War and peace
We should be able to test Ian Morris’s hypothesis that war has created a more peaceful, and hence prosperous world by creating larger, unified societies (19 April, p 28). Yet since 1900 and perhaps earlier, no war I can think of seems to fit. Since then no military invasion has succeeded in its objectives, established an enduring occupation or brought greater peace or prosperity to the invaded nation.
Consider the conquest of two southern African republics by the British Empire during the Boer war of 1899 to 1902. The conquest began to unravel in less than a decade when the Boers won the first elections after that war and resumed effective control of their former republics. They remained part of the Commonwealth until 1961, when a unified South Africa declared itself a republic.
The impoverishment and embitterment caused by the war resulted in a deeply troubled society which still struggles to reduce violence.
Every military invasion since that time was either unsuccessful in the first place or came unstuck later. From the point of view of the aggressors, the two world wars were disastrous.
Sydney, Australia
War and peace
鈥� Robert Eales takes on the argument about what’s happened globally over the past 10,000 years by looking at what’s happened locally in the last 100 years, and he often focuses on still shorter timescales. This, I think, leads him to misunderstand the effects of the world wars. Like a lot of modern historians, I suggest in my book that we should see them and the cold war as phases in a single struggle, running from 1914 to 1989 (or 1991), and that the Boer war is best understood as part of the wider post-1870 breakdown of the British world system.
As far as aggressors losing since 1900 goes, one of the main points that I touched on in 快猫短视频 is that the indirect, long-term effects of war 鈥� making the world safer and richer 鈥� slowly affect everyone involved, not just the aggressors.
Pass it on
Andy Coghlan’s article on the role of microRNAs in the inheritance of epigenetic characteristics was fascinating (19 April, p 14). But a hasty reading of it could give the impression that he is describing an evil mechanism that perpetuates the negative results of stress in future generations.
Surely, this is more likely to be an evolved mechanism for passing down survival strategies when bad times last for many generations.
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, UK
Caveman cross
Ella Been suggests that Australopithecus sediba did not exist (12 April, p 11). If so, it does not necessarily follow that the hominin fossils found at Malapa, South Africa, are from four individuals. They may show Australopithecus and Homo characteristics because of interbreeding between the two genera. The adult skeleton may well be that of a single individual. A cross-bred population would show a random assortment of characteristics from each lineage.
Mosgiel, New Zealand
Cogs in the machine
Interviewed about the automation of work, Andrew McAfee comes across as either na茂ve or evasive (26 April, p 28). The question of what will happen to all the workers displaced by encroaching technology was put to him in several different ways, and McAfee either ignored the point or answered obliquely.
History teaches us that it is always the simplest and most basic tasks that are the first to be eliminated by automation, and those tasks are most often performed by the least able, the least articulate and the most vulnerable in our society. During the heyday of Victorian inventiveness and development, these people were simply consigned to the scrapheap.
I see no reason whatever to believe that McAfee’s utopia will turn out to be any different from the dystopias of the past (or indeed, of the present), unless some new radical way can be devised to persuade those who have acquired vast fortunes to relinquish enough for everyone to share the benefits.
Harrogate, North Yorkshire, UK
Wet life
Colin Barras (19 April, p 36) describes the possibility that life originated in water-free conditions on Mars, before being transferred to Earth via an asteroid impact. He questions whether dry life from Mars could colonise a wet Earth, but there is ample opportunity for life on Mars to have evolved to inhabit wet locations before making the journey to Earth.
Mounting evidence suggests that Mars was very wet several billion years ago, and I think it is more likely that this wet life took root on Earth.
Beacon Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Killing, warts and all
Michael Slezak needs to consider the importance of what is yucky, as well as humane, when discussing ways to kill pest species (26 April, p 40).
Killing a cane toad by running it over or hitting it with a golf club is humane because it is quick but has a high yuck factor. How does anyone know the pain and suffering that may be caused by putting the toad in a freezer for a few days? Probably not humane, but reassuringly yuckless.
Chichester, West Sussex, UK
The last cut
Gareth Jones wants medical schools to stop using unclaimed bodies for dissection (19 April, p 26). When I die, I will no longer have any use for my body.
If I have surviving family who express their respect or emotional attachment for me in some way that prevents my body being used for anatomical education, respect their wishes.
