Letters archive

Your report on home schooling and its effects – particularly in the US – fails to point out that the bulk of the parents involved were educated in the public school system (11 November, p 20). Their embrace of religious dogma demonstrates the abject failure of that system in promoting, illustrating and, above all, practising …

There are other contributions to the "dirty cloud over India": besides those you mention (9 December, p 20). These include underground fires in shallow seams of soft brown coal, which are almost impossible to extinguish – does anyone have any ideas? There are also peat fires in Indonesia, ignited during cut-and burn farming preparation and …

I enjoyed Matt Kaplan's idea that we should tackle global warming by getting in touch with our inner bonobo (2 December, p 40), but the statement that "at most there are a few hundred thousand bonobos left in the wild" is just wishful thinking. Estimates of bonobo numbers range from 10,000 to 100,000. Most fieldworkers …

I can't believe there were so many letters attacking the scientists who spoke up so eloquently for rationality at the "Beyond belief" conference (9 December, p 24). The letter writers seem to think they are being even-handed, but you can just imagine the conversation with them... "I don't believe in an old man with a …

John Steinbruner argues that the US should not engage in defensive biowarfare research because this might "encourage other countries to do the same" (25 November, p 20). It is curious that American leftists (like Steinbruner) and conservatives (like George W. Bush) share the same delusion: that everything that happens in the world is about the …

Patricia Finney suggests that lice genetics could tell us a lot about when humans started wearing clothes (2 December, p 21). This also occurred to Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in 1999, and he went on to collect head and body lice from people in 12 countries …

Lucy Middleton, reviewing a book entitled The Science of Orgasm , asked "whether transsexual men with surgically created vaginas" can have orgasms (18 November, p 80). I must point out that a transsexual man is born with a vagina and seeks from a very early age to rectify the position. Likewise a transsexual woman such …

Hurrah for Patricia Churchland (18 November, p 42). Facing up to the fact that we lack free will seems to be so difficult that the subject is usually regarded as either taboo, or way beyond our current neurological knowledge. But it seems to me that in essence free will is a simple matter and it …

Thank you, Mark Buchanan, for saving my sanity by describing the strange things dynamics can do (2 December, p 44). For the last three years I have been fighting off the creeping feeling that the trees in my train station were trying to communicate. I know I have probably read too much science fiction, but …

Face blindness appears to be much more common than is generally appreciated (25 November, p 34). On reading the article, it immediately occurred to me that I suffer from "voice blindness". I have a lifelong phobia of phone conversations, which I always assumed must be due to marginal deafness (although there was no other evidence …

As one might expect, David Deutsch has some sensible things to say on the subject of quantum computation (9 December, p 50). Unfortunately, in answer to the question "How does quantum computation shed light on the existence of many worlds?" his logical train leaps off the tracks not once, but twice. First, he maintains that …

Nick Bostrom asks whether we live in a computer simulation (18 November, p 38). What would that run on, then? The class of programming languages called functional languages – and their close relative Lisp – often make use of a technique called "lazy evaluation": they defer computing a result until it is actually needed. Perhaps …