hear about from Melvin Bolton in Yeppoon in Queensland.

Melvin Bolton: Many years ago, in England, I was trying to find my way in the dark round the back of a building, when I tumbled into a pit that led to a coal cellar. I came out in nasty bruises and had to walk with a stick for fortnight, but it occurred to me that if I'd been a much heavier person I would not have got off so lightly. It really is true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

I had this in mind at the time because I'd been reading an essay On Being the Right Size by J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane was a mathematician but he was so brilliant he could turn to whatever he liked in science and in 1933, after teaching biochemistry at Cambridge, he became professor of genetics at University College London. Haldane was one of the pioneers of genetics. It was he who came up with the word 'clone' in the sense that we know it today, and some of his predictions were taken up by his friend, Aldous Huxley, and worked into the novel Brave New World.

In that essay on being the right size, Haldane pointed out that if a beetle fell into a mineshaft, a kilometre deep, it would be none the worse for it. Even a mouse might get over the shock if the ground wasn't too hard, but a rat would be killed, a human would break up, and a horse would splash.

This is because the resistance to falling through air is proportional to the surface that meets the air to cause friction. And as volume and weight are scaled up, the surface area gets relatively less. A horse might be a thousand times heavier than a rat but would have only about a hundred times the surface to slow its fall.

The relationship between weight, or volume, and surface, largely accounts for all the sizes and shapes that we see in nature because things can't just get bigger and keep the same shape. It would be impossible, for instance, to have a rhinocerus shaped like a gazelle. A rhino might be four times the length of a gazelle but if the gazelle were scaled up to be four times as long, it would be 64 times heavier—its weight would increase from 30 kilos to nearly two tonnes. On the same-shaped legs it would lie in a heap, unable to stand up.

Nature can never break the laws of maths and physics so has come up with ways of working around them, just as engineers and planners do, but I'll come to that in a minute. I first want to make the point that big animals and plants are more complicated than small ones because they have to be; it's a consequence of being bigger. Single cells, like bacteria, were the only form of life on Earth for more than a billion years, and they are still highly successful but they must stay small. All exchange with the outside world has to take place through the surface, and the centre of the cell has to be close enough to the outside for gases and liquids to move adequately, just by diffusion.

When cells join together to form bigger forms of life, the surface gets proportionally smaller, the centre gets further from the outside, and there needs to be some sort of transport system such as blood or sap that can deliver the necessities of life a lot faster and more efficiently than can happen by simple diffusion.

In nature, there is often a need for bigger surfaces in places that can't be expanded any further—such as inside heads or intestines. In a bird's head the brain is quite smooth on the outside but a chimpanzee has to pack many more neurones around its brain so the surface has a lot of folds or convolutions—which increase the area without making the head any bigger. This is a process that's gone furthest of all in humans.

A small Intestine needs a huge surface to deal with digestion so the lining has projections, like the pile on a carpet. This increases the surface enormously. It varies between individuals, but an adult small intestine has a surface area of thirty to forty square metres—which is close to half a badminton court.

In a final example, let's take a simple shape like an egg, no projections of any sort. Inside a bird's egg the developing chick has the equivalent of a placenta close to the inside of the shell. The chick gets all its oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide through tiny holes, or pores, in the shell. and that presents a problem with bigger eggs. An emu's egg is about six times longer and wider than a sparrow's egg but it weighs about 250 times as much. The shell has to be twelve times as thick and a thick shell is a huge barrier to the passage of gases. The problem has been solved in birds by having the pores closer together, and with a much bigger diameter in thicker shells.

Evolution is essentially a numbers game and nature is made up of compromises that have evolved, step-by-step, minute by minute, through mutations and the filtering effects of natural selection over millions of years. The best compromise emerges because everything that's exposed to natural selection is weighed in the balance for such long periods of time.

Engineers, and others who build things and create new materials, are working with exactly the same constraints set by the laws of physics and maths, and they sometimes get their ideas from nature.

Professor Haldane, in his essay on size, did not get into the topic of deliberately trying to copy nature, but he did make the point that just as there is a best size for every animal, so there must be for every human institution. He pointed out that in ancient greece all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and then vote directly on matters of legislation. So philosophers at that time had reason to believe that a small city was the largest possible democratic state.

New methods of communication had changed things a lot by Haldane's time and they've changed a lot more since then. Although when you look at all the duplications of our old federal system you might think that the tyranny of distance is still a major problem in Australia.

