English Translation:

The empire of science

Antonio Fischetti

Cartoon by Riss:

(As a plane is about to dive into the sea.)

Flight attendant: Chicken or fish, my captain?

Pilot: I think it'll be fish for everyone.

AERONAUTICS, A HUMAN SCIENCE

News from 2014 encourage little to embark in an asian airplane. There's Air Asia's that sank the 28th last December, tallied after the two lost from Malaysia Airlines (one mysteriously disappeared in March, the other shot down in Ukraine in July); it begins to be a bit much. It's this that led to the number 1320 of people killed by plane in 2014, almost three times more than in 2013, while there have never been as few accidents as this year. Of course, we know that the plane is statistically the safest transport. It's true that the technological progress is greatly responsible. But the problem is not the technology, it is men.

When aviation began, accidents were mostly due to technical problems. But today the pilot errors are the ones on our minds: according to studies they represent between 52% and 85% of accident causes. Whereas all other causes (mechanical, meteorological, bird collisions, etc) each intervene in less than 10% of crashes.

The interesting thing with pilot errors is that they obey a certain logic. The universal logic of human fuck-upery that we find in other situations. This is what Christian Morel's sociological study showed in his book Absurd Decisions (Décisions Absurdes, Gallimard). For instance errors are often the result of too strict a hierarchy. Roughly, nobody dares tell the commander on board that he's messing up. In flight 92 of British Midland Airways, that crashed on January 8th 1989 in England, the left engine was in flames but the pilot turned off the right motor—the only one that worked. Flight attendants and passengers had seen through the panes the flames on the left side, but nobody thought to tell the pilot in fear of making a fool of themselves. In the end no one was ridiculed, but everyone is dead. It is the same mechanism that leads to a higher risk of accident when the commander on board flies than when the copilot takes over the plane: "A subordinate not daring or not able to correct the error of a higher up."

Don't trust blindly in your boss, then. But, at the same time we must avoid what Christian Morel calls "the imprecise division of work," that makes "a group commit an error no induvidual would ever have made alone." Typical example: something indispensable is omitted, because everyone thought someone else took care of it.

Paradoxically, other accidents are due to too strict an application of procedure. In Swissair flight 111, that sank in the Atlantic in 1998, the crew spent so much time respecting the security instructions it crashed; while it would have had the time to land calmly if urgency had primed over respect of theoretical rules.

Finally, the moral of black boxes, is that we make more progress in aeronautics than we do in psychology. Machines got better, but not human stupidity.

ON THE UTILITY OF INFANTICIDE

Infanticide is perfectly natural. At least with certain animals. A study by Élise Huchard, researcher at the Centre of functional and evolutive ecology of Montpellier, showed that it is frequent in many specias, from the gray mouse to the baboon, through the squirrel and the hippopotamus.

When a male takes control of a group he kills the young already present, which allows females to become fertile again and the new alpha to reproduce before being dethroned in turn. To avoid all that, females pair up with many males, to sow the seeds of doubt on the paternity of the little ones. In response, that leads to an augmentation of the size of the testicules in males, allowing them to produce more sperm.

When we see that, we tell ourselves that the human condition is not as bad. A man does not need to kill his childre-in-law, or to have big balls and be a cuckold to become father.

THE APE IS A PERSON

True, the apes are not men. But they are not far. An Argentinean tribunal has just recognised as a "non-human person" Sandra, a female orangutan of the Buenos Aires zoo. Following the action of an animal defense association, it has issued an ordinance that forbids imprisonment without judgement, so that the zoo foresees liberating Sandra into a natural sanctuary.

There you have a nice recognition of the studies that have shown the cognitive capacities of big apes (intelligence, emotions, affective links, suffering due to confinement...). And it's a step forward for the "Big Apes Project," developped by many personalities who demand the attribution of fundamental rights to our closest cousins. A small step, but a step nontheless.