|
|
|
|
| SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY |
|
|
|
Moths are just as worthy of wonder as butterflies No God was required to kick-start universe 14 b years ago Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE |
|
|
Moths are just as worthy of wonder as butterflies OUR human prejudices often lead us astray in looking at the natural world. For example, we so love our butterflies that we tend to think butterflies come first, and moths are merely an afterthought. But actually, it’s the other way round. The great insect class of Lepidoptera, those with scale-covered wings, is made up overwhelmingly of moths, nearly 2,00,000 named species across the world, with many thousands more yet to be named. By contrast, there are only about 18,000 named species of butterflies (3,500 of them just in Colombia, by the way), for butterflies constitute a mere branch, halfway down, of the moth evolutionary tree. Butterflies could roughly be described as a bunch of moths which evolved bright colours for mutual recognition, as they had begun to specialise in flying during the day. The fact that the great majority of moths are active only at night means they are largely unfamiliar to most people, and even regarded as somewhat sinister, but in fact, as moth lovers know, they can be every bit as arresting as their butterfly relations. Many are stunningly beautiful, such as the Jersey tiger or the eyed hawkmoth, or even the legendary Clifden nonpareil, the very rare species which shows on its underwings a sumptuous colour found almost nowhere else in the moth world — lilac blue. Once moth enthusiasm takes hold, you end up buying a light trap, which you operate at night and which is the only way to see most moths properly, and you are regarded by your family and friends as a tad on the obsessive side, as you have 868 British species of larger moths to familiarise yourself with, compared with only 58 British butterflies. But that is only the larger ones, those which are more or less butterfly-sized. Even the most determined moth obsessives have been daunted, in the past, by the micro moths — the ones the size of your little fingernail, or smaller — as there are 1,600 species of them in Britain. Becoming familiar with them was difficult as the literature on them was widely scattered, often in specialist journals, and relatively expensive, and only about 170 of them have English names, which means there’s a lot of Latin to remember. Now though, the first comprehensive, single-volume illustrated guide to them has just been produced. Clearly, you have to be a moth fan in the first place to want to buy The Field Guide to the Micro-Moths of Great Britain and Ireland (British Wildlife Publishing; £29.95), but even if you’re not, and you come across it, and you enjoy the natural world, you will be stunned: here, suddenly revealed, is a truly wonderful variety of colour and form in these diminutive insects. They range from the brilliant green of the oak tortrix to the pinky-purple with yellow spots of the mint moth, from the amazing antennae of the longhorns — six times the length of their bodies — to the weirdly bisected wings of the plume moths. There are a tiny number of pests here too, including the common clothes moth, Tineola bisselliela (currently infesting the McCarthy household), and the horse-chestnut leaf miner, Cameraria ohridella, the wee beastie from the Balkans which got here on long-distance lorries a decade ago and now turns our conker trees brown in July. But the overwhelming majority are harmless and utterly fascinating. The authors, Phil Sterling, who is ecological adviser to Dorset County Council, and Mark Parsons, in charge of moths at the charity Butterfly Conservation, have described 1,033 of them, in an entomological labour of Hercules; and Richard Lewington, Europe’s best butterfly painter, has painted every one. It’s a whole new section of the teeming life out there that’s been brought into our ken. Leafing through the pages of illustrations, looking at a thousand different small creatures, so varied and specialised, you are lost in wonder at the power of evolution. I think it’s magnificent. — The Independent
|
||
|
No God was required to kick-start universe 14 b years ago LEADING scientists have once again got themselves embroiled in the debate about the existence of God or a god’s involvement in the Big Bang. Recently, during a panel discussion at the SETIcon II conference in Santa Clara, Calif., scientists discussed the Big Bang and whether there was a requirement for some divine power to kick-start the universe 13.75 billion years ago. Unsurprisingly, the resounding answer was: No. “The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there,” the Discovery News quoted astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, as saying. “With the laws of physics, you can get universes,” he stated. However, Filippenko, a speaker on the “Did the Big Bang Require a Divine Spark?” panel, was vague on whether or not god (or, indeed, heaven) exists — he merely pointed out that the birth of the universe didn’t require an intervening omnipotent being to get the whole thing started. The laws of physics, pure and simple, sparked universal creation. “I don’t think you can use science to either prove or disprove the existence of God,” Filippenko said. He then meandered into a classic chicken-and-egg argument: “The question, then, is, ‘Why are there laws of physics?’ And you could say, ‘Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.’ “The ‘divine spark’ was whatever produced the laws of physics. And I don’t know what produced that divine spark. So let’s just leave it at the laws of physics.” On the other hand, British astrophysicist and author Stephen Hawking cares little for society’s belief in supernatural beings (or subtlety for that matter). In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, Hawking said, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” A “spontaneous Big Bang” is something SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak, also a speaker at the SETIcon II panel, agrees with. “Quantum mechanical fluctuations can produce the cosmos,” said Shostak. “If you would just, in this room, just twist time and space the right way, you might create an entirely new universe. It’s not clear you could get into that universe, but you would create it. “So it could be that this universe is merely the science fair project of a kid in another universe. I don’t know how that affects your theological leanings, but it is something to consider,” he asserted. Last year, Hawking went “all in” and sparked a wave of controversy when he said that there is no God and there is no heaven. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Hawking didn’t hold back: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” —
ANI
|
||
|
THIS UNIVERSE What is happening at the ‘boundaries’ of the expanding universe? As of present epoch, the universe is definitely expanding. This is inferred from the fact that there is a red shift in the spectra of galaxies that are at a great distance from us, and this red shift is greater, larger the distance of the galaxy. It is a little amusing to think of the effect of what happens at the ‘boundaries’ of the universe. We human beings are much too tiny for this to be of any consequence or consideration in the large-scale behaviour of the universe. We should perhaps realise that coming in of humans in this universe is an almost incidental and very brief event in the history of the universe. As it is we are a very young species, very recent, and not so significant even in the evolution of life on the planet. It is certain that our departure will happen much before our sun and the planet depart. Within all this brevity of our existence, we have had a wonderful role in this fantastic drama, significant and truly wonderful because of the fact that we were also fortunate to develop the faculty of partially comprehending the story of the amazing drama of which we became spectators and minor participants.
|
||
Real-time gene sequencing used to combat superbug ‘Blade Runner’ still subject of scientists’ debate
|
OUR human prejudices often lead us astray in looking at the natural world. For example, we so love our butterflies that we tend to think butterflies come first, and moths are merely an afterthought. But actually, it’s the other way round.
