Pops

Between Christmas and New Year's, when university students are at home playing, university scientists get together to talk shop, make an informal but massive audit of a year's research. Last week scientific meetings were popping all over -- the big, democratic American Association for the Advancement of Science in Columbus; organic chemists in St. Louis, sociologists in Philadelphia, astronomers in Delaware, Ohio, anthropologists in Chicago, geologists in Minneapolis, paleontologists in Pittsburgh, archeologists in Ann Arbor. Highlights:

Future. Professor Kirtley Fletcher Mather, Harvard geologist, regards the future of man on earth with a good deal of complacency. He expects the world's climate five or ten million years hence to be more benign than it is now (a cyclic recurrence of past benign climates), and he looks for no astronomical catastrophe to wipe the planet out of existence. It is true, he observed last week, that practically none of the placental mammals (of which man is one) has maintained itself as a species for more than two or three million years, and the average must be about half a million. Since Homo sapiens has already existed for some 50,000 years, he has 450,000 years to go if the average applies -- "then either oblivion as we reach the end of a blind alley or progressive development into some type of descendant better adjusted than we to the total environmental factors of the time."

Cheerful note: Homo sapiens, practically as he stands, may beat the average because the vast army of extinct mammals had no control over their environment, whereas modern man is controlling his environment more & more all the time.

"It is sometimes suggested," said Dr. Mather, "that because man has specialized in brains, brains may cause his downfall, just as presumably the overspecialization in external armament contributed to the downfall of certain herbivorous dinosaurs. That argument by analogy is ... heavily punctuated with fallacies. There is as yet no evidence that mankind is weighted down with a superabundance of intelligence."

Too Foolish? Professor Raymond Pearl, Johns Hopkins biologist, thought it might be a good idea to deprive people over 50 of the ballot, on the grounds that such persons are likely to be slugnutty and irresponsible. "The wisdom of the founding fathers," trumpeted he, "led them to the view that youngsters under 21 were, on the whole, too foolish to vote. But not having envisaged the possibility of such weird economic philosophies as 'ham & eggs' or '$200 a month,' it apparently never occurred to them that there might be an age beyond which people would also be too foolish to vote."

Dr. Pearl was 60 years old last June.

"White-Collar Criminality" was the title of a rip-snorting paper by Dr. Edwin Hardin Sutherland of Indiana University, last year's president of the American Sociological Society. He does not agree with many criminologists that crime is caused by poverty-stricken environments or by mental and physiological conditions associated with poverty. He classed as white-collar criminals the "robber barons" of the 19th Century and the Kreugers, Staviskys, Insulls, Whitneys, Coster-Musicas of the 20th, contended that there exists a great welter of less spectacular white-collar rascality--short weights in stores, commercial bribery, willful violations of food and drug laws, thefts and embezzlements by clerks and accountants, stock frauds, political chicanery of all sorts, fee-splitting by doctors. This top-drawer malfeasance does not reach the courts nearly so often as the murders, assaults, robberies, sex offenses and drunkenness of lower-class criminals, and so receives scant attention from criminologists.

According to this view poverty is not the cause of crime but simply determines its nature. Neither does Dr. Sutherland agree with Harvard's famed Earnest Albert Hooton that crime has a genetic basis. He believes that crime, whether upper-class or lower-class, is learned by association with other malefactors already in the field.

After Aristotle. Biologist Wesley Roswell Coe of Yale: "I know of no satisfactory evidence that any of the numerous techniques that have been recommended in recent years have been more successful in prenatal sex control than those which Aristotle wrote were practiced in his illustrious century. These you may recall were based upon such fantastic theories as were concerned with the direction of the wind at the time of conception and similar nonsense. It must not be concluded, however, that the eventual discovery of a practical technique which will fulfill the desires of prospective parents and animal breeders is improbable."

Boost for Canals. For more than half a century a dispute has raged in a mild way among astronomers as to whether the "canals" of Mars are real or optical illusions. The canals are easier for imaginative astronomers to see than to record on unimaginative photographic plates. But last week Astronomer Earl Carl Slipher of Lowell Observatory, armed with good photographs of the red planet taken during its close approach last summer, declared that these pictures and others made during the past 35 years all show the canals clearly defined and in the same place.

Canals are artificial waterways, and that term implies intelligent beings as builders.

But even if Astronomer Slipher is right and the "canals" are real canals, the beings who built them may have become extinct, in the planet's thinning atmosphere and dwindling water supply, millions of years ago.

Garrulous Old Boy. North of the Bay of Pylos in Greece, the University of Cincinnati's Archeologist Carl William Blegen unearthed fire-scarred remains of a building which he identified as the palace of Nestor, ancient king of Pylos--the garrulous old boy of the Iliad and Odyssey who was always dishing out advice and talking about his early exploits. Pottery found on the floors was dated near the close of the 13th Century B. C., putative time of the siege of Troy. Digger Blegen declared that more than 600 clay tablets, apparently bearing lists of persons, inventories of domestic animals, cereal supplies, etc., disprove the idea that the Achaeans of the Homeric period were "a body of illiterate adventurers who imposed their domination in a series of Viking raids."

Atomic Radio. Professor Isidor Isaac Rabi and associates of Columbia University showed that individual atoms send out radio waves in the broadcast and shortwave ranges--one and one-half to 1,000 metres. Naturally the energy of each wave is tiny and each atom sends out a wave only once in 1,000 to 100,000,000 years. But there are so many billions of atoms in a small pinch of substance that Dr. Rabi gets a continuous program on his detector, which is a ribbon of incandescent tungsten in an oscillating electromagnetic field. He expects to use atomic radio to learn more about the nuclear structure and energy mechanism of atoms. The physicists admired his discovery and Dr. Rabi got a $1,000 prize for the A. A. A. S. convention's best paper.

Snake Eyes. Zoologist Gordon Lynn Walls, Wayne University College of Medicine : "The snakes are known to have originated from the lizards in a relatively recent geological period, but despite the closeness of relationship, the eyes of snakes differ so much in structure from those of lizards (including modern legless ones) that no one would suspect, from the eyes alone, that a snake is any more closely related to a lizard than a cat is to a frog.

"Analysis of the bundle of substitutes that is the snake eye shows that the snakes must have once spent a long period underground, during which they lost their legs, ears, some of the bones of the skull, and almost lost their eyes. The eyes degenerated nearly as completely as have those of the blind fishes which live in lightless caves.

"Later, the snakes emerged above ground and fought their way back to 'respectability.' To help accomplish this, they had to invent one substitute after another within the eye, to take the place of the lost lizard-eye features. The fact that the snake eye is such a bunch of ersatz thus sheds light, for the first time, upon the habits and history of the first serpents. . . ."

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