Atheism and theism are faiths
Agnosticism and atheism are not vague or interchangeable terms, as apparently claimed by Connaire Kensit (4 April, p 57) in response to my letter. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines an agnostic as one “who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God”. This implies existence or non-existence are equally unprovable.
Atheism and theism are both faiths: nothing wrong with that. Religious friends of mine stress the importance of faith 鈥� belief in a blatantly visible god floating up in the sky would be no big deal!
The business of science, however, is that which is subject to observational and experimental verification. All else is speculation.
Aldridge, West Midlands, UK
<b>For the record</b>
鈥� The correct reference for an article on panda sociability by Vanessa Hull et al is (4 April, p 17). Not “jmamma”: our therapist is concealing her glee.
鈥� We now know that, in our article on belief, the extensively quoted neuroscientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, should have been called Frank Krueger (4 April, p 28).
Letters should be sent to letters@newscientist.com
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth…
If I am to believe 快猫短视频, we are about to enter a glorious age of leisure with robots doing all the work, electric cars driving us to beauty spots and other planets being available via space travel, if we get bored on Earth.
Such is the gist of many of your recent articles on technical wizardry 鈥� and it leaves me wondering whether you have already left this planet.
Where we humans live, we face catastrophic changes through military extravagances, monopolisation of land and property and environmental damage taking us to the brink, turning Earth from friend to enemy. Have a care and think of Mother Earth!
London, UK
Health, death and feeling the heat
鈥� Death and illness from extreme heat will rise with climate change. Despite the continued possibility of extreme winters with climate change during the 21st century, death and illness from extreme cold will drop, but drop less.
Health, death and feeling the heat
I was amused to see the “rising threat of heat” discussed right next to the “winter crisis” in your special on challenges facing the UK National Health Service. I presume the winter crisis is a surge of illness caused by cold weather. So which is worse, warm or cold?
Houston, Texas, US
Health, death and feeling the heat
In your special report on the future of healthcare in the UK, you say: “If the low rates of cancer seen in the richer portion of UK society were replicated across the nation, 19,200 fewer people would die every year” (21 March, p 22). People who don’t die of cancer die of something else. What one can say is that 19,200 people would live longer lives.
Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
Who or what gets custody of the cat?
I was interested by your article on the possibilities of swapping body parts (28 February, p 10). This was explored by Gordon Rattray Taylor in his 1968 book The Biological Time Bomb, raising some of the practical and ethical consequences of such procedures. One problem of a head/body swap that he foresaw would be deciding who owned the assets.
Knutsford, Cheshire, UK
Wielding the power of a universe
Your article on radio bursts coming from space mentioned the categorisation of other possible civilisations (4 April, p 8). A Kardashev Type III civilisation is defined as one that controls the power output of a galaxy. Could a Type IV civilisation control the power output of its entire universe? What would this look like to a Karadashev Type 0 civilisation like ours? Would we recognise such a civilisation, or just perceive its actions as “the laws of physics” 鈥� or worship it?
Newport, Shropshire, UK
Have aliens been and gone?
Ian Simmons suggests that “alien civilisations may be out there, but have never managed to visit us simply due to budget cuts” and Adrian Ellis that “It’s the quiet ones that are clever, not the shouters” (7 March, p 53). Perhaps a civilisation a billion years more advanced than ours did visit undetected, said “Yuk!” and left.
Summit, New Jersey, US
Editor's pick: Genetic legacies of rank and file
How can anyone know that the “Roman invasion left no genetic legacy” (21 March, p 10)? Many of the prominent invasions of the UK featured an elite warrior class from a particular place taking control. Often, most of the soldiers bearing arms were not from the same places or countries as the elite.
In the case of the invasion by the Roman emperor Claudius in 43 AD, some of the elite senior soldiers and administrators were undoubtedly from the small area around Rome. However, the vast majority of the soldiers would have come from all around the empire.
