Explanations other stories

Alex Rosenberg There must be some obvious defect in this explanation, so let me try it out on you. The first component is that inequality is the result of an incentive structure that makes some people work much harder than other people. The second is that harder work ceteris paribus produces higher mortality and morbidity, and the third is that higher morbidity at lower socioeconomic status plus contagion leads to higher morbidity and mortality at higher socioeconomic status - end of story. 

Here, past events help to explain current events via implicit principles of natural selection. Such ultimate explanations have been famously criticized as just-so stories, too easy to frame and too difficult to test (Gould and Lewontin, 1979). There is certainly something to this charge. Just because available data or even experience shows that eyespots are widespread does not guarantee that they are adaptive now. Even if they are adaptive now, this is by itself insufficient grounds to claim they were selected because they were the best available adaptation for camouflage, as opposed to some other function, or for that matter that they were not selected at all but... 

There have been a number of suggestions in the past that an extraterrestrial object impacting on the. earth caused or could cause massive extinctions of life. E. J. Opik [11], for example, discussed the lethal effects which could be caused by the heat generated from such objects striking the earth, and H. C. Urey [12] stated specifically that a comet was probably the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions. There have also been science fiction stories and a movie relating to the effects. The events likely to occur if the sunlight were temporarily "turned off" have also been discussed [13]. Our deduction in contrast to the others is based on physical science data (the iridium anomaly) and is the only explanation we found which explained the Ir anomaloy could cause the massive extinction of life and was likely to occur in a period of 100 million years. 

As I started to go down the slope, I was astonished to see the pond water begin to churn and to see the logs stand up on end in an impossible defiance of gravity and several other rules of physical mechanics Of course, the most obvious explanation of this experience—that I was in an altered state of consciousness—never occurred to me. Instead, and this is the resolution I spoke of above, the earth opened up and the pond water and the logs slid through the aperture into the psychedelic cavern that opened my story. It s a limestone cavern, I exclaimed to no one in particular as I ran down to examine its vast and exotic volume. 

A secondary orbital interaction has been used to explain other puzzling features of selectivity, but, like frontier orbital theory itself, it has not stood the test of higher levels of theoretical investigation. Although still much cited, it does not appear to be the whole story, yet it remains the only simple explanation. It works for several other cycloadditions too, with the cyclopentadiene+tropone reaction favouring the extended transition structure 2.106 because the frontier orbitals have a repulsive interaction (wavy lines) between C-3, C-4, C-5 and C-6 on the tropone and C-2 and C-3 on the diene in the compressed transition structure 3.55. Similarly, the allyl anion+alkene interaction 3.56 is a model for a 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition, which has no secondary orbital interaction between the HOMO of the anion, with a node on C-2, and the LUMO of the dipolarophile, and only has a favourable interaction between the LUMO of the anion and the HOMO of the dipolarophile 3.57, which might explain the low level or absence of endo selectivity that dipolar cycloadditions show. 

The book Understanding Multiple Chemical Sensitivity contains a great deal of information on this condition, such as tips for patients and those near to them, experiences and stories of other MCS patients, and clear explanations for doctors, therapists, students or researchers. See www.the-abc-of-mcs.com for more information on the content of this book. On this site you will also find many links to thoroughly informative American and international websites. 

It was as if all these years I had been clinging to Ptolemy s model of the universe, in which the earth is the still center around which all the other planets and stars rotate. Because Ptolemy s model seemed right but was actually wrong, ever more complex mechanisms had to be introduced to force in all the other pieces of the jigsaw. So, as soon as the story of my father s sudden meeting with M. De Eery and his family of Huguenot silk weavers was replaced with this new explanation, so many things that had seemed a puzzle became wonderfully clear. 

If you stand at the side of your poster throughout the session, you are likely to discourage some readers, who may not wish to become involved in a detailed conversation about the poster. Stand nearby. Find something to do -talk to someone else, or browse among the other posters, but remain aware of people reading your poster and be ready to answer any queries they may raise. Do not be too discouraged if you aren t asked lots of questions remember, the poster is meant to be a self-contained, visual story, without need for further explanation. 

In the following chapters, each of these questions, and many others, receives a simple answer. Other books commend themselves to anyone able and willing to go further up the mathematical slopes towards a more acceptable level of explanation—a few introductory texts take the next step up,6 7 and several others8-11 take the story further. 

The pepzymes debacle has never been satisfactorily explained, though the published results point unmistakeably to enzyme contamination. The surfactant story on the other hand has been properly sorted out, to the satisfaction of the original authors. Yet the lessons to be learned from these two case histories are basically the same - and by no means new. Mechanisms generally cannot be proved, only ruled out. So the design of control experiments to test alternative explanations is at least as important as the key experiment which appears to confirm a favourite or new and exciting theory. It is an inconvenient but inescapable fact of life that the more remarkable the result, the more important are those control experiments. 

Dave s story illustrates one of the most important concepts in our understanding of depression resilience. In this key notion lies an explanation for why some of us are depressed constantly others become depressed in response to seemingly minor incidents and still others seem able to withstand one difficult circumstance after another without depression. 

---