The right note
In your look at the sensory world of plants, Daniel Chamovitz states “there are sounds that it could be advantageous for plants to hear”, including vibrations “such as a bee’s buzz” (25 August, p 35).
This was graphically illustrated by geologist Iain Stewart in the BBC television series . Striking a middle C tuning fork caused a flower to shed its pollen.
There’s something interesting about the note C. Australian astronomer said: “We can state with considerable accuracy and confidence that the dominant note of the cosmos at recombination was almost exactly 54 octaves below middle C, at an ear-splitting volume of around 120 decibels.”
I’m not going to play middle C loudly to any of the crops on our farm – it would drive the neighbours mad – but future research about whether plants can hear will be fascinating.
From Brian Robinson
I have gazed in wonder at fields of sunflowers in France, turning to follow the sun. That plants may “see” is bad news for creationists, who claim the complex human eye is proof that God must have created us, as there are no simpler eyes from which it could have evolved.
Brentwood, Essex, UK
Random worries
Catherine de Lange’s look at the growing influence of smartphones lamented the removal of chance and choice in our lives by technologies like GPS and recommendation services (25 August, p 46), and went on to commend alternative apps like Serendipitor that can give us back some whimsy.
Her comment about how “strangely exhilarating” it is to be told to carry out “random activities” made me shudder. Who picks these activities and what criteria do they use? The choices might be benign today, but the habits they form could be hijacked by those who wish to promote less benign activities tomorrow.
Is it, in any case, wise to encourage people to undertake random activities at the behest of software, on the promise of a momentary buzz?
No more heroes
Further to your article on Neil Armstrong’s death (1 September, p 4), I think of him as a pilot. I don’t know if it took an exceptionally skilled pilot to land on the moon or just a capable one. Perhaps it is not politically correct to ask.
Media exposure leads many to idolise sports teams and athletes, actors, singers and perhaps astronauts. The scientists who made the mission possible are rarely mentioned.
I view their contribution as much more significant than Armstrong’s. I don’t really care if he was the first person on the moon; there is no magic in “first”. I can admire people, but I don’t hero worship.
Placebo theory
I’d like to respond to your report on the creation of a mathematical model that supports my evolutionary psychology theory of the placebo effect (8 September, p 9). I welcome this development, but it just formalises a logically strong argument I put forward 10 years ago, supported by a wealth of facts.
In the story you refer to me as a retired psychologist. I am no more a retired psychologist than Stephen Hawking is a retired cosmologist. I am as active as ever, and I have a about the evolution of healing in the journal Current Biology (the paper can also be found on my website, ).
Too late to save Earth
Further to your review of The Human Quest, which discusses environmental tipping points for Earth (18 August, p 51), it looks as if we may be too late. We appear to be at the first of these long-anticipated tipping points, as shown by the record decline in Arctic ice cover this year.
The rate of melting sped up following a , which must itself have been due to there being more open water in the Arctic soaking up sunlight. Once again, reality is preceding the most extreme predictions.
On our wavelength
I was rather concerned by speculation that white dwarf stars could harbour habitable planets simply because these stars emit light at the right wavelengths to sustain photosynthesis (18 August, p 8).
Surely anywhere life evolves it will utilise the dominant wavelengths from the local star. It is not divine providence that has made our eyes most sensitive to the wavelengths emitted most strongly by our sun, and for which plant photosynthesis is optimised. Those wavelengths are what our eyes and plants have evolved to use.
Watson welcome
You report that the IBM supercomputer Watson is aiding medical diagnoses (25 August, p 19). Why is anyone in the least bit surprised that it is useful?
Many people long to be assessed by a computer that will set aside human preconceptions and listen to a full range of symptoms. After the 30 years it took me to get a diagnosis of coeliac disease, I believe I would have done better if handed a questionnaire to be run through a computer of this sort.
Road to Damascus
Your mention of pharaoh Akhenaten’s possible epilepsy and its suggested link to religious conversion (8 September, p 10) may have a parallel in the biblical story of the Damascene conversion of Saul, who gave up persecuting Christians and became one of their primary advocates after he saw a heavenly light and heard a divine voice.
In a in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry (vol 50, p 659), D. Landsborough suggested that Saul, later known as Paul the Apostle, may have suffered from an attack of temporal lobe epilepsy, perhaps ending in a convulsion. The idea that profound religious experiences may be the result of acute illness is one that should be looked at from the position of the calming study of rational science.
Patterns of prejudice
Nina Jablonski’s article on racism (1 September, p 26) doesn’t address the complexity of the issue. Far from having a relentless white-to-black polarity, racism is multidirectional. The Kantian meme she recounts explains very little except one recent expression of one western form of racism.
Addiction is no sin
Further to your look at addiction (8 September, p 36), the overarching clinical and scientific language on this subject is one of puritanical moralism, with drug use and so on being a sin that leads to death and damnation, which can only be escaped through repentance, reform, rehabilitation and salvation.
As a psychiatrist in this field, I have suggested that addictive substances including alcohol and nicotine may, in a minority of users, become the object of brain systems of attachment, such as that governing the attachment of child to mother. The result is that we become attached to the drug, with all the power, passion and drive of an attachment to another person.
Using this picture, we can talk of attachment not addiction, yearning not craving and reunion not relapse.
A significant prediction of this model is that reunion/relapse would be the norm, and abstinence or moderation an unstable state of affairs.
Take note
You report on self-trackers who record many aspects of their lives (4 August, p 40), and I must confess to a similar habit: I have a record of every bath I have had since I was a teenager (I am now 53). Over the same period, I also have a record of every cold I have had.
My father was a compulsive record-keeper, too. He recorded the heights of each of his three children, monthly, until we left home. The graph is interesting because it shows a distinct annual growth cycle.
Despite our being born in different seasons, we all grew more in summer than winter. I was about to ask if this is a new observation but, having looked a little deeper, I realise it isn’t.
Diabetes and fat
Your article on possible links between dementia and diabetes argued that a high-sugar, high-fat diet is damaging to the brain by raising insensitivity to insulin (1 September, p 32). However, type 1 diabetics take insulin to balance carbohydrate and sugar, not to deal with fat and protein. That suggests to me that raised insulin levels will result from eating too much sugar, not from eating fat.
The editor writes:
• Although dietary fats do not cause a surge in insulin levels, they could still play a part in diabetes – and thus Alzheimer’s – by contributing to obesity. As we pointed out in the article, excess body fat seems to trigger the release of inflammatory and metabolic stress molecules inside liver and fat cells, which disrupts insulin action, leading to high blood glucose levels and, eventually, insulin resistance.
Ruinous times
It says something about the financial sector’s current reputation that, when I misread your headline “The algorithm that runs the world” (11 August, p 32) as “The algorithm that ruins the world”, I immediately expected the story to be about automated trading. It wasn’t, of course.
For the record
• The Feedback story about an “impossible restriction” (8 September) should have been credited to Mike Whittaker.