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23 June 2010
From Michelle Thew, BUAV
It is rare that the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, which exists to oppose animal experimentation, finds itself in broad agreement with Simon Festing, chief executive of Understanding Animal Research, a group which promotes acceptance of vivisection (5 June, p 22) . Festing discusses recent studies that have found that a significant amount …
23 June 2010
From Karen Rodgers
The conclusion to Henry Harpending's review of Spencer Wells's Pandora's Seed was chilling: "governments should close international borders to migration and impose a draconian policy of family limitation like China" ( 5 June, p 42 ). Sustainability and orderliness can be achieved through rational argument and consensus. Where they are imposed from above and raised …
23 June 2010
From Daniel Harbour, Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary, University of London
Christine Kenneally's provocative article is a welcome airing of scientific work on human language (29 May, p 32) . However, it repeats an error from Evans and Levinson's original paper: that the Native American language Kiowa has a suffix meaning "unexpected number of". In 10 years' work on the language, I have yet to find …
23 June 2010
From Matt Ridley
In her article Liz Else claims that in The Rational Optimist , I "failed to recognise that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea" (12 June, p 28) . Yet I state clearly in my book: "Take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, …
23 June 2010
From Geraint Day
Stephen Lea's argument that economics is incomplete unless psychology is taken into account (8 May, p 24) reminded me of something that I was taught several years ago. At the very beginning of the health economics part of a course in epidemiology, my tutor stated that "economics is a branch of psychology". That seems to …
23 June 2010
From Sebastian Hayes
Marcelo Gleiser seems to assume that either there is a single grand unified physical theory or there is fundamental asymmetry and lawlessness built into the universe (8 May, p 28) . In doing so, he goes along with the implicit assumption in physics that laws extrapolated from observed effects in one corner of the universe …
23 June 2010
• As noted in a recent article (19 June, p 24), common names can lead us into confusing territory. A fine example was our recent reference to the monarch butterfly (5 June, p 32) , which is known as the wanderer in Australia. • The relief wells mentioned in our article on the Deepwater Horizon …
Issue no. 2766 published 26 June 2010