If there is no one to claim my body and it can be put to good use, then please go ahead. I will have finished with it.
Brisbane, Australia
Ethical highs
One major issue absent from your report on New Zealand’s drug liberalisation (8 March, p 40) is that novel drugs which need to be proved safe will be tested on animals, including experiments to determine a lethal dose.
Understandably, the public backlash here in New Zealand has been huge, with nationwide protests on the streets. People don’t want legal highs tested on animals any more than cosmetics.
Prime Minister John Key has said he’s not fond of the idea of testing drugs used for people’s entertainment on rabbits, however he didn’t mind using rodents. The opposition party leader David Cunliffe says he believes it would be unethical to test the .
Wellington, New Zealand
Poor reception
I don’t know how Ceri Thomas, head of programmes at BBC News, has the brass neck to argue that their coverage of the science around climate change is impartial and balanced (19 April, p 33). I’ve lost count of the number of times Nigel Lawson, chairman of the political think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, has been invited to speak on Radio 4’s Today programme as the “balancing” voice.
Time and again, interviewers make direct comparisons between the costs of green energy and fossil fuels, without including the costs of the carbon sequestration needed to clean up resultant pollution, which would give a truly balanced comparison.
I could easily be convinced that there are interests at work in the BBC intent on discrediting any arguments relating to the case for climate change instigated by humans. I would encourage people to be vigilant and challenge news coverage wherever bias and inaccuracy is evident.
Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, UK
Just like us
Assigning medical diagnoses to Shakespeare’s characters seems to miss the point (19 April, p 43). Labelling his characters as “other” 鈥� differently wired or disabled 鈥� allows us to distance ourselves from them, whereas Shakespeare’s genius was to show us how similar we are to them. Their flaws are our own, just magnified.
By making us empathise with them he shows us that we are all capable of feeling what they feel and behaving as they behave. His plays humanise, rather than pathologise, his characters’ behaviour.
Edinburgh, UK
Moral education
I can only guess at where, and in which decade, Danny Colyer had his school science education (26 April, p 30), but I would like to assure him that many science teachers were already doing what he prescribes 鈥� encouraging a culture of honesty.
We explored with pupils precisely how scientists, as fallible humans, can fall into traps of various forms. Heating water while measuring its temperature allows pupils to confidently extrapolate their pattern to show water reaching a boiling point at well above 100 掳C, albeit with increasing concern.
A post-experiment discussion of why they had followed their pattern, rather than reporting the actual temperature at the boiling point allowed them to think about the fallible mind of the scientist 鈥� all of us, and them.
Investigating the variables which might affect the period of a pendulum brought pupils hard up against why people want to defend their predictions even when patently wrong.
The format of school investigations can enable pupils not only to learn science, but also to confront issues about truth, honesty and even morality.
Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK
Moral education
Reading about the manipulation of school science practicals reminded me of when, as an undergraduate, I and many of my classmates failed miserably in our quest to make p-nitroacetanilide 鈥� a chemical intermediate for some dyes. One day, somebody pointed out that the real stuff bears a remarkable resemblance to powdered milk. How easily the demonstrator was fooled!
Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK
Eaten alive
I read your article on cannibal tadpoles (19 April, p 16). At the Open University in the 1970s we were taught that frogs over-reproduced so that all the tadpoles could strip the food source when the going was good.
When the source was depleted, the ablest simply ate the rest to reach maturity.
Shorwell, Isle of Wight, UK
Hot-headed
Lawrence D’Oliveiro suggests in his letter that memory is a result of increasing entropy (12 April, p 33). I am known by my friends as someone with a poor memory, although I can’t remember why.
Could it be that in my head entropy is decreasing?
Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UK
Unnecessary pain
You report on an attempt to show that mice are less stressed by the sweat of female handlers than that exuded by male ones (3 May, p 14). Pain-inducing injections were given to anaesthetised mice and rats, and “when the animals awoke, the team recorded their facial grimaces, a measure of pain intensity”. Pain intensity was thus used as a proxy for stress.
The researchers could have measured stress using pain-free and more externally valid measures such as observing the exploratory behaviour of the mice in open-field environments.
The infliction of pain in the study described was gratuitous and indefensible.
Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK