Letters archive

Michael Brooks asks whether children raised in isolation would invent a religion (7 February, p 30) . They might: but without knowledge of the Prophet, they would not reinvent Islam; without knowledge of Jesus, they would not reinvent Christianity; and without knowledge of Abraham and Moses they could not reinvent Judaism. By contrast, given sufficient …

Beware of the law of unintended consequences when calling for charcoal to be buried (14 February, p 26) . Carbon credits sound sensible, but smallholder farmers in India have very little economic power. So, as the value of credits increases, large agribusinesses could assemble land and displace the smallholders. James Lovelock is right: the solution …

Nicholas Stern calls for support for the development and "scaling-up" of second-generation biofuels, "which do not directly affect food production" (24 January, p 26) . Assuming such biofuels were only made from crop and forestry wastes and sundry biomass crops, this is in most cases a gross misuse of woody biomass compared with direct burning, …

I was touched by your interview with Irene Scheimberg on her work as a paediatric pathologist (31 January, p 26) . As a doctor in general practice, I would not have imagined that a post-mortem report could be a source of comfort for grieving parents. After the inexplicable stillbirth of our beautiful baby girl at …

Jeff Hecht, in reviewing P. W. Singer's book on robotic warfare, Wired for War , accepts the given examples of "picking the wrong target" – that a "high-tech radar" is incapable of discerning the different flight profiles of a slow-moving, large aircraft and a smaller, fast-moving F-14 Tomcat (24 January, p 57) . IranAir flight …

I was disappointed that after introducing the Catholic church's recent report on bioethics, Dignitas Personae , Lawrence Krauss made it abundantly clear that he did not feel that any deep exploration of the Catholic church's point of view was worthwhile (7 February, p 25) . So he went on to denigrate that church's understanding of …

Amanda Gefter makes much of the idea that in "dark flow" we may be observing effects from beyond the observable universe (24 January, p 50) . Need I say more?

As a schoolboy I used to wonder why the law of gravitational attraction is an inverse-square law rather than an inverse-cube law. I now wonder whether there might be a connection between the holographic principle (17 January, p 24) and the fact that the gravitational attraction is an inverse-square law. The editor writes: • You …

• An Editorial discussed what would happen if the world were to warm by an average of just 4 °C, which "some models predict could happen as soon as 2050" (28 February, p 3) . It should rather have said, as did our cover story in that issue, that "some scientists fear that we may …

So "there's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired" (7 February, p 33) . But it is notoriously difficult to demonstrate that behaviour is genuinely innate or hard-wired. This is especially so for humans whose intensive parental care and social interactions mould their mind from birth. …

Your excellent selection of books on Darwin enhanced each other (7 February, p 48) . If it is a coincidence that Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day, it is not without note that both men should be driven by the same "Sacred Cause" founded on a conviction of common humanity, nor that …

You report a proposed device that would detect a human heart beating, even through closed doors (24 January, p 45) . This was suggested in a Dan Dare story serialised as The Man from Nowhere and its sequel Rogue Planet in the weekly The Eagle in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It was used …

• When Catherine Brahic wrote that "the US could replace all its cars and trucks with electric cars powered by wind turbines taking up less than 3 square kilometres – in theory" she was referring to the area of the footings of the turbine towers (online, 14 January) . On land, the area in between …