Get a shave
Why persist in the belief that a Stonehenge man must have sported a beard as “there were no razors then” (11 January, p 49)? There is sufficient of beardless men from early Neolithic times, let alone 5500 years ago in settlements near Stonehenge.
Fleas, lice and so on would abound and be a severe nuisance to the hirsute. A simple flint flake as used for hair removal from animal skins would serve as a “disposable” razor for the man you described who, by his burial mode, would appear to be above the common herd.
Brightlingsea, Essex, UK
On the wagon
I spotted a flaw in your report on the health benefits of avoiding alcohol for a month in a study suggested by and involving 快猫短视频 staff (4 January, p 6).
An average reduction of blood glucose level from 5.1 to 4.3 millimoles per litre isn’t 23 per cent as you stated; it is about 15.5 per cent. No wonder liver consultant Kevin Moore was startled.
Cambridge, UK
On the wagon
鈥� You are correct, and I apologise for miscalculating the percentage. But at nearly 16 per cent, it is still substantial, much higher than anticipated, and supports the experiment’s other results.
Odd affections
Chris Thomas’s take on the evolution and extinction of species was wonderful (11 January, p 28). When considering the effect of invasive species and climate change, he states that “good and bad is irrelevant”, which is, of course, a brilliantly scientific way of looking at it.
However, the fact that invasive species may eventually increase the biodiversity of an area by changing habitats and sparking fresh evolution doesn’t necessarily make up for the homogenisation of habitats. Invasive plant species often share common traits, while the species they overpower are likely to be unusual or unique.
Likewise, an invasion of rats and dogs often critically endangers endemic species that are beautifully curious.
While we can’t, and shouldn’t, halt this process altogether, part of me wants to hold on to the oddities, and feels that assessing biodiversity shouldn’t just be a numbers game.
Little Wymondley, Hertfordshire, UK
Long lived
Jacob Aron’s article suggests that microbes could have emerged during a life-friendly epoch of a few million years, starting about 15 million years after the big bang (14 December 2013, p 14).
I find it plausible to go further and propose that unicellular life has permeated the universe ever since, surviving for 10 billion years in the deep freeze of space before the emergence of our solar system.
I suggest that Earth was colonised by these microbes as soon as it became habitable, and that all our multicellular life forms have descended from these primitive ancestors.
So the panspermia theory is right after all, and we can now explain where the seeds for this came from.
East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Meaning of art
In Alison George’s article on human intelligence (23 November 2013, p 36), the photo of dots and grids in the El Castillo cave in Spain reminds me strongly of those in caves in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwean archaeologist and rock art expert Peter Garlake persuaded the surviving San hunter-gatherers to divulge their interpretations. He discovered that dots represent a special force they call “!UM”.
Most rock art was painted to convey the feelings of “!UM” while in a trance, Garlake says, often experienced when a shaman was healing a sick person. This took place in the most secret and remote caves.
Shamans were also thought to sometimes trepan a patient, using blades made of obsidian, a volcanic glass, to make a hole in the skull. To me, the central drawing as shown is the skull thus opened. Lots of dots convey bad powers coming out. The healed wound is shown on the left.
George says “ancient art is mind-blowing”. In fact, such art is what the ancient mind saw when “blown away” 鈥� by herbal drugs and trances.
Skelmorlie, North Ayrshire, UK
It's good to talk
Lu铆s Bettencourt’s vision of the next great urban revolution (14 December 2013, p 30) brings to mind science fiction movies in which physical contact and space are reduced to a minimum and there is extensive mind control. We are already on our way to the first state.
What the internet, emails and texting provide is faux social interaction, or as the MIT psychologist and researcher Sherry Turkle puts it, we are talking at each other rather than to each other. In such forms of communication we aren’t holding conversations in all their messiness, which allows for a true exchange. Do we really want an urban world in which such interpersonal communication is an anachronism?
Sandia Park, New Mexico, US
Diverse abilities
You report research as showing a strong link between intelligence and academic achievement in school (21/28 December 2013, p 12). However, there is no clear undisputed link here. Anyone who has taught in schools can tell you how intelligent “non-academic” children can be.
I could offer examples such as pupils with little academic achievement who have a deep and sophisticated knowledge of a special interest subject, such as the biology and ecology of wildlife, or pupils in the bottom set who could confidently solve a Rubik’s cube.
