Equal chances
Your editorial on inequality refers to the concept of equality of opportunity (28 July, p 3), which I would greatly welcome, so long as it is universally applied.
Those who say there is no such thing as equality often dismiss it as a myth, citing as proof the fact that we cannot all run 100 metres as fast as Usain Bolt. Of course we can’t, but in any race, we should all get the chance to be on the same starting line.
That we do not have equality of opportunity is clear. We do not even have it in rich western countries, never mind across the planet. True equality of opportunity will mean no more buying privilege for the offspring of the powerful and wealthy. I can hear the howls of protest already.
From Sebastian Hayes
The super-wealthy, highlighted in your look at who are the 1 per cent (28 July, p 37), are largely a waste of space: overpaid teenagers, such as footballers, and people who have the means to flash messages from one stockmarket to another faster than someone else.
That all this is not necessarily making the world’s poor poorer, as you say in your editorial, is not the point: it is simply repulsive, and when we see such flagrant inequality, vanity and corruption it saps everyone’s will to contribute to society.
Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK
Testing times
Testosterone testing, the subject of your opinion article on what looks like sex-testing of elite women athletes (21 July, p 26), is a poor basis for predicting an unfair advantage, yet that’s exactly the kind of fudge a ruling body is likely to settle on when they need a cheap and cheerful proxy for sex-testing women.
Most likely, the International Association of Athletics Federations and the International Olympic Committee resorted to the time-honoured technique of politicians everywhere: pay lip service to some plausible-sounding science and come up with some vaguely decisive (even if unfair) ruling.
Who knows, maybe this is the kindest fudge possible.
Art appreciation
In your look at neuroaesthetics, the correlation of a data compression “sweet spot” with appreciation of modern art (14 July, p 42) raises the issue of the link between pattern and novelty.
A repetitively patterned input is highly compressible. A totally random input is incompressible. We find the repetitive pattern boring as we detect no novelty. Total randomness disturbs because we can detect no pattern.
It would be interesting to correlate eye-tracking of modern art with image compressibility. Perhaps the eye continuously moves over an incompressible, random image, searching for a pattern, and likewise over a repetitively patterned image, seeking novelty. Optimum compressibility, or the sweet spot, may be when the eye detects relative novelty in a sea of pattern, or pattern in a sea of novelty.
Open access vital
Further to your debate on open access publishing (23 June, p 26), many mortals have instant access to all manner of misinformation and pseudoscience, and only paid or delayed access to peer-reviewed scientific papers. The current system thus puts good science at such a competitive disadvantage that we may as well forget about it. If science is to compete with the forces of darkness it has to be in the race to start with.
Bone collectors
Your article on fossil poaching in Mongolia (16 June, p 28) portends unending futility. As long as there is a market, someone will find a way to fill it. Consider illegal drugs, stolen art, purloined antiquities and exotic animals.
So let’s change the market’s structure and replace the poachers with palaeontologists. When fossils are found, let the palaeontologists collect all the contextual information, then select a few fossils and sell or lease them, with agreed access for further study. What might a collector pay for a legitimate femur with a provenance certified by US expert Robert Bakker?
This will take the initiative away from the poachers. It won’t drive them out of business, but it will drive them out of much of it. Rather than thieves trampling through potential sites and taking what they can, trained palaeontologists will work the sites, then use their professional expertise to choose what is to be sold or kept for posterity.
Conception effect
Your report on babies born in autumn being more likely to live to 100 refers to possible mechanisms such as seasonal infections in early life (21 July, p 17). It is important to remember that these babies were conceived between December and February. The very early embryo is exquisitely sensitive to harmful or teratogenic effects, and it is possible that this, rather than the environment after birth, is what matters.
There are reports suggesting similar differences in whether a person is more or less likely to end up being treated for mental illness and less likely to be listed in Who’s Who, and here too it could be a matter of conception date rather than birth date.
For the record
• Our feature on the fungal disease killing amphibians stated species are estimated to be going extinct up to 40,000 times faster than at any time in the last 360 million years (7 July, p 42). It should have said up to 40,000 times faster than the background or normal extinction rate since then.