Letters archive

Climate sceptics are prone to ignore indicators of global warming when it suits them, but their protagonists can be guilty of a similar process – suggesting particular research is "flawed" or, worse, by making personal attacks on the researcher. Stuart Clark did not mention Theodor Landscheidt 's research when describing David Hathaway's work in his …

Helen Knight's article suggesting methane as a solution to the energy crisis read like an advertisement from the gas industry (12 June, p 44) . The article mentions nothing about the amount of energy that it takes to free the methane from the rock where it is held. The cost of extracting and burning coal …

Discussions of tacit and explicit knowledge, such as that made by Harry Collins (29 May, p 30) , often run afoul of the map-versus-territory confusion: the map is an abstraction of the territory, it isn't the territory itself. The map explicitly shows many features, but it necessarily leaves out other details – tacit knowledge. It …

Dorothy Rowe makes some valid points about the potentially disastrous consequences of lying (19 June, p 28) , but she may have spent so much time treating people who are emotionally disturbed that she has forgotten how the rest of us behave. She says we often tell white lies out of fear of being abandoned …

I was struck by the juxtaposition of Mark Nelson's letter, which challenged the value of natural experiments (1 May, p 24) , and Mark Buchanan's summary of the work of Ernst Fehr on human fairness (p 26) . Fehr's experiments will never truly show the influence of fairness on motivation if he doesn't step out …

Further to Feedback's discourse on the subject, it must be the time of year when "differently real" creatures are getting more active (22 May) . Last week I had a concordant encounter in my workplace, a psychiatric ward. A nurse asked me if I could countersign medication she was about to get "from the pixies" …

• When we mentioned the University of Calgary in our article on evolvability we placed it in the wrong city: it is, naturally enough, in Calgary not Edmonton. And apologies to Abby Drake of the University of Manchester, whose surname we got wrong in the same article (26 June, p 46) . • On our …