So is it still true today that there is an optimum size for human institutions, for nations, for cities? We hear political leaders on all sides of politics declaring that they believe in a big Australia. They don't say how big, though they can't possibly think we can keep making things bigger and bigger indefinitely. They just say they believe in a big Australia as if it is a matter of belief; an article of faith.

Why do they believe it? Usually they say it's because it will produce a better quality of life for all Australians. Is that likely? How many Melbournians think that life will be better in a Melbourne that's twice the size it is now, with twice the number needing housing, services and transport?

Is there any evidence for thinking either way? Well, we can start by looking at the Human Development Index. This is published each year by the United Nations Development Programme and it ranks the UN member countries according to how well their people are doing in terms of health, education, lifespan and general standard of living.

For the past few years, Australia has come second after Norway, with Denmark third. Another index, that goes further than the United Nations one, is put out each year by the Economist Intelligence Unit, based in London. Originally called the Quality of Life Index, it's now known as the Where to be Born Index, which I suppose makes it sound more foward-looking for prospective parents as well as investors. In addition to all the basic welfare issues of health, education, security and so on, it factors in people's feelings of satisfaction with life, based on scores derived from Gallup polls. It even takes climate into consideration.

And with all that, the interesting thing is that it places exactly the same countries in the top ten that the United Nations comes up with. They are in a slightly different order; Australia comes second, with Switzerland first and Norway in third place, but the same ten countries top the list. Six of those top ten countries have smaller populations than Australia.

We can look at cities in the same way. Every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit produces liveability rankings for cities around the world. These are based on scores reached under headings that include stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. In the most recent report, released in 2013, Melbourne came top of the list of 140 cities, followed by Vienna and Vancouver. Of the top ten cities, seven were smaller than Melbourne.

Another major liveability index for cities is produced by the American consulting firm, Mercer. The Mercer Quality of Living Survey for cities is continually being updated and it ranks more than 220 cities on scores under dozens of different criteria of liveability. In this list Vienna has come top for three years in a row and Sydney has come in at number ten, also for the past three years. Melbourne doesn't make it to the top ten and the other nine have populations smaller than Sydney's.

Now, these league tables may not prove anything but they certainly don't offer any support for the belief that getting bigger and bigger will do anything to improve the quality of life for all Australians. They suggest, if anything, that Melbourne and Sydney are doing well despite their size, not because of it.

And such evidence as there is from surveys here in Australia indicates that most Australians are putting up with high population growth rather than wanting it. Why we are putting up with it is another question entirely, and your guess is as good as mine.

When Big Australia believers are quizzed about their reasoning, some of them back off and say simply that our growth rate is unavoidable so we just have to keep on accommodating it—building upwards, over farmland, making more flyovers, freeways, by-passes, tunnels, whatever it takes to cope with centres getting further and further from peripheries and all the other complications of increasing size.

But in a country with baby bonuses, paid parental leave schemes and a high immigration intake, to argue that rapid growth can't be avoided is like claiming that speeding is inevitable while your foot is on the accelerator.

Professor Haldane, in case you are wondering, died in 1964 at the age of 72. His full name, incidentally, was John Burden Sanderson Haldane and he died in India, having emigrated there eight years earlier. He had also taken to wearing Indian dress, remarking that "sixty years in socks is enough." I doubt that he really did have a problem with socks, although, if there was a lot of stretching and shrinking ... no, surely not.

Robyn Williams: Maybe not Melvin, but I’ll tell you one thing that happened when Haldane went to India: Everyone expected him to turn up with tons of shiny apparatus. Instead he gave the Indian scientists pencils and paper and asked them to count the leaves on trees. As a result they found that there were two crop species instead of one. Selecting the best enabled them to double the yield. Yes, Haldane was a genius, if nuts. Melvin Bolton comes from Yeppoon in Queensland.

Next week Ockham’s Razor comes from Western Australia where Dr Peter Underwood tries to corrupt his grandson. That’ll be in Science Extra.

