Letters archive

We are amazed by the claim by Mario Beauregard and Jeffrey M. Schwartz that Andy Clark's reaction to the claims of non-materialist neuroscience betrays a "fundamental lack of knowledge of mind-brain interactions" (29 November, p 23) . They claim that neuro-imaging provides copious evidence of minds changing brains – for example, when a subject's deliberate …

Of course we should be alarmed by the recent attempts to use brain science as a vehicle for spreading religious ideas (25 October, p 46) . But it is scientists who today denounce the abuse of science for religious purposes who prepared the ground for this new intrusion of irrational ideas into science. For decades …

I was very interested in your article about "e-medicine", but I was surprised to read that patients with bipolar disorder are "usually prescribed mood-stabilising drugs and one-on-one therapy" (8 November, p 24) . Not on the UK's National Health Service, they're not. Even the guidelines of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence say only that …

The ideas on the origins of war that Bob Holmes reports (15 November, p 8) are not part of a "new theory". The idea that warfare is primordial, innate and adaptive pre-dates the philosopher Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan (1660) and has had steadfast supporters ever since. The claim that, "for the first time, anthropologists, archaeologists, …

Jason Palmer's article on tidal barrages was interesting but missed a major issue (11 October, p 35) . Presumably, given its high capital cost, a barrage is expected to last for at least a century and possibly longer. Its most basic design parameter is head of water, determined by tide height. No one knows with …

Great: by calling ageing "andropause" we can classify it as a disease and give testosterone supplements to men over 65 in an attempt to turn them once more into hormone-driven 18-year-olds (1 November, p 8) . Just what society needs!

I disagree with your statement that charging a laptop battery "little and often reduces its capacity to charge" (15 November, p 42) . This may have been true in the past – when nickel-cadmium batteries were the standard – but lithium-ion/metal hydride batteries do not suffer the same affliction. With more intelligent chargers, the necessity …

I agree that it would help if what you call "the GM debate" became less polarised and more constructive (8 November, p 5) . But this "debate" is just part of a problem masquerading as a whole problem. Most media reporting on issues of genetic modification of food species is presented as if there were …

Can someone please explain why behavioural scientists are so unwilling to contemplate the possibility that other animals' thought processes are at root similar to our own – as evidenced by findings on their memory (1 November, p 32) ? Surely the simplest assumption must be that they are similar. Yet there appears to be a …

It is the height of a very subjective and particularly human conceit to believe that non-human animals are some kind of stimulus-response-driven robots incapable of thought or feeling (1 November, p 32) . Every scientist working in this field should be given a cat. Once the cats have the scientists fully trained to open and …

Charlie Robinson pokes fun at concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries in cars, pointing out that today's cars carry a tankful of fuel (5 November, p 21) . There are important differences. A lithium-ion cell can release all its energy immediately in an explosion, because it isn't dependent on atmospheric oxygen as an oxidiser. …

A. C. Grayling describes the credit crunch in terms of banks' actions (8 November, p 48) . But the engine of this crisis, the root of the problem, was created by the US Congress allowing residents to deduct from taxable income the interest on mortgages on houses, holiday homes and sail boats, up to a …

Lawrence Krauss is vastly oversimplifying when he names the theologian Thomas Aquinas as the architect of the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (22 November, p 53) . Aquinas was in fact concerned with the so-called cosmological argument: "god must exist, since god must have been the first cause". He did not originate …

Mark Buchanan says that the physicist Albert Einstein made an error in assigning a special status to light when he developed his theory of Special Relativity (1 November, p 28) . I do not think that this is what actually happened. Einstein was building on the observational work of his contemporaries who found that light …