Work-life balance
Aspects of economic anthropology are worthy of closer consideration in the debate on the decline of egalitarian groups (28 July, p 38), in particular the differences in work and leisure time that exist between hunter-gatherer economies and systems like our own.
Surviving hunter-gatherers like the !Kung have been found to spend an average of about 5 hours a day hunting and gathering. Many assume that the increased labour times in industrial societies are a necessary trade-off in return for our luxuriously long and cosseted lives, but that is wrong.
Between 1951 and 2007, productivity in the US rose by 400 per cent. Had that increase been applied to benefit American workers, the average worker could achieve a 1950s standard of living with an 11-hour working week.
Of course, they have not received that benefit and increases in productivity are simply fed back into the system. In large part, cold war militarisation siphoned off the economic gain.
I feel a great injustice has been done. Our lives are short, yet we spend far too many hours chained to the wheel of a wasteful, murderous and ultimately unnecessary machine.
These are hours that could have been spent raising wise children, developing our talents, discovering the wonders of the universe, or simply spent enjoying ourselves, friends, families and lovers.
From Liza Peeters
Life in hunter-gatherer societies and slash-and-burn agricultural societies may seem idyllic, but child mortality is very high. So are rates of violence and murder.
Of course this does not justify their conquest and colonisation, but I’m glad humankind as a whole has moved on. It’s only a pity we’ve lost the positive aspects of such societies on the road to improved living conditions.
Everberg, Belgium
Man the pumps
Your article on adding iron to patches of ocean to encourage plankton growth and so capture atmospheric carbon (21 July, p 15), brought to mind a related method of increasing ocean fertility by the vertical mixing of waters.
You recently suggested that whales may have played a part by stirring the sea when diving and resurfacing (9 July, p36). There have been proposals to do this mixing by pumping deep water to the surface. This should give a better balance of nutrients and do the same job as iron.
Weather woes
If a weakening, slowing polar jet stream is causing weather patterns to stall, leading to extreme weather (7 July, p 32), imagine the disruption if it were to disappear altogether.
Jet streams – high-speed winds in the upper atmosphere – occur at the meeting point of atmospheric “cells”, large-scale circulations of air, such as that created by air rising at the equator and flowing polewards before sinking in the subtropics. In each hemisphere, the polar jet stream occurs between two cells, the polar cell and the mid-latitude Ferrel cell, and helps guide weather systems.
In the north, the polar cell is powered by air over the Arctic radiating heat into space, cooling and then sinking and spreading out over the tundra. If the Arctic Ocean becomes largely ice-free, it will soak up rather than reflect sunlight. So for at least part of the year we are likely to get air rising over the Arctic instead of sinking, reversing the flow in the polar cell.
In effect, what we might see is the Ferrel cell air flow extending all the way to the Arctic and the polar jet disappearing, albeit temporarily. This is most likely in autumn when the land surrounding the Arctic Ocean rapidly cools while the water retains its warmth for longer, encouraging such a reversal and disrupting weather patterns.
Surprise!
I’m surprised that your exploration of facial expressions gave no proposed communicative function for a look of surprise (21 July, p 40). It is a great clue to misunderstandings. If you say something routine to someone and they look surprised, that tells you instantly that something is wrong. You are very likely to correct it.
Likewise, if you have accidentally insulted them, your surprise at their surprise will tell them it probably was an error. And so on.
Safer chemistry
Software linking known reaction paths to create an “internet of chemistry” has the potential to do more than give cheaper routes for chemical synthesis (28 July, p 6). It could also improve the safety of large-scale chemical production.
In many industrial reactions, the greatest hazard comes not from reagents or products, but from intermediates. It was an intermediate chemical that killed so many people in the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India.
The other danger is that highly energetic processes can become unmanageable if control systems fail.
In the same way that drivers can ask a database to plot a route avoiding certain places, we should be able to use Chematica to seek safer reaction pathways that avoid the most dangerous intermediates and highly energetic transformations.
From Ron Baker
Could Chematica be useful for researching the origin of life? If we specified the source materials thought to have been present in proposed ancient environments, and the target molecules important to life, such as nucleotides, perhaps Chematica could connect the dots.
Colchester, Essex, UK
Psycho biology
Your look at von Economo neurons (VENs), found in larger-brained creatures and possibly linked to emotion, empathy and self-awareness in humans (21 July, p 32), reminded me of the idea that in society there are functional psychopaths.
Such people have varying degrees of empathy less than the societal norm. Is it possible that the number of VENs in the brain correlates to the score on a scale used to determine psychopathy?
Rocky ground
Your story on enhanced rock weathering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (7 April, p 4) quoted some “back-of-the-envelope calculations” showing it would require 100 gigatonnes of the mineral olivine a year, spread 1 centimetre thick over 3.6 billion square kilometres of land.
I am the architect of one such scheme and I beg to differ. The scientists you quoted got their calculations wrong, leading them to overestimate the land area required by a factor of 4000.
Besides mistaking billions for millions in the land area estimation, the scientists do not use the right weathering equation, which requires only 25 Gt. This, admittedly, is still a large undertaking, but enhanced weathering is the best, most sustainable and cost-effective way to capture large volumes of CO2.
Unisex games
Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young call for an end to current sex-testing policies in international athletics and the Olympics (21 July, p 26). I agree. Sex should not be the determining factor for eligibility to compete. Ability should.
The current sex-centric mechanism for deciding how many competitions there are and selecting who can participate is outmoded and needs to change.
I can hear the howls of protest from some quarters: “This means that men will be able to compete against women.” But this is what selection by ability, not by gender, means. Look at equestrianism, in which men and women compete as equals on the basis of their ability to inspire and direct their horse. It is time to abandon sex-based selection in other sports.
Human cull
If a superior extraterrestrial intelligence arrived on Earth, as Anthony Wheeler suggests in his letter (21 July, p 30), then presumably it would be intelligent enough to realise that the sheer number of humans, all consuming resources, causes problems. It therefore seems likely that these beings would do as we do when faced with a less intelligent species becoming too numerous: cull it. It would be for our own good, of course.
Natural infidelity
I am disturbed by some of the language in your story on breeding albatrosses (21 July, p 16). It has been known for decades that many pair-bonded bird species engage in extra-pair matings, and up to half the eggs of any brood may result from this.
So it is unscientific to use such anthropomorphisms as “cheating”, “infidelity” and “divorce”, all loaded, negative terms that imply a monogamy and sexual fidelity that does not and never has existed. These birds are not cheating, just engaging in their normal behaviour. It may be normal for humans too: see Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (Harper, 2010).
This will hurt
I would like to counter David Evans’s letter (21 July, p 31). He says only a truly clumsy person makes an injection hurt. I’ve had type 1 diabetes for four years and have yet to find a consistently pain-free spot to inject. I agree there is no need to fear needles, but there is no need to make people feel inept.
Big and bigger
In view of the need to capture carbon and your report on rice plants growing five times larger when given a microbiotic fungus (28 July, p 8), what a temptation to use this on giant sequoia, even if it would be a long-term experiment.
For the record
• In our Editorial that commented on the Tax Justice Network’s report of a staggering $21 trillion or more that has been stockpiled in tax havens (28 July, p 3), we should have said that nearly half that sum involved fewer than 92,000 people, roughly the richest 0.001 per cent.