Redundant males
Thierry Lodé (5 November, p 30) claims that the cost of having redundant males shows that sex is not a good solution for reproduction. However, division into males and females came well after the origin of sexual reproduction.
Many invertebrates are hermaphrodites – where they have the advantages of sex and both parties can reproduce. Some reptiles can reproduce asexually and some fish can switch sex when it suits them. The division into males and females is only complete for .
At least for birds, the idea that males are an unnecessary cost to the system doesn’t work when they share the labour of feeding and rearing their young. Per bird, a pair rears as many young as a single hermaphrodite could, but the pair can share nest-sitting, with its attendant advantage, and so the young are better off with two parents rather than just one.
Similar advantages apply to mammals in species where male parents take some interest in the females, their young or their territory after mating. Clearly the division into separate males and females arose later for totally different reasons.
Superluminal moves
We read your coverage on the speeding neutrinos (1 October, p 6) and the related letter from Alan Watson (29 October, p 35). Even though the OPERA results are in need of confirmation, their claim that neutrinos are faster than light has sent the press into an “Einstein was wrong” frenzy.
Caution is recommended, since an extension of special relativity is possible, which describes superluminal motions without heavy violations or paradoxes: for instance, without motion backward in time.
Special relativity has time and again been proved correct in experiments. The theory teaches us that particles with velocities less than the speed of light may not be accelerated to the speed of light, c, but it does not, per se, exclude extensions of the paradigm to allow particles to exist on the other side of that barrier, without them ever being at a speed slower than light.
Actually, ordinary photons are born, live and die at the speed c, without the need to start from rest. As physicist George Sudarshan put it, even if people south of the Himalayas felt that none of them was able to cross the mountain range, their expectation that there were no people north of the Himalayas would be unjustified.
Indeed, such faster-than-light particles – which were given the name tachyons from the Greek word for “fast” – would not violate the principle of retarded causality, as was shown decades ago. The 1986 review article in , has 600 references on this.
Darwin's disconnect
Robert Trivers is quite right to point out that, at one extreme, you could describe religion as an exercise in self-deception (8 October, p 32). A good example is found in Peter Bonsey’s letter in the same issue (p 34), where he talks about the “fictitious” disconnect between science and religion.
Darwin refused the palliative of self-deception when he rejected the religion he had been brought up to believe, seeing clearly that evolution made nonsense of its claims about God having created species individually. Sadly, post-Darwinian religionists still prefer to cling to their ideas by deluding themselves that religion and science are not at loggerheads.
Science stands or falls according to the evidence; religion refuses to acknowledge any evidence against its fundamental beliefs. If that is not a disconnection, perhaps those who think like Bonsey can tell us what would be.
Red versus grey
Chris Thomas’s call to relocate some species threatened by climate change to the UK is a triumph of hope over experience (29 October, p 29). He states that “no native species has gone extinct here as a result of the arrival of non-native species”, but no mention is made of the diseases they bring.
The grey squirrel, through competition and spread of disease, is predicted to cause the extinction of the native red squirrel. Neither this nor the damage the squirrel causes to trees were envisaged. The shrub Rhododendron ponticum has turned invader in such contrasting habitats as the leafy Surrey suburbs and the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia. It is a carrier for the pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, which has spread to native flora.
New introductions can have damaging and long-lasting, if unforeseen, consequences. Rather than trying to create a new ark in the British countryside, we would do better to enhance our environment for the flora and fauna already here.
A Republican thing
I appreciated your look at America’s poor relationship with science but was dismayed by the disparaging reference to my 2005 book, , which you called “simplistic and unhelpful” (29 October, p 3). On the contrary, the book looks prescient now, with anti-science behaviour on the US political right more extreme than ever.
Today, any Republican who wants to be a serious presidential contender has to deny the reality of human-caused climate change. There is no comparable anti-science litmus test on the US left. Why equivocate when this is the clear state of affairs?
Moreover, science itself is now revealing why US conservatives are anti-science. As political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have shown in their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics , the US Republican party is, increasingly, a psychologically authoritarian movement. As such, it creates its own in-group reality and just hardens its line when challenged.
Incidentally, I was glad to see you opted for “Unscientific America” on your cover. It happens to be the title of another of my books, which you reviewed (8 August, 2009, p 46).
From Bob Hammersley
In “Decline and fall”, part of your report on science in America (29 October, p 38), Shawn Lawrence Otto asserts that “the idea that there is no objective truth is just plain wrong”. On what evidence? Granted, creationism and other unscientific theories can be discounted as wholly implausible in the light of observation, but it does not follow that scientific knowledge is absolute.
Research suggests that measurement and interpretation, however useful, are to some extent a product of the human mind. If so, then surely no account of popular unscientific movements in America is complete without mention of objectivism.
Eynsham, Oxfordshire, UK
My own phantom
I would like to pass on a personal observation related to the rubber hand illusion (15 October, p 34). I am a below-the-knee amputee and periodically have twinges of phantom limb pain. Where I have the sensation depends on circumstances. If I’m wearing my prosthesis, the pain feels as if it is in my (missing) foot, but if I’m not wearing it, then I feel the pain in my stump. This is independent of whether I can see my legs or not.
Taming teleology
I read almost once a month in 91av how the universe is “fine-tuned” for the existence of life (22 October, p 14). This assumes that someone had the intention of seeding life when “they” created the cosmos. It is also a very Earth-centric view, because the universe is not, on the whole, a very hospitable place.
I have always argued life is a one-off, a fluke, a coincidence. Just because it happened here doesn’t mean it will happen elsewhere. There is no reason to believe that ET exists, and there is nothing special about life. As far as the universe is concerned, all the Earth’s creatures may just as well be lumps of rock.
It is certainly ridiculous to suggest that there is anything in nature (be it the gravitational constant G, God, or the properties of water) that has favoured life over any other phenomenon.
It's what you know
What Phyllis Goldstein’s letter on the end of evolution of brain size (22 October, p 35) overlooks is that the more knowledge you have in your memory, the faster you can work and the more you can do.
At a mundane level, imagine trying to write a letter when you have to look up the spelling of every word.
Kitchen science
George Legendre wishes there was a book which dealt with pasta seasonings as rigorously as his own mathematical study of pasta shapes (15 October, p 48). He might be interested in the culinary book by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy (Quirk Books, 2010).
The jacket flap states: “There are over 300 shapes of pasta, each of which has… an affinity with particular foods.”
Rotten end
Here’s my contribution to the alternatives to traditional burial and cremation (29 October, p 36).
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Forensic Anthropology Center is also known as the “Body Farm”. People can donate their remains, which are then left to decompose so that trainee forensic scientists can learn their trade, for example, by identifying the stages of decay in bodies being eaten by maggots. I hope we get one in the UK before I die… many, many years from now.
From Alan Thompson
I’d prefer my mortal remains to be used to make biodiesel. Far better to go to heaven on a number 47 bus than as some crockery, as previously suggested. Those of little faith could opt to provide the glycerol for nitroglycerine, thus going out with a bang.
Lymington, Hampshire, UK
For the record
• Pine beetles have swept through 130,000 square kilometres of forest in British Columbia, Canada. Our story was out by a factor of 10 (5 November, p 38).
• The feature “Don’t tell it so straight” (29 October, p 42) mistakenly suggested that the Discovery Institute sought to get biblical creationism taught in science classes, and used the talking point “evolution is just a theory”. These actions should have been attributed more generally to opponents of evolutionary theory.