Life or death
I have read David Robson’s article on the dawn of civilisation several times, especially the part on Klaus Schmidt’s excavations around Göbekli Tepe (5 October, p 32).
While hesitating to contradict an experienced archaeologist, Schmidt’s descriptions remind me far more of an open-air cemetery than a site of pilgrimage or anything else. Plenty of rooks and crows, no nearby water, no evidence of dwellings, fires, agriculture or tools. The carved depictions of various creatures could simply be representative of guardians, rather than gods.
Upper Hutt, New Zealand
Digital deities
Stephen Welch writes that computers are like the gods of old in our digital surveillance society (12 October, p 31). However, when it comes to encouraging a moral society, one could never be sure which side they were on.
Lydbrook, Gloucestershire, UK
Size matters
Your report on the possible formation of diamonds in Saturn and Jupiter (19 October, p 17), states that the gems could grow to cinematic sizes. A single-screen art house or a multiplex? It needs to be crystal clear, bearing in mind the object described.
Torquay, Devon, UK
Spooky action
In the article “pop-up universe” (5 October, p 38), which looks at unexpected similarities between distant parts of the universe, there is, courtesy of a typographical error, a reference to the Australian town of .
Meanwhile, in the letters section that week (p 30), there is a letter from Narromine. Is this evidence that both references were created by a typographic big bang and subsequently separated by editorial inflation?
Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
No sale
Those such as Stanley Schaetzel (26 October, p 33) who favour the “market forces” approach to wildlife conservation – arguing that sustained legal ivory sales can release funds to benefit conservation and undercut the illegal trade – ignore two key points made by Richard Ruggiero of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (5 October, p 27).
Ruggiero accepts that – in abstract principle – a controlled legal trade might make sense, but says in practice it would act as a cover for the illegal trade. And at the basic biological level, there are simply not enough elephants to satisfy the demand in Asia.
In essence, elephants are not raw materials, subject to the “law” of supply-and-demand. They are slow-growing megaherbivores that play a key role in ecosystems. Their tusks are not gemstones, but foraging and social tools. It is much better to put ivory out of “use”, and to signal to all potential consumers that it is in the same dirty league as drugs and guns.
Oxford, UK
Shake on it
In his letter (12 October, p 31), Lawrence D’Oliveiro suggests that a handshake quashes Valerie Curtis’s idea that manners in part evolved to avoid spreading disease (21 September, p 28), because such contact helps spread influenza.
But it is worth noting that handshaking keeps a potential influenza victim at two arms’ lengths, roughly the , which is more of a hazard than touching a surface that has the virus on it. Leeds, UK
Cool it
Feedback reports surprise at a technical detail for the manufacture of the WoodMiser, a metal mesh said to improve the efficiency of a woodburner (5 October). Whether it works to increase burning efficiency I don’t know. However, what seemed to be the focus of your attention was that its construction involves “fast-cooling special metal fibres at a staggering rate of 1 million degrees per second”.
Sounds preposterous? Well, amorphous metals are created in just that way.
Brighton, East Sussex, UK
Life or death
Your report on civilisation’s true dawn was interesting. However, the graphic about monuments seems to suggest that Stonehenge was only built 2000 years ago, rather than the estimated 4000.
Reading, Berkshire, UK
Life or death
The original motivation for gathering at sites such as Göbekli Tepe would surely have been for mating, to ensure genetic diversity. Organised religion would have been the bogeyman needed to keep all those raging hormones under some sort of control.
Wonga, Queensland, Australia
Widen the search
The problem with functional MRI in neuroscience is only partly the flakiness of its results (19 October, p 33). More fundamentally, the phrenological way of looking at the brain – for example, identifying the area for fear, or the area for doing up one’s shoelaces – embodies a simplistic approach long abandoned in genetics; no one now thinks of looking for the gene for sadness or for speaking a foreign language.
How did this retrograde view come about? Much of the responsibility must lie with the high-impact-factor journals that would often reject functional neuroscience papers that lacked technicolour pictures of bits of the brain lighting up.
They are not entirely to blame, because it was only crude ideas such as these that interested the popular press, in turn reflecting the unfamiliarity of their readers with quantitative analysis, and their readiness to be impressed by glossy images. This drove experimenters – often with misgivings – to include fMRI in research, a vicious circle that kept the whole fiasco going for years.
Where is not how: what we really need to know are not the locations of brain activity, but the underlying neural mechanisms that actually cause behaviour. Just as swathes of genes typically contribute to any given function, in general these neural mechanisms appear to be spread over large areas of the brain.
Cambridge, UK
Super worms
According to chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane. But this feat is trivial compared to worms stopping the tectonic plates grinding to a halt, as suggested in your look at what would become of a lifeless Earth (28 September, p 38).
Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, UK
Zombies all
Alan Worsley finds it intriguing to imagine machines dubbed “zombies”, which are intelligent entities like us in every respect except consciousness, discussing consciousness (14 September, p 30). However, I don’t believe that human “consciousness” deserves special status.
The consciousness so precious to those who think there must be something that makes humans special is misleading. It’s zombies all the way down.
Berlin, Germany
People power
Debora MacKenzie’s erudite review of three books about the pursuit of happiness amid increasing inequality and overconsumption was welcome (5 October, p 48). Any political analysis needs to be carefully judged and delicately balanced to avoid accusations of bias. Perhaps that is why MacKenzie left her most explosive notion to the final sentence: “Levelling depressingly uneven playing fields is their [governments’] patch.”
Other than by direct intervention to stem the flood of cash away from the poorest into the hands of the already super-rich, I fail to see how any progress in this matter could be achieved by this route. Perhaps we should look to Stéphane Hessel’s short book Time for Outrage! on the need for the youth of today to rise up against the discrepancies to which MacKenzie refers.
Cracoe, North Yorkshire, UK
Counting the cost
Lomborg paints a generally favourable outlook for humanity up to 2050. The inclusion of all the usual suspects and the weighted analysis is valid, but the increasing threat of nuclear proliferation is omitted. This alone could undo everything.
Clitheroe, Lancashire, UK
Counting the cost
Bjørn Lomborg’s assessment of the state of the world with a GDP-based approach (12 October, p 26) illustrates why economics has been attacked as fundamentally unscientific. , editor of The Lancet, last year tweeted: “Rationality, for the economist, means subjecting every thought/decision to a cost-benefit analysis. A wholly narrow view of humanity.”
Lomborg’s basis for the evaluation, which he admits is not a perfect measure, is an elaborate exercise in cost-benefit accounting which, for all its apparent sophistication, must remain inherently subjective.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Sleep mode
Paul O’Connell, reflecting on future legal dilemmas, asks if switching off a self-aware robot would be considered murder (19 October, p 31). The answer is no. It’s more like giving a general anaesthetic; you can always revive it by switching it on again.
Evershot, Dorset, UK
<i>The editor writes:</i>
• There is a caveat to such ideas. Extra trees in such areas will suck in some CO2, but that will be more than cancelled out by the change in albedo. By contrast, extra trees in temperate and tropical regions will cool the planet.
Carbon camps
Geoengineering by planting trees on unused farmland to capture carbon is immediately practical (12 October, p 10), but Olive Heffernan’s article on greening of the Arctic in the same issue (p 40) points to an additional approach.
The northward spread of the boreal forest is far slower than the rise in temperature in the region. Accelerating this spread by planting trees at the forest margin would be cheap, and use non-agricultural land away from threat of human damage. It also only requires support from a few governments to access vast areas.
I wouldn’t suggest a return to the gulag, but summer planting camps might occupy idle youth.
Bristol, UK