Talk of inherited educational ability relates not only to the perverse desire to increase the number of grammar schools, but also to those who wish to suggest that the population will become less intelligent overall if those from “lower social strata” have more children than those who are artificially made more “intelligent” in the schools of the wealthy and sharp-elbowed.
Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK
Moral origin?
Joshua Greene tells us that morality is “essentially a suite of psychological mechanisms that enable us to cooperate” and that came about by evolution (7 December, p 30). But then he goes on to tell us that we should think and behave differently 鈥� implicitly claiming that there is a higher morality than that which has evolved in us. What is the source of this conviction of his?
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Boggy territory
The editorial in the Christmas edition credits a scientist with naming the moon as the eighth continent (21/28 December 2013, p 5). By the conventions of precedent it is at best the ninth.
In his 19th-century Ingoldsby Legends, Thomas Ingoldsby (pen name of the clergyman Richard Barham) identified Romney Marshes in Kent, UK, as the fifth continent: “The World, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh.” If we include Antarctica, Australia and a division of the Americas, we have eight to which the moon may be added. Having said that, this only holds if we accept the view that Europe isn’t just a peninsula of Asia.
Canterbury, Kent, UK
No to Dawkins
I’m not sure why I and my co-religionists find Richard Dawkins so irritating. Certainly there are plenty of people critical of Christianity who don’t provoke such ire. Perhaps it is his use of phrases such as “medieval superstition” (21/28 December 2013, p 40).
And of course he is wrong. He has a tendency to create a false dichotomy between science and religion. If you want to argue that elements of the Bible are almost impossible scientifically (such as the Genesis creation account) I have no problem. The foundation of Christianity doesn’t rest on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
Christianity does require belief in a supernatural realm and some miracles (the resurrection at the top of the list), but belief in forces beyond scientific laws doesn’t negate science.
Seattle, Washington, US
Cancer cause?
I was fascinated by the idea that a fever might help defeat cancer (4 January, p 26). Could the incidence of cancer in the 20th century be, in part, a result of fewer fever-inducing pathogens in our environment and the greater availability and use of fever-suppressing drugs?
Chipstead, Kent, UK
Ripping, old-style
Jon Cartwright, in his look at the use of quantum properties in a new wave of computers, compared current technology to Colossus, an early computer used to crack Nazi codes 70 years ago (11 January, p 40).
Paper tape was used to input data, not punched cards, as stated in the article. In the photograph you can see the tape streaming through its pulley system, reputedly at a speed of 5000 characters per second .
Paper tapes were the standard means of computer program and data entry until punched cards, and eventually magnetic storage devices, replaced them in the 1960s. Those of us who had to repair the inevitable, and all-too-common, breaks with gummed paper, and re-punch the data holes that represented binary digits, didn’t mourn their passing.
London, UK
Dump here
In her letter on the issue of storing long-lived nuclear waste, Ailsa Mathiessen says the Australian outback, home to indigenous people, shouldn’t be a dumping ground for waste of any sort (4 January, p 28). But the outback is littered with the waste from mining. Check out Google Earth if you don’t believe me.
Nuclear power doesn’t add to global warming; Australia exports uranium and coal and we are one of the highest emitters of carbon dioxide per capita. We have a moral obligation to help. Local aboriginal tribes should be the only ones who decide whether to allow and profit from a nuclear waste repository.
The site of the first nuclear test on the Australian mainland in South Australia would be a good place for consultations and geological studies.
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
Vintage defences
Paul Marks reports on the European SAVELEC consortium’s system to disable the cars of uncooperative drivers by firing radio pulses at them, scrambling on-board electronics (14 December, p 24).
Marks says the group is releasing few details of its system “in order to prevent people from developing countermeasures”. I think I already have one. I drive a Morris Minor.
Nairn, Highland, UK
For the record
鈥� In our preview of books for 2014 (4 January, p 48) we missed a publisher’s title update. Superintelligence: The coming machine intelligence revolution should be Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. The author’s name, however, was always Nick Bostrom not Bostrum.
鈥� The last ice age was 12,000 years ago, not 1200 years as stated in our look at archaeological finds revealed by shrinking glaciers (11 January, p 36).