No traveller returns
Shelly Kagan takes the Stoic view of death, epitomised by Shakespeare’s Caesar: “cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once… death, a necessary end, will come when it will come” (20 October, p 42).
But unlike Shakespeare, he ignores the fear of bereavement. From his perspective, logically we should not fear this, since death of those we love is inevitable and better than being condemned to eternal life. Yet this fear and grief help to make us compassionate by opening our hearts to others in distress. Fear and grief have been the foundation for much beauty in art, music and literature.
Stoicism is a brave perspective on life, but its refusal to feel such negative emotions can lead to over-harsh judgement. So, like many others, I will continue to fear the Reaper.
Surely death could simply be an evolutionary strategy, selected for over non-death, or the “not-very-much-death” of prions and amoebas, as the more successful method of propagation of information-as-self?
Death without sex would be likely to have less advantage. On this reading, it is analogous to the programmed cell death of apoptosis – it is programmed organism death to improve survival and propagation of genes. Whether mortality is a price worth paying for sex may be worthy of discussion.
Your editorial states “few of us know exactly when death will come” (20 October, p 3). The reality is that none of us is absolutely sure of the time, the place or the manner of our death, nor can we be, even if we plan it. There is always the possibility of utterly unpredictable “black swan” events.
This is no trivial statement of the obvious. It is profoundly useful in helping one focus on what is important in life.
Caroline Williams describes the process of decomposition but only mentions insects in passing (20 October, p 40).
Maggots play a major role in the breakdown of bodies, unless excluded by funerary procedures. The maturity and nature of such maggots has been found to have great forensic use.
I was shocked to find that Dick Teresi’s article “Plight of the living dead” morphed from an interesting history of the science of the determination of death into a polemic against organ transplantation (20 October, p 36).
I am happy to define brain death as “unconscious and never going to regain consciousness”. I shall continue to carry my organ donor card with pride.
Force against Caesar
Laura Spinney quotes theorists’ idea that since our closest relatives are chimpanzees, early humans probably had similar strength-based hierarchical social organisation and practices (13 October, p 46). This is a fallacy in more than one way.
Bonobos and chimps are genetically almost identical to, and equidistant from, humans. Yet the social behaviour of bonobos is all but the polar opposite of that of chimps. This destroys any thesis based on genetic closeness indicating social similarity.
Why then are chimps generally used as the model of early human behaviour? The fact that humans are capable of having sex at almost any time, like bonobos but unlike chimps, could indicate that we are more like the bonobo.
There is lots of anthropological evidence that early human nomadic groups were far more likely to be egalitarian and consensual, regardless of weaponry. There are also plenty of examples of consensual or democratic societies that have arisen without armed citizenry.
I’m pretty sure there were rocks to hand prior to our ancestors fashioning a nicely weighted piece of spruce to do the job of killing from afar. Pretty much any old rock will do the job; we have been able to inflict lethal damage at a distance for as long as we have had opposable thumbs.
Laura Spinney writes that “it wasn’t until about 1000 BC that nomads on the Eurasian steppes learned how to sit on [horses] and how to control them.”
Wear marks on equine teeth created by the presence of a bit have been found at digs in the steppe dating to between 4000 and 3000 BC, so horses were clearly being ridden much earlier.
Paul Bingham’s view that “democratisation tends to go hand in hand with the citizens of a country gaining access to weapons, usually handguns” is manifestly absurd. How many of the long-standing and stable democracies of Western Europe and Scandinavia allow their citizens to be armed? His view owes more to pro-gun US politics than evolutionary biology.
Winchester, Hampshire, UK
• Just for the record, I am not “pro-gun”. For example, I strongly support banning assault weapons in the US. There is extensive empirical evidence for an intimate relationship between the distribution of access to decisive coercive threat – democratised or hierarchically controlled – and the political organisation of local economies or polities.
Evolving morals
I share Susan Hall’s irritation with assertions that because infidelity is normal in humans it must be acceptable (13 October, p 31). But I feel that she, like many others, nevertheless accepts the central tenet of such arguments, which portrays moral behaviour as an unhelpful side-effect of human intelligence rather than something which is selected for by evolution.
These “scientific” arguments, like those which “demonstrated” that people of colour were inferior, are merely attempts by parasitic humans to hijack science to justify their amoral life positions. In takes but a moment’s thought to realise that human ascendance is due to cooperation, and cooperation requires trust. The development of trust requires codes of behaviour that are accepted – morals.
So much food
In his review of One Billion Hungry, Fred Pearce says: “Of course, everyone should put their shoulder to the wheel to double global food production by 2050” (13 October, p 50). I am curious as to why.
Today’s population stands at 7 billion and is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050. It doesn’t take a doubling of food production to feed these extra people. One billion people may be going hungry today, but a billion of us are also overfed and around a third of current food production goes to waste.
• The target of doubling production stems from assumptions about rising demand, especially for meat.
Not perpetual fuel
Unless someone has repealed the second law of thermodynamics, there is no prospect whatsoever of producing fuel from air without using more energy than that fuel delivers (27 October, p 20).
But that is not the economic question: you do not reject your laptop or mobile telephone just because the battery requires more energy to charge than it returns.
If fuel from air is anything, it is a form of energy storage, not generation.
• Sorry, this was a case of poor wording. You are right: the point is that the energy used in producing the fuel should not be too high and the ultimate cost of the fuel should not be prohibitive. If renewable energy is used to generate the gasoline, which when burned returns the same carbon dioxide to the air, it is a carbon-neutral form of energy storage.
A toxin's toll
Jessica Hamzelou reports that 80 per cent of older people’s brain cells are vulnerable to developing DNA damage (29 September, p 6). Could this be due to an external toxic agent, such as aluminium, to which older brains have been exposed for longer?
In 1988, for example, 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate got into the water supply serving the town of Camelford, Cornwall. Residents reported memory loss, premature ageing, rashes and joint pains.
A 1999 report in the British Medical Journal concluded that some suffered “considerable damage” to brain function ().
Aluminium sulphate is routinely added to a host of products that we consume, including tap water.
Eat your words
Feedback hints at the problem faced by those with toilet systems that clog easily in phrasing delicately what may be placed in the pan (20 October). The captain of a cruise ship on which I recently travelled advised passengers succinctly that, other than toilet paper, if “you haven’t eaten it, don’t put it in the toilet”.
For the record
• It would have been better if we had mentioned that the photo of Kelly Richardson’s video installation Mariner 9 (25 August, p 50) was taken at its in Whitley Bay, UK, and that it was commissioned by Newcastle’s , which worked with Richardson to develop the piece.