A great number of these will have been genetically linked to British people if they came from almost anywhere in Western Europe, especially from Gaul or the Low Countries. The Romans may well have left a legacy in the genetic make-up: it’s just that it is the same signature as that of the people who were already here.
Bishop Norton, Lincolnshire, UK
Ancestors, gods and ghosts
You ask “Should we thank god for civilisation?” (28 March, p 5). But what counts as “god”? Cults that honour dead human ancestors are common among tribal peoples, and consistent with the elaborate burials we find from very early on. They may coexist with the idea of gods and goddesses, with some gods viewed as ancestors fathering or giving birth to human offspring and some human ancestors being promoted to be demigods or gods.
We can only speculate about what the people of Gobekli Tepe or the Maya city of Ceibal believed. But they may have simply believed in ancestral ghosts, with the notion of gods and goddesses emerging later to serve the interests of professional priests.
The notion of a single all-powerful god definitely comes much later. Some civilisations have managed fine without it, including most of East Asia. The Supreme Being of Hindu faith is a rather abstract and remote being.
Coventry, West Midlands, UK
Don't bank on arbitrary credit
I have enormous respect for Andy Haldane of the Bank of England, but his interview hides the constraints under which he operates (28 March, p 28). The book he cites, This Time is Different by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, presents the message that the main cause of financial crashes is letting banks (and their functional equivalents) lend money they do not have.
If the government stopped that and set a small transaction tax on financial trades, it would replenish the treasury and stop the casino activities that recently bankrupted the country and will likely do so again if left unchecked.
Manchester, UK
Shaming carbon emitters fairly
Bob Holmes names China as a “bad apple” that causes “harm out of all proportion” because of its carbon dioxide emissions (21 March, p 46). This seems eminently unfair. China has a population equivalent to about 20 other countries put together.
To be fair, one should look at the carbon dioxide emissions per head. Among the top 20 offenders in 2011 statistics, China is 15th with 6.52 tonnes per head per annum. The worst is Saudi Arabia with 19.65, followed by the US with 17.62 鈥� almost three times China’s per-capita emissions. The UK value is 7.92.
Nyon, Switzerland
Knowledge, chance and circumstance
Regina Nuzzo describes someone with a frequentist approach to statistics tossing a coin for a drink in a pub (14 March, p 38). They would be a dull drinking companion, insisting that when a tossed coin lands unseen in the hand it isn’t sensible to talk of the probability of it being a head. Until the outcome is known it is surely sensible to wonder whether I’ll get a free drink.
The important event here is the gaining of human knowledge, not what state an unobserved coin is in. Our frequentist’s real problem is the belief in a scientifically knowable objective reality that exists independent of observations. Similarly, from the human knowledge perspective there is really no need to tie oneself in knots to explain the “existence” of the Higgs: it is highly probable from what we know at present. Your story on quantum Bayesianism (10 May 2014, p 32) makes a similar point.
Darlington, West Australia
<b>Weekly social</b>
That article on belief was one of the most enlightening things I’ve ever read
on Twitter in response to “I believe: Your personal guidebook to reality” (4 April 2015, p 28)
I smell tomato, you don't smell at all
Asifa Majid points to the paucity of the English language of smell (28 March, p 27). Could the issue lie in our noses? For example, I can recognise a musty smell, but my wife finds musty smells on items that have no such smell to me 鈥� clearly there is a chemical in the “musty” family I don’t respond to. On the other hand, freesias are odourless to her, whereas their perfume is extremely strong to me. (I think I got the better deal.)
Imagine trying to develop a consistent vocabulary for colours if everyone was colour-blind in a slightly different way. That’s where we seem to be with smell. Could the Jahai people that Majid works with, who find it easy to converse about smell, have less genetic diversity of smell?
Madsen, New South Wales, Australia
Editor's pick: Genetic legacies of rank and file
鈥� Indeed, the majority of the Roman soldiers posted to Britain were not Italian, but recruited from Gaul and Germany: but the point remains that the Italian elite hardly left any genetic imprint.