Letters archive

Christine Kenneally describes how linguists Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson have challenged Noam Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar in language (29 May, p 32) . To support their argument, they point out that in some languages there are "some aspects that are not mastered until later in life", citing as an example the triangular …

Michael Brooks provided an exciting overview of some of the more counter-intuitive implications of quantum mechanics, but did not delve into perhaps the greatest weirdness of QM: the behaviour of physicists themselves ( 8 May, p 36 ). The closing discussion of the meaning of QM left the unsatisfactory impression that there are only two …

The Royal Society made an inspired choice, rather than an odd one, in deciding to celebrate its 350th anniversary by sending a piece of wood into space on the shuttle Atlantis (15 May, p 4) . Not only did the piece of wood come from the apple tree that inspired Isaac Newton to develop his …

I was interested in Stephen Battersby's speculation that there could be subsurface liquid water present on some of the solar system's moons, and whether or not life forms could exist in these environments (27 March, p 32) . It made me wonder about other possibilities. Take Jupiter's moon Io. As some of its surface features …

Despite the tone of your editorial, evolutionary biologists cannot use the argument of a lack of design in regard to mammal eye structure to support evolution any more than creationists can use the argument to the contrary (8 May, p 3) . It is certainly the case that scientists can speciously quote studies to support …

Harry Collins's article on tacit knowledge includes a prohibitively complex formula for riding a bike (29 May, p 30) . I have a friend who decided to teach himself to ride a bike in his forties after hearing that it was supposed to be impossible to do so after the age of 21. He was …

The warm temperature of the tropics undoubtedly contributes to the high biological diversity seen there, as stated in Emma Young's article (24 April, p 32) . But surely the dominant factor is the length of time the tropics have been stable. Northern climes have been swept clean by continental glaciers on many occasions, the last …

• The DOI was wrong in our article on shape-shifting islands (5 June, p 10) . The correct reference is DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2010.05.003 . • We did not get to the root of the matter when we talked about failure "to route out disease agents" (5 June, p 6) . • We should have been more …