Letters archive

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini discuss what they see as flaws in Darwin's theory (6 February, p 28) . They argue that Darwin, and his uncritical neo-Darwinian synthesis followers, got things wrong by attributing so much power to natural selection. Their opinion piece covers two major themes: endogenous constraints and genetic free-riding. Darwin clearly acknowledged …

The comments by David Brin and others about broadcasting our presence to aliens leave me doubting the validity of the inverse square law governing the radio spectrum (13 February, p 24) . Applying this law shows that the combined output from all the radio stations on Earth is so diffuse as to be non-existent before …

In his article on the unusual properties of water (6 February, p 32), Edwin Cartlidge failed to mention the weirdest property of all: the "Mpemba effect". That is, if identical vessels of hot and cold water are placed in a freezer at the same time, the hot water will freeze first. This was first alluded …

In his article on horizontal gene transfer, Mark Buchanan erroneously states that the genetic code is "universal, shared by all organisms" (23 January, p 34) . In mammalian mitochondria there are two codes for methionine, rather than one, and one of the stop codons, which usually terminates a protein sequence, encodes tryptophan instead. In ciliated …

Our yearning for distinction from the animal world induces us to explore some weird mental byways, one of which being that we are special because we possess consciousness (9 January, p 28 , and 6 February, p 26) . This tedious hunt for distinction goes on because most people cannot quite believe the Darwinian proposition …

In your editorial on quantum biology, you write that "the pigments used in photosynthesis use quantum calculations" (6 February, p 5) . I shall soon be taking a closed-book exam and, since I suspect that most definitions of closed book would fail to make mention of pot plants, I intend take a plant into the …

In his letter detailing why the Nobel committee rejected calls for new prize categories, Michael Sohlman claims that the Nobel prize in chemistry for 1995 was given to Paul Crutzen et al for work on "climate change" (13 February, p 22) . This prize was given for work on the ozone hole. This has little …

Michael Payton criticises Michael Le Page's suggestion that one cannot logically draw conclusions about climate change from a single severe weather event (6 February, p 27) . Payton appears to miss Le Page's point entirely when he suggests that climate scientists are doing this by using extreme weather events as evidence of climate change. Le …

• We lost our sense of proportion when stating how many people there are in the world without access to banking services who could benefit from mobile money technology. It is of course around a billion people, not a million as we stated (20 February, p 20) . • In our article about atmospheric water …