On Ockham's Razor on ABC Australia, today, 30 October 2011, hundreds of thousands of people would have heard 24 year old Fiona Heinrichs blast the mainstream media's failure to provide a voice for the younger generation and its promotion of of an ideology of unending growth. Fiona also delivered a blistering critique of Bernard Salt's unscientific promotion of population growth and his failure to respond to her challenge to debate him, which was recently the subject of an article on OnLineOpinion. This is the text of the talk. You can also download the podcast here.On Ockham's Razor on ABC Australia, today, 30 October 2011, hundreds of thousands of people would have heard 24 year old Fiona Heinrichs blast the mainstream media's failure to provide a voice for the younger generation and its promotion of of an ideology of unending growth. Fiona also delivered a blistering critique of Bernard Salt's unscientific promotion of population growth and his failure to respond to her challenge to debate him, which was recently the subject of an article on OnLineOpinion. This is the text of the talk. You can also download the podcast here.(This introduction by Sheila Newman)

Text of Fiona's speech on Ockham's Razor

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’d know that Professor Robert Manne’s Quarterly Essay Bad News greatly upset The Australian. Manne argued, persuasively in my opinion, that on many topics of key national importance The Australian lacked journalistic objectivity. In particular on the topic of climate change, he sees the paper as pushing the skeptics’ view of the received scientific position.

The Australian responded to Manne’s critique with a near booklet of articles. Seriously, cut them all out and staple them together if you don’t believe me. I don’t recall an essay or a book being subject to such an intense critical reply in any newspaper. A nerve was no doubt struck by Professor Manne, and struck at the right time, following in the wake of the British News Ltd scandals.

However as useful as Professor Manne’s essay is, it does not address the main weakness not only of this newspaper, but all other Australian papers such as The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and so on. So this is where I come in, finishing up where Professor Manne left off. I wish to discuss today two subjects that particularly bother me as a gen Y female: First, the lack of voice to my generation in these papers (and I will focus on The Australian), and second, the religious faith in the possibility of unending growth. On the denial of the limits to growth, The Australian is more hard-line in my opinion than say The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald, but in general the major dailies push this line, especially with respect to immigration and population issues. So lend me you ears, I implore you, for what I have to discuss today affects not only human beings, but every single species on the planet.

Okay, firstly let’s start with Bernard Salt. This columnist for The Australian serves as a good example of an ageing baby boomer who is a supporter of big Australia and the ‘growth is good’ philosophy. His book The Big Tilt, published a few months ago brings all of these themes together. Each week his columns in the business section of The Australian develop his theology of growth. Of course, sometimes he relaxes and writes an amusing news item. One such piece was about ‘hotness delusion syndrome.’ This supposed disorder is where men in their forties have an inflated sense of how ‘hot’ they really are; on the basis that there are 15 percent more single women than men at that age. This, I suppose, is Salt’s type of human interest article.

The modern day woman is a common theme in Salt’s writings on demographic issues. Thus he is concerned at the social trend of women not marrying and conventionally having children. The family for him seems to be the conventional nuclear family. I can’t recall any worthy discussion of gay relationships and alternatives to the nuclear family.

Salt’s writings on my generation are even more flawed. He sees gen Y as self-absorbed, indulgent and preoccupied with technology – mobile phones, iPods and the like. This generation is very well off, he says, and has a great time ahead. But in recent articles he has moved to take a different line for Australia as a whole, because with the rise and coming global dominance of China, Australia will be ‘attendants’ to the Chinese empire providing services that the Chinese want. So if Australia doesn’t shape up – watch out!

Now there is no objective statistical attempt in Salt’s book The Big Tilt or his articles to justify his generalisations about gen Y. Where is the index of ‘indulgence’? Where is the empirical research such as survey work actually measuring levels of indulgence, compared to a control group, like his own generation of ageing baby boomers? One attempt by Salt to back such claims involved his observations from the KPMG Nine Rewards Lifestyle Survey. Supposed evidence from this survey that gen Y is reckless in its spending included findings that people aged 18-24 are most likely to eat out at a café or restaurant. Hmm, yes, because treating yourself to a $15 chicken parmigiana and chips is so indulgent isn’t it? The same indulgent students struggling to afford the petrol to fill up their second hand car they drive constantly to get from uni to a part time job and somehow squeeze in enough study to pass the course somewhere in between. The other indicator of supposed excess was that people aged 25-29 are most likely to take a holiday. Come on, we’re talking Bali youth hostels here, not the penthouse suite in Paris. Such simplistic summations are hardly evidence of reckless spending.

Salt’s columns in The Australian describe him as a ‘demographer’ but he does not have a PhD in demography and apart from his popular books, he does not have a research record of publications in high impact factor peer reviewed demographic journals. Demography is a scientific study of population, but Salt’s approach is merely ‘pop’ demography.

