Letters archive

Your editorial espousing "the new science of religion" uses the words secularist and atheist as if they are synonyms (17 March, p 3) . They are not, and the distinction is important. Secularism is about maintaining a distinction between religious faiths and their ruling bodies and the structures of government and law. This is well …

I think Daniel Everett's big idea in his excellent article "The social instinct" is in fact bigger than he says (10 March, p 32) . It sheds light on the way languages shape our thinking and thus our views of what is real. The Pirahã's culture limits what they can express, in a way that …

Don Higson says the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine is "the worst that could happen" (17 March, p 26) . I disagree. At Chernobyl and Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant, one safety system worked successfully to limit the scale of the disaster: people. Without those workers on site, the Chernobyl reactor fire would have continued until …

It seems an argument can be made that middle age in humans was shaped by powerful evolutionary forces, and that the middle years and their unique characteristics are a vital part of the human story, since they allow the passing on of accumulated skill and wisdom (10 March, p 48) . So what are we …

Ara Norenzayan writes that "up until about 12,000 years ago all humans lived in relatively small bands" (17 March, p 42) . How could we know that? Global sea level was around 50 metres below present levels from 60,000 to 20,000 years ago, and much lower by 18,000 years ago . Shorelines were many kilometres …

It worries me that the only "results" recorded during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, are those fitting the standard model (17 March, p 8) . I do appreciate the cost implications of recording everything, but surely this means that the two results (so far) that suggest the existence of …

Silk garments protecting soldiers from shrapnel are hardly novel (4 February, p 36) . In the 13th century, Mongolian soldiers wore raw silk shirts for exactly the same reason: if they were wounded, the silk made it easier to pull the arrow out.

Your editorial mentions discussions on renaming the Higgs boson as the Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble particle (17 March, p 3) . Those hoping to do so should take note of history. The scientific community made it clear that "X-rays" should be replaced by the official "Röntgen rays" . That went well.

I am often surprised by the turn of phrase used, or at least reported, when discussing physical and behavioural adaptations in animals. Given that the thrust of the Darwinist argument is that evolution is blind, random and value-free, I find it odd that language which is almost anthropomorphic is sometimes used to describe the result …

Feedback readers' concerns about homeopathic treatments for sick fish (25 February) made me realise why homeopathic medicines seldom appear to work. Most are based on natural products and all are, by definition, soluble. That makes it likely they are already present in the environment in very dilute and therefore highly effective, according to homeopathy, quantities. …

• We omitted from our story on early feathers (24 March, p 8) a reference to Paläontologische Zeitschrift , DOI: 10.1007/s12542-012-0135-3 . • Evan Eichler works on genes and human evolution at the University of Washington in Seattle; Washington State University is 500 kilometres away in Pullman (24 March, p 34) .