Editor's pick: The keys to fatherhood are researched at last (1)
Anna Machin’s research on the effect of pregnancy on fathers is welcome (24 March, p 37). The West lets down fathers in more ways than one, and I think changing this is key to changing other inequalities. Current pay inequality is a reflection of societies’ stereotyping of women as the predominant childcarer.
If we can change our view of parenting to be a partnership, having equal impact on both parents, perhaps employers won’t just look at a woman in her 20s and think she is probably going to have kids in the next few years, but also look at a 20-something man, think the same thing and, crucially, treat them equally.
Editor's pick: The keys to fatherhood are researched at last (2)
I was thrilled to read about Machin’s work on fatherhood. When I became a father more than 40 years ago I found very little information; I was the one to be supportive. End of story.
As a newly qualified vet, I spent a lot of time working out my feelings by pulling calves out of cattle, or delivering them by C-section. More than 30 years later, both my son and my son-in-law chose to be stay-at-home parents and childminders.
They found there was still almost no information or support. I am pleased someone is finally opening up research into this, so that when my grandchildren come of age maybe they will have some evidence to inform their decisions.
Editor's pick: The keys to fatherhood are researched at last (3)
You report that the influence of the father on a child increases when she or he is around 24 months old. In my experience, this is initiated by the child: “Daddy do it” for almost everything. My late wife Mollie and I figured that this was nature’s way of freeing her up to have the next one.
Meritocracy, equality, fairness and society (1)
Mark Sheskin presented some interesting if, sadly, not unexpected statistics on our attitudes to inequality and fairness (31 March, p 28). Upper management pay contributes significantly to inequality; but there are more problems with it.
Chief executives receive salaries and “bonuses” whether or not their company does well; they don’t have to add any value to the business. When it folds, causing misery to the workforce and their families, upper management can simply move on.
Sheskin states that a scientist or writer might deserve more wealth than him if the contribution they make improves the general lot more. Logically, this means that refuse collectors and sewage farm workers should be paid more than doctors and nurses 鈥� worker for worker they save more lives and prevent more disease and misery.
Meritocracy, equality, fairness and society (2)
Sheskin makes a good case that most people object more to economic unfairness than to inequality. But what causes this unfairness? Wealth is transmitted mainly through inheritance, social class and private education.
Examine the background of supposedly “self-made men” and the silver spoon of social advantage will probably have played a part. That’s not fair.
Meritocracy, equality, fairness and society (3)
Fairness, not equality, is the central issue facing us, Sheskin argues. If, however, humans “evolved” a love of inequality, did they also evolve a sense of justice or fairness? If not, where does our knowledge of justice come from?
The editor writes:
There is a large scientific literature on the evolutionary origins of morality. See also our article “Morality 2.0” (26 September 2015, p 36).
First class post 鈥� 21 April 2018
I think I trust them more than the homicidal maniacs in charge at the moment Steffi Thompson by calls for artificial intelligences to explain themselves to the rest of us (14 April, p 40)
A Roman historian told of 'swarthy' Britons
Colin Barras reports analysis of Cheddar Man's 10,000-year-old DNA suggesting that he may have had dark skin and blue eyes (3 March, p 12). In Agricola, 8000 years later, the Roman historian Tacitus into three categories thus: “The reddish hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a German origin, the swarthy faces of the Silures, the tendency of their hair to curl, and the fact that Spain lies opposite, all lead one to believe that Spaniards crossed in ancient times and occupied that part of the country. The people nearest to the Gauls likewise resemble them.”
Obedience and social resistance reconsidered (1)
Thank you for the interesting article by Gina Perry about Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments (17 March, p 43). We should not forget that prior to these experiments, most people would have guessed that virtually nobody would go all the way, and psychiatrists were sure that only psychopaths would do so.
Milgram showed that things were not as simple as that. Now most people are convinced there is a torturer in all of us, which seems to be as wrong as the general opinion pre-Milgram.
The claim that the participants who thought the experiments were fake were also the ones most likely to go to maximum voltage is not necessarily proof that the results are unreliable: it could also be explained as self-justification after the fact.
Obedience and social resistance reconsidered (2)
Perry gives an excellent critique of Stanley Milgram’s claims of widespread willingness by individual volunteers to obey immoral orders. In addition, his later work shows that resistance to such orders was much more common where collective action by a group of volunteers was possible. Social ethics can be a more reliable counter to evil than individual heroism.
Diabetes, migraine, sugar and salt
Theresa Jones suggests there may be a connection between migraine and low blood sugar (Letters, 3 March). I find this especially interesting in light of by Janice Pogoda and others that found an inverse correlation between migraine occurrence and dietary sodium intake (20 August 2016, p 12). It strikes me that one thing sugar and salt have in common is that they are both used to restore low electrolyte levels resulting from dehydration.
If agriculture is so harmful, why bother?
Ben Collyer describes evidence that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist caused a dramatic worsening of diet and an increase of disease and hard labour (24 March, p 44).
This raises the question of why, then, it persisted. Masochism?
The editor writes:
• The loss of wetlands through rising sea levels contributed to the adoption of cereals in early city states. Reproductive rates rose on the new diet, probably through earlier fertility and shorter lactation, and the emerging populous, autocratic austerity allowed no return to the old ways.
We Luddites just want a focus on real problems
Often different articles in the same issue of 快猫短视频 offer radically different world views, and the issue of 24 February is no exception. Buoyed up by the realistic, mature attitudes of Michael Mann on combating climate change (p 22), Michael Marshall asking whether hairspray is really wrecking the planet (p 23) and Sandrine Ceurstemont on pollution from laundry (p 36), it was a downer to encounter the hubris of George Hotz promising to make your car drive itself (p 42).
Hotz refers to those of us who dwell on the more negative aspects of technology as “Luddites” who want to hold things back. We certainly do; we want all those who seek ever more slick ways of consuming resources to accept that the lifestyles to which the world's wealthy have become accustomed will be unsustainable in decades to come, and that hyper-bright problem solvers such as himself will need to turn their attentions from frivolous trivialities to the real environmental crises.
Better food for dogs, better food for humans
It is great that Wild Earth's bioreactor-grown dog food has a lower carbon footprint (24 March, p 12). But companies such as Beyond Meat in the US and Moving Mountains in the UK are using plants to biomimic meat. This causes much less climate change, among its other advantages. It ensures that all meat-eaters have better options, not just dogs.
Identifying smells with more or fewer words
Andy Coghlan says that hunter-gatherers are better at naming smells, based on them giving the same name for a given smell more consistently than horticulturalists (27 January, p 12). But the study scored a society's smell-naming performance as “0 if everyone in a group gave a different name, and 1 if all responses matched”.
Imagine a culture that has only two colour words: “warm” and “cool”. Its people will agree on the classification of almost all colours. Now imagine a culture that revels in colour words, like “vermilion”, “puce” and “chartreuse”. Which culture cares more about colour, and is better at perceiving and naming it? The same issue would seem to apply to smells.
The editor writes:
• The researchers say the hunter-gatherers had at least as many words as the horticulturalists, but they were much more consistent in their choice of word.
For the record 鈥� 21 April 2018
鈥� Whiffy! It would be more precise to say that volatile compounds from household items like your deodorant and shampoo are one of the biggest sources of air pollution in Western cities (24 February, p 23).