Salt has recently focused his writings on the virtues of good manners, expressing anger and frustration towards people who don’t respond to messages. He assures us that he is ‘normal’ not engaging in such rudeness, even creating the manners-minded Facebook group Society for Normal People which has been heavily spruiked on television, radio and in the print media. Yet apparently such rules for politeness do not extend to people of different beliefs, for I have both publicly and privately challenged Bernard Salt to a debate regarding his world views. To date, he has not responded to my challenge. Silence. The words ‘pot’, kettle’, ‘black’ come to mind. Now before you say, ‘But wait, maybe he didn’t receive your message?’ And offer the following explanations such as: ‘Maybe it went to the spam folder? Or maybe his inbox was clogged that day with dozens of messages? Or maybe it didn’t even send properly at all?’ The answer is still unfortunately ‘No’. Even if Salt somehow didn’t receive my email, I also wrote the same message on his public Facebook wall. In fact, it’s quite interesting that my wall post was one of the very few with absolutely no response. Now I know what your next question is, ‘How can we trust that you wrote a courteous, dignified message that was deserving of a response?’ I assure you the message was perfectly civil; if you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself. Go on, add ‘Bernard Salt Demographer’ to you Facebook, scroll down the page and read my message for yourself. Last time I checked it was still there. Okay listeners, I know what your final question is, ‘why make such a big deal out of this?’ Well other than the outrageous hypocrisy, it’s simply unethical that such figures in their ivory towers continue to get away with these misleading articles while well researched counter-replies are ignored. The public has an inherent right to hear both sides of any argument. So I offer again: Come on Bernard, don’t be scared of a 24 year old female uni student – I won’t bite! In fact, I propose we hold the debate at the Society for Normal People function room.

My generation is sick and tired of being stereotyped. Many of us are students not yet employed or are unemployed and desperately searching for work. Rather than being self indulgent, gen Y is actively involved in charity work while deeply concerned about the environment and the prospects of human survival.

This is the other area where The Australian is particularly bad as I document in my online book Sleepwalking to Catastrophe. The idea that there are no limits to growth, that both economic activity and human population numbers should continue infinitely, is received doctrine. Almost all of the journalists writing for The Australian (with the exception of Phillip Adams) follow the Julian Simon mode of thought in his The Ultimate Resource, that the human mind is just that, therefore humans can solve any problem. Reality check: World population is likely to multiply by 1.5 by 2050 but if the rich countries maintain their present resource/consumption and other countries replicate it, resource consumption for the world increases by a factor of around 8. As Ted Trainer points out in his recent book The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, if all strive to the standard of living of the West at a 3 percent growth rate, then by 2070 resource consumption increases by a multiple of 60! Even the attempt to reach this level of resource consumption is likely to exhaust irrecoverable coal, oil, gas and uranium. Some petroleum geologists believe that peak oil, for example, has already occurred in 2010, and if this is so, modern society is moving awfully slow to deal with this challenge.

The Global Footprint Network has estimated that humanity’s demand on the ecological services of the Earth is now such that it would take 1.5 Earth’s to ‘generate all the resources humanity consumes and absorb all our CO2 emissions’. An ecological overshoot has occurred such that it now takes 18 months for the Earth to regenerate what was used in 12 months. The Network has further observed: ‘The urgent threats we are facing today – most notably climate change, but also biodiversity loss, shrinking forests, declining fisheries and freshwater stress – are symptoms of this trend.’

This message is not to be found in The Australian in journalist comment. The paper may give small news item coverage to such reports, but most of the words in the paper are devoted to justifying and glorifying growth, global capitalism and the love of money, wealth and affluence. A lavish magazine regularly comes with the paper aptly called Wish, a glossy celebration of high priced consumer goods that only the rich could afford and that ‘wannabe’ consumers are to merely lust over. This makes no ecological sense, it is simply wishful thinking.

In dark moments I suppose that the corporate elites and those who scribble for them really do know that the party is over. But they talk on as they do because they intend to make the most of the limited time they have left. They will party on as the Titanic slowly sinks and the icy waters of ecological reality start to consume them. They will be in defiance to reality to the bitter end. Ironically, as they pass through the void they are the lucky ones as they won’t have to face the full consequences of the environmental crisis that lies ahead for my generation and those that follow. I personally am determined to show leadership through this catastrophe by giving gen Y the much needed public voice it deserves.

Other sites with this article:

http://globalpopulationissues.blogspot.com/2011/10/sleepwalking-to-catastrophe.html
http://www.populationmedia.org/2011/10/27/sleepwalking-to-catastrophe/