Letters archive

Cosmologist Charley Lineweaver is trying to redraw the definition of life based on physical criteria that could take in hurricanes and stars (19 May, p 29) . Can you better define a life form by its waste? A hurricane does not produce waste, just "chewed up" material that comes out a different shape. I'm not …

In reifying evolution as a force or power that is separate from and even inimical to human beings and their values, Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg are talking as much nonsense as any fundamentalist theist who believes God created us as sinners and we must struggle to be good (12 May, p 28) . It …

I read with interest the article exploring the evolutionary benefits to the group of being argumentative (26 May, p 32) , but must confess I wondered why it needed stating. As someone with Asperger's, it seems obvious to me that the vast majority of face-to-face communication is adversarial rather than inquisitorial. However, having worked with …

A key issue for the trial of genetically modified wheat at Rothamsted in the UK (12 May, p 5) is whether or not the modification will work. When we objected to the application for the trial, we pointed to evidence that aphids could quickly become habituated to the alarm pheromone engineered into the wheat to …

Might one way to protect threatened seagrass meadows (26 May, p 16) be to encourage commercial farming of them? Seagrass is used in artisan crafts, most familiarly twisted into cords to be woven into chair seats. It could be used in other, similar crafts, and its long fibres should make it a good substitute for …

Further to the row over the legality of auctioning a dinosaur skeleton in the US (26 May, p 4) , one international convention of no small import is the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property . It states that "cultural …

I read with interest Peter Aldhous's article on using spare energy from phone masts to power vaccine storage, in which he attributed to me the concern that hi-tech refrigerators might fail (26 May, p 22) . This possibility should not be overlooked, but the more important point is that it is better to move the …

I don't think morality has much to do with disgust, as suggested in your look at opposition to gay marriage (19 May, p 28) . Disgust probably evolved from the advantage gained from avoiding sources of disease and toxins. Morality probably evolved by group selection, which gave a survival advantage to groups of pre-humans who …

I can bear witness to your report on drunken waxwings (2 June, p 17) . Where I live, every year in late winter, when food is scarce, Bohemian waxwings ( Bombycilla garrulus ) fall out of trees. These birds flock in groups of 500 or more and cruise the city in search of fruit on …

I would like to suggest an alternative approach to the search for Starlite's formula (12 May, p 40) . It seems to me that listing the ingredients easily available to inventor Maurice Ward in the five to 10 years before his appearance on the TV show Tomorrrow's World in March 1990 is essential. I would …

There is a possibility that you do not consider in your report on suggestions that our cosmic neighbourhood may be dark matter-free (28 April, p 6) . If most matter is in fact dark matter, organisms on Earth must be able to tolerate it continually passing through their bodies, and hence it must be made …

• In our look at creativity (26 May, p 37) , we should have said that a majority of mathematicians have a single-digit Erdös number.